Jarren Benton

TRUTH: On Being A 2014 XXL Freshman: “I’m feelin’ fuckin’ great right now. This is fuckin’ awesome. It’s a blessing, man. It’s one of those things that I can look back and say, ‘I was on the 2014 Freshman Class.’ I dropped out of high school, so if I really went back, I would be a freshman anyway. So I’m doing it all over again.

Sometimes I would look at [the Freshmen Cover] like, ‘Yo, how did they not get ya boy?’ But yeah, every one that would come out, I would look at it. And it’s crazy because not only would I look at it like that, but I would get random calls from the homies like, ‘Yo, what do we gotta do to get you on that cover? How we gonna get you on that cover?’ I was like, ‘I guess we just gotta go harder.’ So we just went hard.

I didn’t expect to get on the cover, and I didn’t not expect to. It was just like, if it happened, it happened. I didn’t get excited until I actually pulled up [at the shoot]. I was like, ‘Oh shit.’ And yo, let me definitely say this. I’m a third year—the whole [Funk Volume] team has been on the cover. Hopsin set that bitch off, Dizzy Wright came in and suplexed that bitch, and now ya boy on this time. They wrestled a couple niggas. Me, I got the gun, I’m goin’ for the kill. So yeah, this is our third year, man. This is a fuckin’ blessing. Next year, we gotta get another one. We gotta keep this going. And it’s genuine too. The fans fuckin’ with us, man. Funk Volume, I feel like we really shut shit down, and I’m just glad people are taking a look at us and takin’ us serious, you know, ’cause we all work hard for this shit.

To me it’s another small win, and we’ll keep building off that. The next step is gonna be bigger. The next step will be bigger. Shit, my solo, I need the solo cover real quick. It represents and lets me know that I’m doing the right thing. ’Cause there was times where I was doin’ this shit, man, and family, everybody looking at me like I’m crazy, like I’ll never fuckin’ make it. I’m not even one of those dudes like, ‘Yeah, in your face now. Fuck you.’ I actually thought that too. So it’s a blessing, it shows that we’re doing the right thing, that we’re moving in the right direction now.”

Thoughts On Being The People’s Champ: “Funk Volume, our fuckin’ fans go hard. If a muthafucka hits me with a message on Facebook, I’m gonna reply back. Someone hit me on Twitter, I’m gonna reply back. ’Cause it’s like, I need y’all as much as y’all say that I’m helping you out. So it’s a win-win. I owe everything to the fans we got. And I don’t even wanna call them fans, the people that appreciate our music. I owe it all to them, man.”—As Told To Dan Rys