How did you come up with your stage name Berner?

From graffiti, I would always tag Berner back in the days and that’s how it began.

For our readers who don’t know, when did you start to really take rap serious?

I used to do rap battles back in the days in a little coffee shop of Haze Street, in San Francisco and from there, I decided to put together a project with an artist out from San Francisco too and it got some good response and from there we just started getting busy. I pretty much learned the independent game easy and figured out how to work it. But, I was playing with it and didn’t go hard until 2009, when I dropped five albums that year.

Who would you say are some of your biggest influences to your career thus far?

The Jacka (Rest In Peace, The Jacka), San Quinn, Rappin 4-Tay, E-40, Mac Dre, they all gave me the barriers in general. My goal was to always take that and flip it up a little bit, and kind of get a little further than some of the artists have and get it popping for us. Because I feel like the Bay has always had such a great sound but, got slept on for a little bit here and there.

You’re currently on the Cookies or Better tour, following the successful release of your recent album Prohibition 2. Can you talk to us about the tour and the success of the album?

Yeah, Prohibition 2 did hella well and right before I went on tour I dropped the album with The Jacka (like I said, Rest In Peace The Jacka) we dropped that project and just kind of nowhere we had some music and some we hadn’t finished up, so we put together an album, since we didn’t have a series of projects that were suppose to drop with season number three. That was two days into the tour and we hit number three on iTunes Rap Album and I think it was number six-or-something on Hip-Hop Albums, so it did well on the charts. And the success of the tour has been cool, I mean the projects, the music, the fans they’re eating it up. We’ve sold-out venues; we were in Detroit last night (August 4) and people were taking dabs on the bar. It was cloudy, I couldn’t see past the quarter of the crowd.

It’s been a whole lot of sh*t, in a lot of places and a lot have been saying we’ve been pushing the envelope in places where it’s not okay to smoke weed, where you can go to jail for weed; but, people been firing that sh*t up likes it’s not even an issue. The venues have been so over whelmed the only way to deal with it; it’s to let the fans do what they want to do. It’s a crazy vibe! This tour to me has been eye opening for me, people are really risking to go to jail to f**k with me, and have that good vibe with me, it’s tight!