Bone Thugs-n-Harmony promises surprises
|  | | Bone Thugs | It has been almost four years since Cleveland-based Bone Thugs-n-Harmony put out their last CD, Thug World Order. However, if you think that means "Bone" has been inactive, you'd be mistaken. The early '90s hip-hop group has been quite busy, said member Krayzie Bone, and their concert Saturday at La Villa Real Special Events Center will prove it.
"Just because we weren't together as a group in the studio doesn't mean we weren't together," he said in a telephone interview. "Everybody was making money through solo projects, so when everybody was ready to come back everybody decided to get back and do what we do as a group."
The group has definitely had its ups and downs over the past several years, Krayzie said, from their separation with Ruthless Records to the departure of fellow member Bizzy Bone. That hasn't kept Krayzie and contemporaries Wish Bone and Layzie Bone from continuing their involvement with music, or from working with big names in the music industry.
"We're going to drop two albums this year," Krayzie said. "One of them is with Swiss Beats (a hip-hop producer) and one is something we're doing ourselves. We've been in the studio, and we've got a lot of star producers like Dr. Dre, Three 6 Mafia, Kanye West, from Lil' John and Big Boi from Outkast, and that's just in productions."
Krayzie said the new Bone albums, which have not yet been titled, will also feature guest spots by industry stars like Mariah Carey and Petey Pablo. That's a change of pace from the old Bone-Thugs, whose only visiting artist on previous albums was Tupac Shakur.
"There's never been any room for anyone on a Bone album but us," Krayzie said. "It's something different we're trying, and we've never done it before. We think it will go over well. A lot of fans have requested that we do something with this person or that person, so we're finally doing it now."
Today's BTNH has grown up quite a bit from the kids who got together in the late 1980s, Krayzie said. The members have changed over the years, something that they think reflects in their new music.
"We are older," Krayzie said. "We're much more in tune with the business and focused on what's going on around us. It's not all about partying and spending money on everything you can buy. We're much wiser and much slower in our actions. We're more laid back and enjoy life more. We're just trying to prosper and take care of the next generation coming up behind us."
Though the group is expanding its horizons, the reunited BTNH will retain the attitude it had in the early days, when the group won a Grammy for the song "Tha Crossroads" off of 1995's E 1999 Eternal.
"It's definitely the original Bone Thugs-n-Harmony, but it's new Bone, too," Krayzie said. "There are going to be a lot of surprises. A lot of people are thinking that since Bizzy's not in the group, Bone can't rap no more. But we gonna show 'em. We gonna learn 'em real good." (The Monitor)
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