To Yo Gotti, a Memphis rapper who refers to the sanitation workers' strike of 1968 on the cover of his album I Am - the strike is the reason Dr.
And there are ghosts, too - an empty pyramid by the river, a crime scene at the Lorraine Hotel that's now a museum.
When you are there, you can see the history of Memphis on plaques and honorary street names and restaurants like the Four-Way, which promotes itself as Martin Luther King Jr.'s favorite place to eat when he was in town. I don't have to move to here to make it and say I'm from there." "That's what gave me the ammunition I needed to know I can make it from here, period. If they can make it from here, anybody can make it from here," he says. You can never make it from Memphis.' Growing up, that was one of the milestones. "The whole time, coming up as a rapper, that's what they told me: 'You will never make it from Memphis. The album mattered to Memphis rapper Don Trip for a different reason. I remember my cousins and them pulling up in they box Chevys, listening to Comin' Out Hard." "Eightball and MJG - they legends down here. You know how you run up behind you big cousin, and whatever they on, that's what you on, from the clothes to the music," says Young Dolph, a rapper who grew up in Memphis. "I used to always listen to everything my big cousin listened to. Like, 'I'm balling, not because of my size.' His flow and who he was - he was just like a fly fat dude." "I had a lot of big, fat-ass homies, you know what I'm saying? And I remember, like, how comfortable big dudes started feeling wanting to go out and hit the club more. Big" was still that song, and Eightball, the rounder half of the group, still an inspiration. Even after he got his driver's license, " Mr. Just, 'Woo!' You didn't want to get out the car," says Drumma Boy, a producer born and raised in Memphis, who was 11 when Comin' Out Hard dropped. "I remember popping it into my Oldsmobile - I had a '83 Cutlass Oldsmobile - and we just hit the block, hit the mall and we just went everywhere.
I left it there, because I was in the city to talk to the men who put a drop-top Lexus coupe on the front and back covers of their first CD and to the people who kept it in their CD players for years. When I got into my rental car at the Memphis Airport, the bass on the stereo was at +9. Last year, right around the 20th anniversary of the first of those records, Comin' Out Hard, I went to the birthplace of both Stax and Sun Records to hear the story of Premro Smith and Marlon Jermaine Goodwin, better known as Eightball and MJG. A pair of young rapper-producers from Memphis straddled the tonal shift, and you can hear, on the two albums they released between the summer of '93 and the spring of '94, the unease of an industry flooded with money just as regional markets were wolfing down less commercial, grittier records. In 1993, the wild success of cinematic albums like The Chronic and Doggystyle had shown corporate America just how large the appetite for rap was, but the next wave of musicians had something more serious in mind. Two decades ago the essence of adolescence was leaving hip-hop. While Diddy can hopefully bring the sound of these Memphis heroes to the huge audience they deserve, Ridin’ High is proof that 8 Ball & MJG won’t be changing their time-tested technique for anyone.MJG (left) and Eightball in an early, undated photo. “Relax & Take Notes,” “30 Rocks,” and “Get Low” are Southern rap boulders, sure to satisfy fans who have thrived on the duo’s brand of formidable street rap for all of 15 years. The legendary Memphis duo completely own Ridin’ High - even the radio-friendly concessions (“Pimpin’ Don’t Fail Me Now,” “Take It Off”) seem like a means to slip the group’s seriously rugged, heartfelt hood rap into the hands of the public.
Diddy (corporate rap’s super-svengali) with 8 Ball & MJG (pioneers of street-bred Southern hip-hop) is dubious to say the least, but could any other partnership have produced the bombastic majesty that is “Cruzin’”? The song merges all of Diddy’s larger-than-life tendencies (including a cheesy hook sung by Slim of 112) with 8 Ball & MJG’s muscular, masterful brand of Memphis hip-hop, thereby transforming the standard Southern cruising song into a dazzling radio anthem of epic proportions.
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