What means Looptroop ?
Promoe: Actually, it doesn't mean that much to us. We came up with it in 1993: we'd made a tape with, maybe 10 songs. We wanted to put out the tape and we didn't have a name for the group so we just had to choose something. We had some bad ideas... Looptroop was just a rhyme, loop on troop...
Supreme: It's a wack name :-)
Promoe: Yes, but it doesn't matter anymore because now, we've had it for 8 years: the name doesn't really matter because people know Looptroop, they don't think about the name, they just think about what's around Looptroop and what it is.

You made your first tape in 1993 but when did you first met the hip-hop culture in Sweden ? Was it Mcing, Djing, Graffiti or Breakdance ?
Cosmic: For me it was graffiti, I started in the late 80s or the begining of the 90s. And around that time, I started to write rhymes, just for myself... well, that's the story :-)
Promoe: For me it was graffiti too, it was through the book "Subway Art" and the movie "Style Wars" [documentary about graffiti]: the classic way to get into graff. We listened to hip-hop and we thought we were breakdancing but it was some jerkie moves we did. But it was mostly graffiti in the begining, from 1986. 1991 is when I started to write rhymes and I started recording with Embee.
Supreme: I don't know really but I got a phenomenal art book, the "Spraycan Art Book" and I used to look at that and try to do sketches. I've got my first LP, GrandMaster Flash's one. I thought it was cool but I don't know if I really got into it. There were lots of things: I used to skateboard a lot, I thought hip-hop was a cool thing and then I got into more and more.

How many albums have you released?
Promoe: It's only one full-length album of Looptroop "Modern Day City Symphony" and now this year is the second full-length, Promoe "Government Music". But we've done a lot of 12 inches and EPs, but I'm not sure how many...
Cosmic: We've put out 18 different releases so far, plus the tapes from 93 to 97. This is quite a lot :-)

Do you know french hip-hop crews ? MCs, producers from France? Difficult question!
Supreme: I don't think we know that much about them, but the only one that I've heard the record and seen on live is the Saian Supa Crew. I know other names but that's the only one that I've really heard the album.

What do you think of the french level in MCing and in production?
Supreme: We haven't heard them much but it seems that it's really good. And I really liked the Saian Supa Crew, for example. I can imagine the level is really good because it's been going for a long time, but the only one we heard actually, years ago, was MC Solaar, that was the only one you could see on MTV... Other one will say, I don't think we know about any groups...
Cosmic: IAM, Assassin.
Promoe: "Nique Ta Mère" (NTM) [laughs]. We only know names we don't really know the music. When we hear the rap, it sounds like it's really good but we don't understand what they say...

[Promoe worries about the "MC Gyver-like" assembly that let me record the interview].

In France, nearly all the MCs raps in french, but in Sweden we don't hear many swedish MCs rapping in swedish? many do it in english !
Promoe: Actually, there's more people rapping in swedish than in english...

So it's a false vision we have in France?
Promoe: It's false in one way but it's real because it used to be like that. Most people used to rap in english in Sweden, but now most people rap in swedish. The reason why people rap in english, I think it's because they didn't have real models in Sweden...
Supreme: The guys who try to rap in swedish weren't really hip-hop, it sounded wack to us. We let this first impression to the rapper's public that it sounded wack, nobody did it like a real hip-hop group.
Promoe: Everybody tried to do it in english because the only good rap we heard was from the States and people wanted to get out into the world, I guess... Well, it didn't really happenned like that. But now I think most people rap in swedish. Only us and two or three more groups rap in english in Sweden. And we also rap in swedish but I guess in France you don't get the swedish stuff because we only put it out for the swedish market: it's the same way for us to hear the french rap than for you to hear the swedish rap. It's impossible to understand and probably it's harder for you because a lot of swedish people take french lessons in school...

But in france...
Supreme: Nobody...
Promoe: Nobody take swedish lessons !

What do you talk about in your lyrics?
Cosmic: We rap a lot that we don't like the police [laughs]. We represent a lot for the graffiti writers, we rap for them because that's where we come from: we're not the most active graffiti writers nowadays but we still represent that part of hip-hop.
Supreme: We have friends still writing.
Cosmic: And we do the classic hip-hop topics like that we're the best MCs in the world [laughs] ! "We came here to rock the party" !
Supreme: I think in Sweden they mostly portray us as a political group. I don't know if it's true because we're doing lot of different songs but maybe most of these are pretty political I think...
Promoe: The biggest songs. People forget about our funny songs.
Supreme: It was like to picture us as the Swedish independant, the alias of Company Flow in Sweden. That's not really us but that's the way they want it. Everybody wants to say "this is the swedish american thing". It's probably the same thing, here in France, they say "this is the Wu-Tang of France" or "this is the Company Flow of Sweden".

How did you get connections with the American ? In France, this kind of connections is really rare...
Supreme: For us, it's been by doing shows with people, so we met people. But otherwise like in Germany, I think it's mostly the labels who pay somebody. If an american artist is on Def Jam, then they'll probably put him with a german artist who's on the german Def Jam, something like that. If you pay, you can get anyone.
But we have Freestyle from the Arsonists [Freestyle has left the Arsonists crew]: he's just a friend of us so we put him on the album.
Promoe: Maybe it's also a language thing, but I'm not sure because the german people rap in german. Maybe the American get the impression that the french hip-hop scene is very close, that it's hard to get into. I don't know if it's true but people think that french people listen mostly to french hip-hop. I've read some interview with some guys who did something with Nas, from France...

NTM?
Promoe: It was NTM ? So he was pretty arrogant to host them; you know, American people think they own the world or whatever... French people maybe have more pride than maybe Germans and Swedish, I don't know... It's something to write a book about [laughs] !

This is your first time in France, what do you think of the french public here?
Supreme: We've only done two shows so far. The first one, in Evreux, was not a hip-hop audience, but the show we did in St-Germain-en-Laye (Yvelines, France) was really good, there were not a lot of people but it was a good crowd, I don't know if they understood what we rapped but they were still listening and shouting, the scene was really good. And we went to a reggae show yesterday and it seems the audience was really good: cause they are really hype when the DJ plays a good sound, they are really into. I think they were a lot of hip-hop people there.

Why a Promoe album and not a second Looptroop one?
Promoe: I have such a big ego [laughs] and I wanted to make my own album ! If you check the record, Embee did half of the production and Cosmic and Supreme are on about five songs. So it is still Looptroop but it is just a little bit more Promoe. And we've got some different producers because Embee wanted to do other projects with a Swedish rapper called PSTQ, he raps in Swedish and he wanted to do some stuff with him. Maybe Embee felt he didn't wanted to do a Looptroop album right after the first. I just wanted to make an album but we can still do Looptroop because we have many projects...
Supreme: Especially in Sweden, people don't really mind, they see a solo album but I think they know that it's the same people, the same crew. It's the same people around.

Someone in the group goes on the web ? What do you watch on it?
Cosmic: Porn ! I don't know if I wanna say that here… freesex.com ! [laughs]. Noooo, I check my mail ! And I check swedish hip-hop sites and forums. I also check a lot of reggae sites, new releases, new singles… It's a good media: this is almost free and you can check stuff from all over the world, you can download mp3z.
We don't have an official website but there's a quite good site called looptroop.cjb.net: that's a fan site but it's cool.