*I believe the first time I personally caught wind of you guys was with the video game, and still one of my favorites to this day, Jet Set Radio Future, with your track “Improvise” and then your album Quality Control. Two part question. How did you end up working with the creators of Jet Set Radio Future ?

Yeah man, a lot of people got into us because of that. It was actually a really cool game. I’m an avid gamer, Akil as well. At the time, when it came to marketing and us getting stuff out, we knew we were limited, but we did know that we had fans that were skateboarders, snowboarders and gamers. Therefore, it just made sense for us to reach out and put a song through games because everyone was playing video games. It just made sense if anything simply from a marketing stand point.

What were or are the video games of choice?

I’m a huge EA Sports fan. I play all of them from Madden to basketball and baseball on the bus; anything that’s sports related. I’m big on FIFA as well as the mental games and puzzle games. The sports definitely dominate the bus because we like to run tournaments while on tour.

Who’s dominating the FIFA sticks right now?

I can’t really get them to get into FIFA. I can only play when I go overseas. It’s like everything out there; I never have a problem getting someone to play FIFA when I go overseas. But if it’s just me, I can’t get them to play. I’ve been trying to tell them how tight it is. Once I get them on the sticks, they’ll be addicted.

I’ve often wondered, who came up with the name Jurassic 5?

At the time we were looking for a name, the mother of Charli 2na’s girlfriend at the time made a joke and said, “Think you sound like the fantastic five, you sound more like the Jurassic 5.” She said that as a joke and we thought it was dope.

So jumping back to the present, I hear there are talks of a live album possibly being released. Can you talk about that?

We have full control of everything right now so we have the choice to do whatever we want. Nine times out of ten we’re not going to go through a label. If anything we might just get the Marketing and distribution from a third party, but that’s about it. We’re going to see. We’re going to start with this single and figure out time wise what everyone is doing and we’ll see. We’re going to talk after this tour when we have some time off.

What advice would you give to up and coming artists?

I think artists right now today, in 2014, are in a great place. Better than we were in some sense because the technology is at a level where you can literally have a studio in your closet. You have the whole world at your fingertips and you can really take advantage of it. With Bandcamp and all of these digital distributions, you are your own label. You have everything at your fingertips. You just gotta do it.

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