"White Van Music was my reaction to being signed to G-Unit and focusing all my energy on that at the time. I got burnt out making the beats they liked—specifically, repetitive one-bar loop-type beats. It was cool and fun for a while, but it wasn’t what I really wanted to do. I didn’t see myself as one of those guys making strictly commercial music. That wasn’t my goal.
With White Van Music, I wanted to pull together all of my influences and create something that felt cool and different to me. That’s why you have such a wide variety of artists on the album—like Brother Ali, Young Buck, MF Doom, and Keak Da Sneak. Back then, rap was very divided. You were either into East Coast hip-hop, underground rap, or commercial acts like Nelly and Chingy. But I liked pieces of all of it. Sure, I had preferences, but I wanted the album to reflect that mix and show I could bring it all together in a cohesive way.
My biggest inspiration for the album was Pete Rock’s Soul Survivor. To me, that’s still the best producer album of its time. A lot of producer albums feel like a collection of throwaway tracks from other projects, and sometimes that’s unavoidable. But that’s not what I was aiming for. I wanted to make something deliberate and original. [...] Overall, it was a special project for me. I still meet people who tell me how much they love the album, and that means a lot. It didn’t make me much money, but it helped grow my name and establish my identity as a producer. That was the point of it, and I think it achieved that."
