Standing next to my momma was Deb Antney. She’d been on a mission to get in touch with me ever since the failed “Go Head” video shoot. Somehow she found my mother, who had caught wind of what I was up to.
“What are you doing here?!” I asked them. I was in shock.
“We want to talk to you,” Deb explained. “You’re throwing your life away. You have a real chance to make it. Why would you be back here doing this?”
At first I couldn’t get past the fact that my momma was actually standing outside. But after they left, Deb’s words took root. I’d just gotten out of jail. Maybe I shouldn’t be doing this. At the very least I should get back to working on my music too. But I wasn’t going back to Big Cat.
?
One of the people who helped me get back to working on music was Shawty Lo. I was walking through the South DeKalb Mall one day when I saw a dude who had on as much jewelry as I did. The nigga stood out. When I peeped his chain I realized he was in the rap group D4L.
D4L was a rap crew out of the Bowen Homes projects in Bankhead, a neighborhood on the Westside of Atlanta. Zone 1. They were the pioneers of snap music and at the top of 2006 snap music had taken over the country. “White Tee,” the Dem Franchize Boyz song that inspired “Black Tee,” had been the beginning of snap, but D4L had brought it to the masses. Their song “Laffy Taffy” hit Number 1 on the Billboard charts the month I came home from prison.
But I wasn’t familiar with Shawty Lo. I’d been locked up during D4L’s rise and Lo wasn’t even on “Laffy Taffy” or “Betcha Can’t Do It Like Me,” their other big song. Lo wasn’t on most of the songs on their album. This guy was what I’d originally set out to be: a hustler turned financier who hopped on a track every now and then. Like me, Lo had just come home from a year in prison. He was a real street nigga and we hit it off.
Lo had his own studio in Bankhead, and as our friendship developed he told me I could record there for free. Since I was no longer recording at Big Cat’s studio and now had to foot the bill myself for studio time, I took him up on his offer. I started going there a lot. He had a whole roster of in-house producers who hooked me up with beats too.
That meant something to me. Lo didn’t need anything from me. He extended his hand, asking for nothing in return. He had character, he was a genuine person. Ever since then we were close friends. I was there for Lo for anything. A cameo in a video, a feature, whatever it was. I could never charge him a dollar.
Then there was this white kid, DJ Burn One, who had been trying to get me to do a mixtape with him ever since “Black Tee.” Burn One was still in high school but he was serious about the mixtape game. When I met him he’d been putting together compilation tapes of songs from artists he liked, but now he wanted to do tapes exclusively with one artist, like how DJ Drama was doing with Gangsta Grillz.
I ran into Burn One not long after my stint in Fulton County but had brushed him off. Trap House had been a big success and Hard to Kill was going to be a bigger one. What did I need to do a mixtape for?
But things had changed. I didn’t know what the situation was with Hard to Kill and “My Chain” hadn’t taken off. I was back to selling dope and the more I thought about it, maybe I was back to square one. Maybe doing a mixtape wasn’t such a step backward.
I hit up Burn One and met him at Zay’s, where I was knocking out a verse for some niggas I’d met at a club called Blue Flame. It was four in the morning by the time Burn One showed up, but I’d taken two X pills and was wide awake. I was geekin’ that night.
With some convincing, Zay let us all in his basement. Middle-of-the-night surprise sessions were not his thing, but these guys were going to pay him for a beat, so he obliged. Zay played a few cuts and after these dudes found one that was to their liking, I laid down my verse. Then it was time for the other guy to do his.
This nigga rapped the worst shit I’d ever heard in my life. It was terrible. And when he walked out I told him so.
“That sucked,” I told him straight up. “I can’t be next to you on that. Burn One, you want my verse? You can have it.”
Burn One didn’t say a word. He could see these guys were pissed.
“What are you talking about?” the other one asked. “We just paid you five thousand dollars for that verse.”
“Nah, the five thousand was for Zay’s beat,” I told them. “I can’t give you my verse.”
I switched the script. As lame as these dudes were with music, they weren’t soft. I’d seen guns in their car. Even as things got tense I wouldn’t budge. I was all over the place. Zaytoven saw where this was going, so he decided to cut his losses and wipe his hands of the situation. We were told to leave.
The arguing continued outside and the way shit was going this would end one of two ways. Either the cops were getting called or someone was getting shot. Burn One, who hadn’t spoken since I offered him the verse for free, butted in, sensing I wasn’t going to be the one to deescalate the situation.
“Let’s just all go to the strip club and we’ll sort this out there.”
Somehow that worked. I got into Burn One’s little red pickup truck and we took off.
“Man, I ain’t goin’ back to Blue Flame,” I told him.
He already knew that and he hit the gas and we dipped, leaving those fellas high and dry and out of five grand.
During that drive Burn One put me up on game about the mixtape circuit. It was a whole different ecosystem with a lot less rules and red tape when compared to putting out an album. He told me about all this money that artists were making from their mixtapes. To me, it seemed, this could be the route to get my career back on track.
The sun was starting to come up by the time Burn One dropped me off at my place. I put a couple of hundred dollars in his hand before we parted ways.
“Thanks for that shit back there,” I told him. “We’ll start doing the mixtape tomorrow.”
Over the next few weeks me and Burn One cooked up Chicken Talk, my first mixtape. It was a wild period of time. I kept my little run with the X pills going and you can hear it in those songs. It made for great music. More than any other release of mine Chicken Talk captured my state of mind during the time I was making it. I dissed every single Big Cat artist on that shit. It’s a perfect time capsule and my favorite of all my mixtapes.
After we got Chicken Talk pressed up, me and Burn One went to the Old National Flea Market to sell some copies. The guy there wasn’t having it.
“Ain’t nobody gonna buy that,” he told Burn One. “I heard Gucci Mane over with.”
Meanwhile I was outside in the parking lot with my new tape booming out of Burn One’s truck. A small crowd had gathered around me and I was selling copies hand over fist. The guy inside, the same one who’d just told Burn One my career was finished, saw what was happening and ran out a couple of minutes later.