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Five years ago, the three men who run Cash Money Records were sharing a beat-up 1968 Impala. Now, thanks to Juvenile, B.G., Lil Wayne and the Hot Boys, they've got a fleet of Bentleys, Jags and Cadillacs. How the New Orleans label becamethe hottest sound in hip-hop.
At seven o'clock on a foggy night in New Orleans, Mannie Fresh
rolls his brand-new, just-washed, platinum-colored Bentley up
alongside a pair of identical cars in the parking lot outside Cash
Money Records. The label's owners recently bought seven Bentleys as
gifts for their rappers, including one $375,000 deluxe model, with
a convertible top and blue mink carpeting, for themselves. Puffy
may have made the stuffy British car a rap status symbol, but Cash
Money gave the Bentley its first ghetto makeover - mounting DVD
screens to the wood-panel interior, replacing factory speakers with
booming subwoofers, jacking up the suspension on 20" custom rims.
"We fucked up everybody by puttin' rims on these Bentleys," says
Fresh, the label's producer and musical mastermind, placing factory
speakers with booming subwoofers, jacking up the suspension on
twenty-inch custom rims. "We fucked up everybody by puttin' rims on
these Bentleys," says Fresh, the label's producer and musical
mastermind, with a defiant chuckle. "We was up at Justin's" -
Puffy's New York restaurant - "and those guys be like, 'Man, what
the fuck wrong with y'all? You don't do that to no Bentley.' I was
like, 'Fuck that - I bought it, I gonna put some rims on it, some
TVs in that bitch.' I had to tear that motherfucker
down."
The Cash Money crew arrived home from a Las Vegas awards show less
than twenty-four hours ago; now they're itching to hit the road
again for a pleasure ride to Houston, 350 miles away. "A lot of
times if we just sitting around and we don't got shit to do, we be
like - Houston!" explains Fresh, sinking low into the soft tan
leather driver's seat as he waits for the end of a song - Mary J.
Blige's "Sexy" - before shutting off the engine. "It's a relaxed
place. We got a lot of love there; we can lay back and have some
fun. No stress. They've got a great mall down there, good clubs,
and the women - wait until you see the women in Houston."
If not for the luxury cars parked three deep in the lot, it would
be hard to guess you've arrived at the headquarters of one of the
most successful labels in rap music today. There's no sign out
front, and the gray, two-story cinder-block building, tucked
between a body shop and a Jacuzzi dealer, looks more like a
low-rent insurance office than the home of an organization that
grossed close to $70 million last year. (At the time of these
interviews, Cash Money was building larger new offices nearby.)
During 1999, fueled by sales of albums by Juvenile, B.G., Lil Wayne
and the Hot Boys - an N.W.A-style tag team that features all three
star rappers plus newcomer Turk - Cash Money sold more than 9
million albums and transformed its proudly provincial Southern
style into the most explosive new sound in hip-hop.
The office windows are tinted and covered with steel grating, and
the only sign of life coming from inside is the music - the
thumping, booming, bass-and-synthesizer rhythm of Juvenile's
current single, "U Understand," which bangs so loud it rattles the
exterior window frames. On the other side of a heavy metal security
door, the party is in full swing. A half-dozen members of the road
crew, dressed in standard Cash Money garb - Girbaud jeans, oversize
T-shirts, white Reeboks - lounge on a beat-up couch and across the
dingy gray carpet, eating Popeye's chicken and chugging from
bottles of champagne. "This how we do it!" shouts label co-owner
Bryan "Baby" Williams, 27, hoisting a Modt bottle in one hand and a
drumstick in the other, his wide grin showing off a mouth full of
gold and diamonds. "All the way ghetto."
Baby and his brother, Ronald "Slim" Williams, 29, founded Cash
Money Records in 1992, though the label didn't start to live up to
its name until years later. The brothers are a study in contrasts:
Baby is robust and excitable, with the tightly wound energy of a
man who could be set off at any time; Slim is tall and gangly, with
a pigeon-toed walk and an almost Buddha-like calm. Both exert a
benevolent, paternal air over their brood, joking, telling stories
and taking a nonstop barrage of calls on the two cell phones they
each seem to carry at all times. At one point, Lil Wayne's mother
calls, wondering how her son is feeling. Wayne, who at sixteen is
the label's youngest star, has the flu, and despite his athletic
stage dive during Cash Money's performance two nights ago, he's in
no shape to travel to Houston. "I think I been workin' too hard,"
he mumbles.
When Wayne first asked his mom if he could join Cash Money, she
resisted, telling her son the rappers looked like gangsters in
their bandannas and low-slung jeans. She relented a year later, as
long as Wayne promised not to curse in his songs. (So far, he's
cursed only once - in the mournful, angry "F*** Tha World," about
the murder of his stepfather, Rabbit.) Not long after he joined the
label, Wayne accidentally shot himself in the chest with a Glock at
his mother's house. He would have bled to death had the police not
heard him kicking the inside of his mom's door. Wayne won't talk
about the incident, but he's admitted that he was stoned at the
time and distracted by a bag of cookies. "I got the munchies," he
told one reporter.
"Where I come from, temptation is a motherfucker," Wayne says
tonight in his slow, soft drawl. "But these guys picked me up, set
me straight, taught me a lot - they been like fathers to me."
Spend time around Cash Money and it's obvious that the love and
admiration its members have for one another is not manufactured.
"You got to understand, bruh, we nothin' but a big old family,"
Slim says. There's something else at work, too - a strict, unspoken
hierarchy that Fresh calls "a Mafia kind of thing." Cash Money is a
tightly knit, insular organization that, in addition to Slim, Baby,
Fresh and the four rappers, includes a staff of twenty that swells
to forty-two on the road. The rappers are required to follow rules:
Show up at the office every day; be ready to go in the studio or on
the road at any time; no drugs. The latter policy is strictly
enforced, particularly since B.G., a former heroin addict, got out
of prison on a two-year parole that includes weekly urine tests.
This is one reason friends from the old neighborhood are not
allowed to hang around the office.
"We don't condone outsiders," says Fresh. "We went through a long
time where it was hell trying to get these guys to understand that.
Because they young kids, and they think everybody's they friend and
everybody's cool with them, but we don't know these people, and you
might not really know these people, either."
Wayne shrugs when asked about the policy. "I ain't old, but I feel
it's too late for me to make new friends, anyway," he says.
"Controlled chaos" is how Slim describes the Cash Money atmosphere.
The undisputed chief and, at six feet eight, the most imposing
member of the crew, Slim - who also answers to Sugar Slim, the Don
and the Godfather - is soft-spoken and intense, with dark, sleepy
eyes and long braids hanging over his FUBU jacket. Known throughout
the rap industry as a shrewd businessman, Slim has an easygoing,
generous manner that friends say can turn fierce when circumstances
demand it. And while his more flamboyant brother, Baby, raps in his
own group, the Big Tymers (a duo with Fresh), Slim stays in the
background. He never appears on albums, in videos or onstage. He
doesn't drink, smoke or, to the best recollection of friends,
dance. "You got to have a chief to stay on top of things - and
that's me, the Godfather," Slim says. "A lot of people lose focus -
they get the money and they forget about what made them. They party
too much, lose perspective. We like to have fun, we party, but we
don't go overboard. I be right on top of everything, all the time.
I be the first one to congratulate them and the first one to jump
in their chest when they be doing something they ain't got no
business doing."
It's almost 2 a.m. by the time we finally hit the road, a
surprisingly orderly procession of Cadillacs, Jags, Bentleys and a
black Lamborghini 2000 VT - one of the fastest and rarest cars in
the world - cruising down Veterans Boulevard to I-10. No one
travels above eighty m.p.h., and no one who's had even a little
champagne takes the wheel. In the Cadillac Escalade I'm driving,
the most dangerous activity is watching Meet Joe Black on
DVD. A dozen silver-plated Nokia cell phones serve as CB radios to
choreograph pit stops for gas and fast food. At one point,
Juvenile's Bentley pulls up next to Baby's and he phones. "Hey, 'd
you pack anything? What about clothes? What we gonna wear?"
"Nah, bruh, we don't need no clothes," answers Baby from the
backseat, with typical rowdy enthusiasm. "I got money in my pocket
- we'll buy clothes when we get there. Shit, we goin' to the mall,
ain't we?"
Senior editor Jason Fine prefers a classic Eldorado to the
Cadillac Escalade.
For the complete story, check out RS 840, on newsstands
now.