Nearly three decades have passed since Fatlip exited the Pharcyde, one of the cleverest, funniest hip-hop groups to emerge in the early Nineties. Since then, he has put out a solo album, The Loneliest Punk, scored an underground hit with “What’s Up, Fatlip?” and even buried the hatchet with some of his former fellow Pharcyde emcees. Fatlip and original Pharcyde members Slimkid3 and Imani have been touring as the Far Side, though the original quartet, which includes Bootie Brown who owns the Pharcyde trademark, hasn’t gathered together since a short-lived reunion in 2008.

Now Fatlip is putting out a new album, Torpor, which contains a track featuring all four emcees, “My Bad,” in which each rapper appears to apologize to each other for decades of ill will. In a press release sent to Rolling Stone ahead of the song’s release, Fatlip hyped it as “the long-awaited reunion of the original Pharcyde group.” But as news broke of the reunion, the Pharcyde’s official Twitter claimed the headlines were false, telling AllHipHop it had “bad information” and saying, “[It’s] really weird people promoting something knowing I have nothing to do with it.”

“It is [my voice], but they lifted the song from another project,” Brown tells Rolling Stone from Australia where he’s on tour with Gorillaz. “I can’t remember what it was. I don’t know where they got the lyric from or who they got it from. I definitely know it’s an outside project that I did for something, but for the purpose that they’re using it for, I never recorded it for that. So I don’t know where they got it.”

READ ON AT ROLLINGSTONE