When Little Brother’s debut album The Listening was released on February 25, 2003, the twenty-something college students were unknowingly swimming against the Hip Hop tide.

The trio of rappers Big Pooh, Phonte Coleman and 9th Wonder crafted a soulful homage to their foundational heroes like A Tribe Called Quest, De La Soul and Slum Village at a time when standard bearers of the underground like Common and The Roots were pivoting into more experimental territory sonically and the South as a region was dominating with splashy, high-BPM, escapist fair designed for radio and club consumption. Not to mention a guy named 50 Cent was casting a long shadow over the entire industry with his Lazarean mythology and bullet-riddled boasts backed by two of the biggest names in music, Dr. Dre and Eminem.

“I didn’t know what the hell was going on, man,” Rapper Big Pooh tells HipHopDX matter-of-factly looking back on that time. “We were having fun. It was some work element to it, but it was fun. I really had no expectation for anything involving making that album, other than we think it’s dope. We think what we’re doing is dope. But just that time, man, you can never get that time back. There were no expectations. We were just trying to do what we thought was right, and having fun doing it, and just that it was so innocent. I’ll use that word. It was innocent. You can never get that moment back, no matter how much you try. We know too much now. We’ve been in The Matrix. We were all naive, to a certain point, and just going in there trying to make the best [music].”

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