Tha Alkaholiks Spit ‘Firewater’ Before They Exit The Game

By Will Jordan

They stumbled into the rap world in the early ‘90s stinking drunk and spitting sounds that had yet to be heard on the West coast. After four critically acclaimed releases, Tha Alkaholiks are finally bowing out of the rap game as a collective. They will however continue their onslaught of audiences as single artists, each chartering their own individual path ahead.
Don’t fret. Tha Liks aren’t going out without one final toast. Their fifth and final album, Firewater, releases this month on Waxploitation Records and KOCH Records. The release will precede a “farewell tour” – a final party for their fans.
“We’re starting a whole new chapter in our careers,” DJ E-Swift says in a phone interview from his LA home. “We’ve been doing this for over a decade and we just wanted to go out on top of our game.”
Swift says Tha Liks aren’t splitting over differences, but rather pursuing their own visions.
“We’re still cool,” he says. “We could have made ten more albums together. We just all got stuff we want to accomplish.”
Not to mention the geographical hurdles. E-Swift has remained in LA, but Tash has moved to Las Vegas and J Ro is living in Sweden.
“We all have separate lives now,” Swift adds. “When you’re a group you’re like a fireman--always on call. We’re all so dedicated to what we do, we’d never say no.”
Now their dedication is to themselves and each have been taste-testing the firewater for years.
“I’ve been doing solo albums and me and madlib have been getting together and producing a lot of other cats. It’s about to multiply by ten,” Swift says. “We’ve all always got stuff in the works. We’re not brand new to the solo game.”
Xzibit, who in the past stepped in as a fourth member of the crew, moved on to the solo arena a while back, and conquered mainstream TV and airwaves, by pimping rides on MTV, doing high-profile collaborations and making commercials. Rumors tossed around back in the day about beef between Xzibit and Tha Liks, but Swift says they squashed that a long time ago.
“He’s still cool with us, Swift says. “Everybody made a big controversy out of it, but this is a family and it just got out of hand. We all love each other. When we put people on, we want them to come out and do well…and stand on their own without holding each other’s hand.”
Firewater is an appropriate exit album for the trio. Tracks like “Drink Wit Us,” “Party Ya Ass Off,” “The Get Down” and “The Flute Song,” echo the same flavor Tha Liks have been true to since their inception as a group.
“Knowing Firewater was going to be our last album made us very, very focused,” says E-Swift. “We knew there was never going to be a second chance and we owed it to our fans to put everything we could into it, right here, right now.”
“In some ways, the release of Firewater is bittersweet,” says Waxploitation Records founder Jeff Antebi. “It feels like the end of an era, but Tha Alkaholiks are exiting with an incredible legacy to follow them. It’s not often an artist can pick their own exit, at the peak of their game.”
Tha Liks first came together in the early ‘90s under the guise of West Coast rapper and “king of the 40oz” King Tee, who'd been looking for a new hip-hop group to bring up with him. “It was King Tee’s idea to name us Tha Alkaholiks,” says J-Ro from his new homebase of Malmo, Sweden. “And he just came up with the whole concept for the group while we were sitting at a table drinking some 40s. If you look at King Tee’s early stuff, it was kind of hard edged but clownin’ at the same time, so that's pretty much always been our style.”
From the beginning, Tha Liks’ hard partyin’ and hard drinkin’ image didn’t exactly fit into a hip-hop universe mainly focused on MC Hammer/Vanilla Ice pop style rhymes or on gangsta rap, which was at the height of its popularity.
“There was no hip-hop comin’ out of the West Coast at that time that was like us, everybody just thought we were doin’ thug shit out here,” says J-Ro in a release. “When we first came out, we were a rebellion directed at what was going on then. We were anti-establishment and I think a lot of people gravitated towards us because of that. We kind of started the whole backpack movement out in LA.”
Pressing through the ‘90s, Tha Alkaholiks followed their hard working and hard drinking schedule of touring and releasing an album every other year until 2001’s X.O. Experience, which brought about an official name change to “Tha Liks” for radio purposes, and an over-publicized three year “hiatus” in which no new material came out…yet the worldwide tour duty was still as heavy as ever, according to the group.
“To us we’ve really had no time off just because we haven’t put out an album. We would talk about that too,” says J-Ro. “Sometimes we’d be stuck in an airport or a nasty motel somewhere, and say like ‘Yeah, people think we ain’t doin’ shit right now, but we were always grindin’.”
All three members will continue to work together and separately on any number of solo albums and collaborations well into the future.
“A lot of people are lookin’ at it like we're splittin’ up, but I look at it like we’re really taking time to expand on the legacy we created,” says E-Swift. “It gives us a chance to focus on other things and still put things out together collectively. Even though we’re individually putting things out, it’s still going to be a collective effort.”
As for the final tour Swift says, “Oh man, we can't wait. It’s going to be the end result of over a decade of hard work. We’re going to see the most people passed out and people acting crazy—we’re going to party to the end.”

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