Realistically, what commercial goals - if any - did you have for the album?

I had no commercial goals at all. I said "if I could do 50,000 on this project within a year, I think that'll be good," especially for my first release on my label. As it is now, I'm already at over 50,000 in a little over 6 months. That's why they asked me to do volume II for next year. I wanted to do this more for the fans of Wu-Tang and for the independent, that's why it's called Wu-Tang Meets the Indie Culture. I did this to show how powerful the independent world is, and to show major labels that "look at all this talent put together on this one project and none of these guys is on a major label, something is wrong with this picture." You know what I'm saying?

Right

Even down to myself, I look at like "Yo, I should be up in one of these companies putting real big records together. A project like this on Def Jam would've been phenomenal, if they'd put their machines behind something like this. But, they're so scared and so used to doing things one way that they don't even understand something like this. From what I heard though, my CD has come across a lot of high end people in labels. It's making a little noise where n***as is like "what the f**k is this?" They're looking at it like "damn, where's this from?"

It's never been done before

Never been done. A lot of people have done compilations. When I first told my man, Chucky, that I was doing a compilation, it didn't really have everybody's interest at first. I knew that would be the case, because I didn't tell them the concept of my compilation at first. There's been a million compilations, but basically, they just get n***as like "yo, you can you rhyme on this beat?" and whatever. They don't really take time to put something together that's monumental. No concept, no thought process behind it. Once my man started hearing about it, he came and met me while I was having dinner with my girl, like "Yo I heard about this Wu-Tang Meets Indie Culture." He heard a couple songs I had done with RZA and was like "I gotta have this album. You didn't tell me it was going to be something like this." Then, I finally played some joints for him, because he made me an offer right on the spot that I couldn't refuse. Babygrande, Chuck Wilson really understood, and really got behind the project. This is one of his favorite albums ever.