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One day in Jersey City, New Jersey, a then-fourteen-year-old Joe Budden walked into his mother's kitchen high on a drug cocktail of several different substances. "My eyes were black; my skin was peeling and had no color," Budden says eight years later, sitting in the greenroom at MTV, waiting to perform on MC Battle. "I just looked like a dead person walking."
Fortunately, he survived. And with the release of Joe Budden, his debut album, and its club-friendly bangin' first single, "Pump It Up," Budden has emerged as one of hip-hop's brightest young talents, deftly mixing graphic tales of his life struggles with a universal pop sensibility.
Budden's drug-fueled descent can be traced to when, at age twelve, he fell into a deep depression after his father went to jail. He began abusing marijuana, then alcohol, then angel dust. "I started to do all those things at one time," he says. "It was pretty bad. Every morning I would wake up, and that would be breakfast." But that day when Budden was fourteen, his mother saw the effects that drugs were having on her son, and she lost control. "She was screaming, hollering and crying," Budden says. "She dropped to the floor. I'd never seen her like that. And me and her have always been close. So that made me think, 'Enough is enough.' "
In 1997, Budden went into rehab and eventually kicked his habit. "I had the best therapist ever," he says. "Me and her still speak to this day. She was somebody I could tell all my business to. Which is what somebody like me needed."
Budden was also lucky to have another obsession besides drugs: writing. He filled journal after journal with the anger, isolation and frustration he felt. When he was eighteen, he decided to turn his writing into rhymes. He flooded the New York mix-tape circuit with tracks. After he garnered much attention and street cred, Def Jam eventually offered Budden a deal. "I'm speaking from experience, so it's not so hard to write about it," he says. "It's just that my fans have taken a liking to my experience."
"Pump It Up" includes a call-out to anyone in the club who "came to get it crunk/With a dame and chidick [a chick that's drunk]." And, indeed, it's impossible for a rapper to avoid situations where people are drinking and smoking, but Budden says he can deal. "If I can, I will leave," he says. "If I can't, I'm all right. It's not a temptation." This month, Budden will be able to walk into a record store and see his album on the shelf. In July, he'll celebrate six years of being sober. The first milestone would not have been possible without the second.
TOURE
(June 3, 2003)