Thick: Let start with where you're from and a lil' history.
Skyzoo: I'm from Brooklyn, New York. Born in the '80s, 1982. I moved around Brooklyn a lot as a kid. I just grew up on Hip-Hop since day one. I started rhymin' at nine years-old, and it's been movin' ever since. I fell in love with the music at an early age and just kept it going. Just really put my all into it and been makin' music for a bunch of years now, over a decade actually. That basically sums up my early beginnings and all that. I was influenced by Chi Ali from the Native Tongues movement. When I was a lil' kid, he was like fourteen when he had first dropped his album, and I just fell in love with the whole movement of it, the sound, the fact that he was so young but sounded so mature. I was in awe of it. That really made me wanna start rhymin'. That was the nail in the coffin that made me want to pick up the pen.

T: Yeah, Chi had that flavor that other kid rappers didn't have.
S: The way he wrote, like he had stories as a young kid but from a New York perspective and it wasn't kiddie rap. It wasn't too vulgar but it wasn't kiddie rap. It was real and it just drew me in. That's what seperated it from everything else.

T: Speak on the name?
S: My middle name is Skyler, and my whole family uses that name. They've been using that name since I was a baby basically. So people call me Skyler or Sky for short. And there was a group out when I was born in '82 named Skyy and they were a disco group from Brooklyn, and they had a record out called Skyyzoo. It was supposed to be a kazoo, like an actual kazoo was throughout the beat. So, it was supposed to be a play on the word 'kazoo' but they put Skyy on it after the name of the group. It was a real big record. From there my family used to call me that as a little kid. Just as a lil' nickname they would call me Skyzoo, like my parents, and aunt, and cousins. It sorta stuck, man. So, when I started rhymin' I just kept the name authentic, as opposed to makin' up some other name, I just used what was already there.

T: You weren't heard with the Justus League around the beginning but in the last year or so you've been on everything they do. Speak on that affiliation.
S: Well, that all came about through my man Chaundon, who's in the Justus League. He's the only one in the crew that's not from North Carolina, he's from the Bronx. He lives down there now but he still comes up to New York a couple times a year. He had come up once for his birthday and a friend of mine introduced me to him. I gave him one of my mixtapes on the humble, and he called me the next day, or the same night, or something like that. He called me and was like, "yo, this stuff is crazy, you're stuff is amazing, man. We gotta link up, I'm in town for a couple days, let's go to the studio and mess around". So, I said, "cool, no doubt". So, I brought him out to my studio and we did five songs the first day we were in the studio together. We didn't know each other from a hole in the wall but we had done five songs off the bat. That just showed the chemistry right there. He took the stuff back to North Carolina and was playing it for Khrysis, 9th, Pooh, Big Dho and all of them. A couple months later, next thing you know, they (Justus League) was like, "yo, why don't you have him come down and we can make some music and just bug out". That's what they normally do - you come down for a week, make some records, bug out, have a good time, and see what happens. Me and Khrysis worked real heavily at first, we worked for about six days and we did about fourteen, fifteen songs. And a lot of 'em nobody's even heard yet and these are songs from 2005, like two years ago. We just did a bunch of joints and left it at that. I sorta became an extended family member. For the record, I'm not in the Justus League, I'm not in the Hall of Justus but that's my second family. My team is Custom Made, Custom Made Entertainment is my crew that I started with a couple partners. The Justus League shows me a ton of love and I show them the same amount of love back. It's a good thing.

T: What do you think about 9th Wonder leaving Little Brother?
S: I mean, it's not a bad thing. I know just from knowing them personally, that it's nothing personal at all, it's strictly business. I know they're still great friends. Pooh and Tay are obviously still together and 9th is ridiculously busy. He's so talented and that talent comes with the gift and the curse. The curse is, being so busy. He's teaching a class at North Carolina Central (College), he's DJing parties with the True School Movement that he got started, and he's making beats for everybody. Let alone the people in North Carolina who know who he is and are fans of his, and run up to him on the street and want beats and want to do things with him. He's the man in North Carolina, along with all over the world. He's dropping albums with Murs, he's dropping albums with Jean Grae, Buckshot, he did an album with me, along with the industry stuff, the Lloyd Banks stuff, the Mary J. Blidge stuff, the Game stuff, he's working real heavy with Camp Lo now. I understand where all of them came to that agreement at and it's not a bad thing. It's like with Slum Village when J-Dilla left. When Dilla left they were still great friends. People thought they hated each other but they were great firends, it's just on a business level it didn't make sense any more because Dilla became so busy he didn't have enough time that the group deserved. Plus, they (Big Pooh and Phonte) want to change their sound a lil' bit and try something new. It's good for all parties involved. It's gonna give 9th more time to do what he gotta do, it's gonna give Tay and Pooh more time to do what they gotta do, and you still gonna hear more music from them. You still gonna hear Little Brother on 9th Wonder beats every now and then. So, it's not a bad thing.