urassic 5 Considering New Material: 'I Hope There's More Music To Come,' Says Nu-Mark

[Transcendence]

More new music will be part of the Jurassic 5 reunion, although its members aren't yet sure in what form it will be released.

The hip-hop group, which reunited last year after a seven-year break and is out on the road this summer, has dropped one new single, "The Way We Do It," that DJ Nu-Mark tells Billboard was one of four tracks J5 demoed with Heavy D before the split, "and when we got back together we decided to clean it up, put he fairy dust on it and send it out to our fans who keep asking us for new music," accompanied by a video shot at Red Rocks Amphitheatre in Colorado. Now, Nu-Mark says, the group is trying to figure out the best way to add to its catalog in the near future.

 

"I hope there's more music to come," he says, "but we realize that the complexion of the industry doesn't even resemble what it did when we started in '93. Attention spans have shrunk quite a bit with the advancement of YouTube and the Internet in general, so we're just surveying the landscape, I guess. I think it's kind of like second nature for someone to say, 'When's the album coming?' but realistically nobody really listens to albums anymore. I know very few people, and that includes my DJ peers, who will sit and listen to 16 songs back-to-back in one sitting. WE might have to go back to an EP thing or just do another song and spoonfeed music out little by little. We're taking it one day at a time and taking a look at the landscape and seeing what's in front of us."

Nu-Mark says J5 has other projects in mind, including a live album and a documentary. "We shot some new footage and we have a tone of old footage," Nu-Mark says of the latter, which he considers "really at the crawling stage. There's really not a whole lot to talk about, but we'd like to get something out there that's a true representation of how the group got together and some of the early footage, the wild moments, the big concerts, the small concerts, the failures, the triumphs, the whole nine."

Meanwhile, J5 wrapped up a North American tour on Aug. 3 in Boston, and while nothing else is on the books after that, Nu-Mark says he's confident the group is a going concern again. "I hope we can continue to do what we're doing and just open our minds and create and do something that's actually offering something valuable to the public instead of just adding another record in the stack of basement records," Nu-Mark says. "I remember at the time we broke up, I was DJ'ing and opening for Public Enemy in Australia, and Chuck D came up to me and said, 'Hey, groups should never break up. They should just take a break.' That really stuck with me."

Meanwhile, Nu-Mark says "everybody in the group is working" on other projects until J5's next move. He'll be sinking into his new collaboration with the Pharcyde's Slimkid3, which has produced a new single, "Bullion," with an album due Aug. 25. "It was a really rewarding project," Nu-Mark says. "3's a really open-minded MC. It was really dope to see what happened if you joined a J5 producer with a Pharcyde MC. It