360 Answers The Haters: '90s Hip Hop Is Dated'

360 has answered the critics - particular the 'older heads' of the hip-hop community - in theMusic.com.au's second interview with the artist this week.

Following on from yesterday's revelations that despite his commercial success, he is only recently off the dole, Sixty tells us that he battled the "demons" of inter-scene criticism while making his breakout debut album.

“Yeah I hear it all the time man, everywhere,” he said of the criticism in today's cover story for Time Off and Inpress. “When I was making the album I was battling demons in my head for ages, like, the older heads in hip hop aren't gonna like this shit, but at the end of the day, I'm doing what I wanted to do and that's make music that I love.

"I mean, I guess it is pop – pop just means popular – and it's just like incorporating all the stuff that I listen to and just putting it into my music as well. I think it's important to do it and I mean I don't know how long the Australian scene can keep going making music that sounds the early-'90s and shit. I guess for a lot of the older dudes they came up listening to hip hop from the late-'80s"

He adds, "They feel like they were involved in the hip hop scene from when it started out. I sort of came up listening to Eminem and shit like that. That was one of my biggest influences and I guess it wouldn't be for them, you know what I mean? Of course the music's gonna change. Dudes in five years are gonna come out who have only been listening to Lil Wayne and Soulja Boy and shit like that. You can't really hate on it, it's just a sign of the times."

Through the criticism he's come to the conclusion that he's got to blaze his own trail, going so far to even call the classic '90s tracks "dated".

"You can't enforce your idea of what real hip hop is onto other people – it's always gonna be different and it's all about personal perspective how you think real hip hop should be made," he says. "I don't think real hip hop should be old early-'90s stuff, I think that's dated. If I wanna hear old early-'90s stuff I'll listen to old early-'90s stuff. I don't wanna listen to someone else trying to make that – it's 2012, you know what I mean?”

Read our second interview with 360 here.