BMF: The Rise and Fall of Big Meech and the Black Mafia Family (24 page)

And we can’t be stopped. I don’t see nobody stopping us. I don’t see no one to come after us, either. None. Nobody will ever do this again, because this many niggas and this much money can’t get along and stay together. They gonna fall out over girls or something.

From there, he crossed into offensive territory, straying from the style of an old-fashioned sexist preacher into that of a stereotyped hip-hop player. “We don’t fall out over no girls,” Meech told the camera. “We hit ’em all. They hit my hos, I hit they hos. The ones that don’t want to be shared, then that’s your own personal one. Other than that, we ain’t fallin’ out over no hos.”

In summation, Meech assigned a purpose to the partying and excess that filled the preceding thirty minutes of video. He might have stretched the numbers a tad, for effect, but the point was clear. Meech was answering a calling. He felt he had a responsibility to spend as much cash as possible, and he had to do it fast. Because you never know when someone might burst in and put an end to all that overkill.

A lot of niggas don’t like to spend their money. We love to spend money. We can’t take none of this shit with us. None. Ain’t no armored trucks pulling up at no funerals. So you better enjoy this
shit. Just a fool and his money won’t part. When we go out at night, whatever we spend, $50,000, $100,000 in the muthafuckin’ club, we can afford to do it, because we can’t bring it all with us. Simple.

At about the time that the
Smack
DVD dropped, so did Jeezy’s street video, “Trap or Die.” It was packaged along with his album-length mixtape of the same name, which had been for sale, in various incarnations, for months. Jeezy’s DVD, which eclipsed
Smack
in sales, did far more to boost his career than Meech’s would. And though similar to the
Smack
video, down to a fatalistic mini-soliloquy from Jeezy toward the conclusion of his disc,
Trap or Die
felt more authentic, more like a genuine documentary compared with BMF Entertainment’s stagier antics—which revolved around the label’s sole artist, Bleu. By the spring of 2005,
Trap or Die
sold a reported 250,000 copies. And the buzz surrounding Jeezy was bubbling up from the streets and into the mainstream.

Daily newspapers and national magazines were building huge momentum for Jeezy’s first major-label album,
Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101
, which was scheduled for release later that year. In the months leading up to the album,
Vibe
called Jeezy “Atlanta’s next big thing.” He was described by the
Montgomery Advertiser
as “arguably the hottest rapper in the South right now.” And the
New York Times
christened Jeezy’s new DVD as “charming” and lauded his delivery of “tightly packed lyrics in an appealing rasp.”

Jeezy also piggybacked off BMF’s Miami blitzkrieg. He and Bleu hosted a party at club SoBe Live with then–Philadelphia 76er Allen Iverson, and he performed at several of Meech’s Sunday night events at Crobar, along with the equal parts raunchy and sultry rapper Trina, known as “the Diamond Princess.” Even as early as March of 2005, Jeezy was a pretty big draw. His performances were attracting crowds
one-thousand-people strong, all of them willing to pay twenty dollars a pop.

Jeezy also was as skillful a self-promoter as he was a rapper. In interviews, he answered questions with the same eloquence that characterized his lyrics. And his promises, though big, were genuine.

“When my album comes out, all the dots will connect,” Jeezy told
Billboard
in March 2005, four months before the album was released.

You’re going to feel sad with me, you’re going to go through the struggle with me, you’re going to hang out with me, you’re going to hit the trap with me. You’re going to see the ’hood through a young man’s eyes who has really seen it, really felt it, really touched it, really tasted it.

Basically, Jeezy was guaranteeing that he was the real thing.

At the end of his
Trap or Die
DVD, he described, with similar authenticity, what life had been like for him thus far, a twenty-seven-year-old native of the streets who’d seen “fifty or sixty” friends fall to the game. “I ain’t had a good night sleep in ten years, because I don’t know if my motherfuckin’ door’s gonna fly open, you know what I’m saying? I
still
don’t know. I’m just here, my nigga. At the end of the day, I just wanna be heard, dog. However it go, if it go for good or it go for bad, I was here, and I made it this far.”

Soon, his words became more chilling than even he could have imagined.

A few months earlier, in the fall of 2004, Jeezy had brushed shoulders with a younger, lesser-known rapper at the downtown Atlanta shoe store Walter’s. Against the backdrop of Walter’s rainbow of Adidas and Nikes, Radric Davis, aka “Gucci Mane,” was passing out promo CDs. He offered one to Jeezy, who was “iced out” with diamonds
and buying what looked to Gucci like ten or fifteen pairs of shoes. Jeezy took the CD and complimented Gucci on his skills; he’d already heard some of the up-and-comer’s tracks.

Though they came from different territories—Gucci from Atlanta’s East Side and Jeezy, by way of Macon, from Boulevard’s Old Fourth Ward—the two rappers claimed similar backgrounds. They both professed to have lived the ghetto life. And they both had been effective in channeling their street experiences into more professional ones.

The two rappers hit it off, and they agreed that they ought to get together in the studio. Jeezy thought a collaboration track between the two of them might work, and Gucci was game. Gucci, who had recently signed with Atlanta-based Big Cat records, was in the midst of cutting an album, and he hoped that Jeezy would contribute a few verses to one of his singles. Gucci wanted to attach some of Jeezy’s star power to one song in particular, a lighthearted track (at least compared with Jeezy’s fare) called “Icy,” which touched on rappers’ and groupies’ fascination with bling.

When Gucci and Jeezy met in the studio, Gucci explained what he was going for with “Icy.” But Jeezy didn’t seem all that interested. That kind of stuff wasn’t really his style. The concept was too singsongy, almost cheerful held up against Jeezy’s darker repertoire. Jeezy tried to steer Gucci toward other material, but Gucci kept bringing them back to “Icy.” At the very least, Gucci wanted to pay the better-known rapper to lay down a couple of rhymes. It would be a coup for the more underexposed artist to have a guy like Jeezy on the track. Then they could move on to something else, something more Jeezy’s speed.

Jeezy complied, rattling off his distinctive brand of poetry: “In my hood they call me Jeezy da Snowman … I’m iced out, plus I got snow, man.”

To everyone’s surprise, including Gucci’s, “Icy” became an underground hit. In December 2004, it got heavy play on Atlanta’s influential
urban radio station, V-103. Its video later earned a regular-rotation spot on BET. And when Gucci or Jeezy—or, on occasion, the two of them together—would perform the song live, the crowd would go wild, screaming the chorus.

In the winter of 2004, Gucci and Jeezy took the stage together at Macon’s career-making hip-hop club, Money’s. Club owner George “G. Money” Willis, the fatherly benefactor of Macon’s rap scene, remembered Jeezy from years earlier, in the late ’90s. Back then, he was still Lil J and hadn’t yet left Macon for Atlanta. Even so, the young man, not yet a rapper, had big aspirations. He and his close friend, Demetrius “Kinky B” Ellerbee, were pushing a mixtape label they’d launched, called Young Gunz Entertainment. Jeezy and Kinky B were so close, they considered themselves brothers. They’d met as teenagers, at a boot camp for wayward boys, and as soon as they were out, they hit the streets with a singular purpose: succeed in the hip-hop biz. The goal was a common one in Macon’s down-and-out neighborhoods, but Jeezy and Kinky B’s combination of street smarts and business sense was not.

G. Money had appreciated the young man’s hustle. He noticed something in Jeezy, a quality that distinguished him from other young men with similar dreams. To G. Money, Jeezy was a born star. And now, with Jeezy filling his club with hundreds of adoring fans, he watched as his early premonition came true.

After Young Gunz had dissolved, Kinky B convinced Jeezy that he had the skills to be a great rapper, and Kinky B’s hunch paid off in a huge way. He and Jeezy formed Corporate Thugz Entertainment to promote and package Jeezy’s talent. And while the label started as an underground mixtape venture, by 2005 it had grown as much in stature as Jeezy’s rap career.

Like Jeezy himself, his and Kinky B’s label forged a deal with Def Jam. A seven-figure infusion of Def Jam funds would allow Corporate Thugz Entertainment (or CTE, as everyone called it) to cultivate new talent—perhaps so that Jeezy could do for another rapper what
Def Jam had done for him. CTE built a stable of artists, including the rapper Slick Pulla and the group Blood Raw, with the hope of turning them into eventual stars. Jeezy and Kinky B also were on the hunt for new talent. And in the spring of 2005, they’d set their sights on another act, a rap trio from Macon called Loccish Lifestyle.

No doubt about it, Jeezy and Kinky B had hit it big. Jeezy’s stardom as a rapper was all but guaranteed. And CTE possessed both street sensibilities and major-label backing. Those two things were a sure recipe for record sales—and, some claimed, bullying rights.

In what came to be construed as a case of big label versus little one, Jeezy’s camp had approached Gucci’s label in the spring of 2005 with an unwelcome proposition. “Icy” had gotten so hot—
Jeezy
hot—that Def Jam wanted to acquire the track from Big Cat Records. The problem was, neither Big Cat nor Gucci was interested in selling it. “Icy” was Gucci’s biggest hit to date. He birthed the song. And so he and Big Cat felt it belonged on Gucci’s soon-to-drop album, not Jeezy’s. In fact, Gucci and Big Cat already were battling the perception that the song belonged to Jeezy. In one newspaper article about Jeezy’s rise, “Icy” was described as, “His song (along with Gucci Mane).” Gucci had been reduced to a parenthetical.

And yet even after negotiations over the rights to “Icy” broke down, Gucci tried to get Jeezy to appear in the video for the track. Despite a few near-concessions, that didn’t work out, either. By the time it came time to shoot the video, in April 2005, two things were indisputable. The first was that, on the set, Gucci was just as “icy” as Jeezy had been the day they met at Walter’s. The young rapper was decked out in a fifty-thousand-dollar yellow-diamond-studded watch designed by New York’s Jacob “the Jeweler” Arabo, and a 37-carat pendant that spelled so
ICY
in forty thousand dollars’ worth of diamonds. The other certainty was that by the time the cameras were rolling, the term
icy
also applied to the relationship between the once-friendly rappers. The tug-of-war over the track had gotten personal. And the personal was about to get public.

To make his feelings on the matter abundantly clear, Jeezy released a “dis” song aimed at Gucci. The practice was common in hip-hop. For reasons ranging from disrespect to attempted murder, feuding rappers would dishonor the other party in rhyme, and would record the ensuing put-down for all the world to consider. The Biggie–Tupac imbroglio in the mid-’90s was the most significant of all such battles, ending in both rappers’ deaths and the loss of two of rap’s most talented artists. Back then, dis songs mostly were released on traditional albums, ones that took months, at least, to drop—elongating the pace of the feud to a frustrating trickle and dampening its ferocity. By the time Jeezy and Gucci found reason to loathe each other, though, the art of dissing had grown more sophisticated. Thanks to the mixtape phenomenon, dis songs could be released to the street within the week.

As a result, neither Jeezy’s verbal assault of Gucci nor Gucci’s razor-tongued response was served cold. Jeezy’s track took several well-aimed swipes at Gucci. And it placed a steep bounty on his forty-thousand-dollar necklace:

“[If] you just happen to snatch that muthafucka off his neck …”

“I’m gonna shoot you the ten-stack, man.”

As if the ten-thousand-dollar bounty wasn’t obvious enough, the title of the track, “Stay Strapped,” doubled as a threat. If Gucci wasn’t already carrying a gun, he ought to start.

Gucci was quick to fire back. And his track, “Round 1,” showed he was eager to play this game. In “Round 1,” Gucci insulted Jeezy’s skill: “Jeezy can’t make a hit with a Louisville Slugger.” And, in a verse that took balls, if not a disregard for self-preservation, to record, Gucci elevated the feud to the next level: “Put a dress on, nigga, you Meech’s bitch.”

In May 2005, two members of the rap trio Loccish Lifestyle hopped in the car to make the hour-and-a-half drive from Macon to Atlanta.
They’d been to the city countless times before, to perform in rap tournaments and hit the clubs to catch up with friends. But this trip was different. This time, Henry “Pookie Loc” Clark III and Shannon “Luke” Lundy were hoping to meet with representatives of Corporate Thugz Entertainment—and maybe sign a record deal.

The anticipation leading up to this trip was not unlike the thrill of another visit to Atlanta five years earlier, back in Loccish Lifestyle’s infancy. On that occasion, Luke, Pookie Loc, and Loccish’s third member, Carlos “Low Down” Rhodes, came to town for a freestyle rap competition at hip-hop club the Atrium. The three of them didn’t even have a song ready, just a beat from somewhere, an undeniable chemistry, and a name for their three-man crew.

Loccish
refers to a way of life on the streets,
loc
having its origin in Crips gang lingo. (The term
loc
is used to refer to a friend, supposedly standing for “love of Crips.”) In Macon, a lot of people claimed the lifestyle. But few actually lived it. For a while, Pookie, Luke, and Low Down did. They shared a callused, survival-at-all-costs mentality. And so when the three of them started writing songs together, their material blended seamlessly. In life and in art, they were part of the same song. Back in 2000, when the Macon trio drove to Atlanta to perform in the rap tournament at the Atrium, they were mostly unrehearsed and had no real repertoire from which to draw. And still, they managed to take home the prize.