Zay and I could not have been more different. This was a guy who went to church every Sunday. He didn’t drink, smoke, or curse. He had nothing to do with the type of things I had going in the streets. He came from a religious military family and his folks had kept him on the straight and narrow.
Despite our differences on paper, we clicked off the dribble. I was feeling his beats and I ended up buying a batch of ’em from him for a thousand dollars. With beats in hand I was ready to get to work with Lil’ Buddy. But before I could do that, I had to report to DeKalb County to serve out my ninety-day sentence.
?
I get how for someone on the outside looking in, jail is an interesting place. Fortunately, for most people it’s a world they’ll never see. But the truth is that most of the time jail is just super boring. A whole lot of doing nothing. And when it’s not boring, usually something bad is happening. Something that ain’t really worth talking about.
Because it was my first offense, I was designated a trustee, which meant I’d only have to serve sixty-seven of the ninety days. I worked in the cafeteria and I talked a big game in there, telling the inmates I had my own record label and getting them to think I was established in the rap game. The truth was I hadn’t done a damn thing.
The sixty-seven days flew by. When I came home it was time to back up all the talking I’d been doing. But I had to go back to the drawing board. My plans with the kid hadn’t worked out. I’d only been gone two months, but that was long enough for a teenager to get distracted, decide he didn’t want to be a rapper anymore, and move on to something else.
Now I was at square one and out of the thousand dollars I’d spent on Zay’s beats.
I linked back up with Zay after my stint in the county. He suggested I start rapping and put the music mogul stuff on hold. Zay had seen me rap because I’d been writing the lyrics for Lil’ Buddy and then telling him how to deliver them, giving him the flows. Zay thought I had talent. I wasn’t so sure.
Not only did I have the stigma that rappers were all broke and lame, but I had long ago convinced myself that people would never take me seriously if I started up rapping.
It wasn’t that I’d never rapped before. Far from it. Even before my brother put me onto his music, I had an interest in poetry and the process of putting words together in creative ways. I can’t remember what I wrote but there was a day in first grade the teacher had our class make cards for Mother’s Day. Everyone else’s was on some “Roses are red, violets are blue . . .” shit, but I deliberated over that card until I could come up with something that didn’t just rhyme but captured how I felt about my momma. It caught my teacher by surprise.
“Wow, Radric,” she said. “This is how you really feel.”
I colored the card and brought it home, excited to give it to my momma over the weekend. I sure as hell wasn’t thinking about a rap career, but I did know this was something I was good at. Better than my peers.
After we moved to Georgia I’d spent a lot of time freestyling with my buddies in Sun Valley. Me and OJ would hang outside the apartments and take turns rapping while the other made a beat on the big green power generator. Me and my other friends—BP, C-Note, Dontae, Jughead, Gusto, and Joe—even had our own little rap crew. We called ourselves Home Grown. I always thought I was the best out of all of them. The thing was, whenever we would record our little ciphers on BP’s cassette player, I hated how my voice sounded on playback.
I sounded different from my friends. My voice was that of someone from Alabama, not from Atlanta. Not only did I sound so country, but I’d always had something of a speech impediment, like my father had. I’d gotten teased for that in school after we moved to Atlanta and it was another factor that turned me off to the idea of becoming a rapper.
But something kept me coming back to Zay’s basement, and the more time I spent down there the more comfortable I became. I was playing around with my voice, my cadence, and my diction and after a while all those reservations I’d had slowly started to fade away.
I was listening to a lot of Project Pat then. I was twenty years old, coming into my own, and while I was out there doing what I was doing—trappin’ out of cars with OJ and standing on the corner hustling—Project Pat was the soundtrack. I had his debut album from ’99, Ghetty Green, on repeat. When a girl hopped in my car, that’s what she was going to hear.
I’d always been a big fan of Memphis rappers. Guys like 8Ball and MJG, Kingpin Skinny Pimp, Tommy Wright III, Playa Fly, and Triple Six Mafia. But Pat was my favorite. Still is. He was talking that street shit and I just knew he was telling the truth.
I knew that life, and I could tell if a rapper was playing Scarface. I had an ear for that. I knew Project Pat did the shit he was rapping about. Can’t nobody tell me different. I knew C-Murder did what he said. I knew Soulja Slim did what he said. I knew BG did what he said. Their music was real and it motivated me. My music had to be the same way.
P and Baby were my idols, but I couldn’t be rapping about Bentleys and Ferraris because I wasn’t living that life. The cars I was around were Regals and Cutlass Supremes. I couldn’t be rapping about shutting down the clubs because I wasn’t in the clubs. I was in the trap house. I was on the corner. I wanted my music to inspire niggas to get money and come up out of that shit, but at the same time I wanted to let them know I was one of them. I couldn’t leave them out.
Soon I found myself at Zay’s nearly every day. There wasn’t a plan. We were just two young men trying to find ourselves, in music and in life. We didn’t know the fun we were having would give birth to a whole genre and inspire a generation of artists after us.
Trap music. To some it’s the subject matter. Stories of serving fiends through burglar bars. To others it’s a style of beatmaking. Shit, today there’s a whole audience of white kids who think trap music is about popping molly and going to a rave.
In a way it’s all those things. But when I think about trap music I think about those early days in Zay’s basement. When I would go over early in the morning after a night spent juugin’ in my neighborhood. When Zay would mix our songs and he didn’t even know how to mix. The whole process was crude and unrefined. What we were making wasn’t radio-ready and definitely not destined for the charts.
When I think about trap I think about something raw. Something that hasn’t been diluted. Something with no polish on it. Music that sounds as grimy as the world that it came out of.
?
Eventually I decided to put together my first body of work. I bought more beats from Zay and another producer I’d met named Albert Allen. Al had been the keyboard player for the nineties R & B group Silk and he knew a lot more than Zay or I about the music game. He helped me put together the collection of songs that would make up my first underground release. But first I needed a rap name.