Everybody's Brother (10 page)

I was already writing raps, making beat loops using a floor-model dual tape player, trying to figure out how to produce and arrange. But I knew I would need a lot of help and there was no shortage of talented help in the Dungeon. Out of nowhere, or so it seemed, Organized Noize and the Dungeon Family became like a Motown in Atlanta, creating a whole new Sound of Young America as Berry Gordy and his winning team had once done in the Motor City. Our sound was very genuine, very honest, very vulnerable, very moody. There was a lot of musicality, with live instrumentation. We seldom used samples. And the songs talked about a common knowledge that pertained to all parts of the country, all people.

In a flash, Organized Noize was in demand to make hits for everybody. (They would go on to write and produce some of the biggest hits in the whole world—we’re talking global smashes like “Waterfalls” by TLC, on which I gladly and proudly sang background vocals, and “Can’t Let Go (Love)” by En Vogue.) Meantime, the Dungeon Family was growing into one big tangle of talent and ambition, tied together by history and blood. Gipp even married Joi, a singer who was also part of the scene. So the Dungeon Family was real family. But in music and organized crime, being part of a family can really help or really hurt.

The main players in the Dungeon Family were young
guys from the Dirty South who had big egos and even bigger chips on our shoulders. As young men with fresh attitudes so commonly are, we were all in a rather big rush to stake our claims and make our marks. So the atmosphere in the beginning wasn’t exactly “All for one and one for all!” For us, at first, it was more like “Let’s all keep pushing like hell in the same general direction until one of us finally breaks on through to the other side.” That way, we figured, once one of us made it through the front door of music’s big time, then we would keep the door ajar long enough for all of us to flood into fortune and fame.

As fate would have it, the Dungeon Family’s first breakthrough arrived in late 1992 when Organized Noize was able to place our little brothers OutKast’s track called “Player’s Ball” on the LaFace Christmas album called
A LaFace Family Christmas
. At the time, OutKast’s playful Yuletide effort stood out in a very big way. Here was this really strong, really street rap track on an album full of much slicker seasonal soul and R&B material. Looking back now, this was the moment when our gang finally began to move out from the Dungeon and get our first peek at the outside world of possibilities. OutKast getting one of their songs released proved to us that the same thing could happen for all of us.

That was the good news. At the same time, having OutKast break out first from the Dungeon Family also led to a little confusion as well. As a result of the order of events back then, Goodie Mob became wrongly seen by some as just being part of OutKast’s scene, and for the record,
let me tell you why that’s not quite right. If anything, the reality was actually more like the other way around. With Goodie Mob and OutKast, the love was mutual and that love was genuine too. But let me be perfectly clear here—it’s definitely not like they just gave and we just took. If anything, we gave more than we got in terms of influence. See, André and Big Boi from OutKast and I are the same age, but in terms of experience, I felt like I was an Original Gangsta and that experience gave me the standing of an elder alongside them. For me and the rest of Goodie Mob, they were the younger generation.

Big Gipp:
The relationship between us and André and Big Boi from OutKast was always competitive, but always friendly and always close too, because we were all part of the Dungeon Family. Sure, we could argue with one another, but make no mistake, we stood together against the world. In the beginning, OutKast learned a lot from us. We were the big brothers, they were the little brothers. In our minds, OutKast never overshadowed us because we weren’t trying to do the same exact thing. We always tried to make sure there was a distinction. And at least the way we saw it, we were always equals.

The way I saw it, Dré was a quiet gangster who would not say much back then. Big Boi was very flamboyant, but there was also a slight awkwardness there because unlike all of us Atlanta boys, Antwan was from the outside world—specifically, he was from Savannah, Georgia, which may not sound like it was too far, but to us that was a whole other world. There were a lot of things that transpired as kids between CeeLo and the OutKast duo, so that by the time they met up again at the Dungeon, they all shared a lot of history. Meanwhile, me, the Organized Noize guys, and Khujo and T-Mo, all came from the other side of town.

And if you listen to the first OutKast album, you notice CeeLo and me were really solo artists then who were kind of Mob-adjacent. In the beginning, Khujo was in charge because he was a serious gangster back then. Khujo’s name was even bigger and louder in the street than Lo’s had been because of all the stuff he had done. So Khujo commanded a lot of respect. T-Mo also commanded a lot of respect, but in a different way because T-Mo was personally real quiet. T-Mo had been adopted as a child, and he was usually by himself and only messed with those he really had to mess with. T-Mo never had a lot of people around him, but he was a fighter when he had to be and a damn good one. We always said Khujo was the meat, T-Mo was the vegetables, CeeLo was the water—because what he has to say is crystal clear. I was the glue that somehow kept the whole meal together.

People looked at Goodie Mob like we were a little scary no matter what we did. People were intimidated by us, and maybe they had some reason to be. As a group, we stood for something, and we stood strong. If Goodie Mob had said something soft and safe with the music that we made, I don’t think we’d be remembered today. But we wanted to say something, and at the same time, we might really kick your ass if you didn’t listen to us and agree.

Remember, the Dungeon Family was like a collective—we were very deeply associated, yet all separate entities. OutKast and Goodie Mob had two totally different dynamics. We couldn’t be the same unless we tried, and I give you my word, we didn’t try. As proud as we were for our Dungeon brothers, we weren’t an offshoot of them. We weren’t broken, so we didn’t need any fixing. And we were too crazy in our own right to ever want to borrow their brand of crazy. That said, OutKast was family to us and they did a lot to help spread the word about us.

Listen to that first album,
Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik
, and you’ll hear Goodie Mob represented on two tracks—on “Call of Da Wild” and more famously on a very cool number called “Git Up, Git Out.” Gipp and I co-wrote “Git Up, Git Out” with the OutKast guys and more than any other track, that’s the one that helped me make my point of entry into the hip-hop pantheon. It also brought together all the elements of Goodie Mob for the first time.

“Git Up, Git Out” is a politically charged statement about the need to take charge of your own destiny and go out and do something in this world. It’s an inspirational street message that struck a big chord with all of us because it expressed exactly where we were in our lives at that very moment. It was intensely personal, and universal at the same time.

The reaction to the track was strong and immediate: For the first—but not last—time people in the music industry started talking about me. As a result of doing the verse for “Git Up, Git Out,” I was named Doper’s Rhyme of the Month in
The Source
magazine, which was an extremely sought-after honor back in the day. What made this honor even more meaningful to me was the fact that “Git Up, Git Out” was my very first-ever recorded verse—my real entry into the game. Just on the basis of that track, I was actually offered a few different solo record deals.

I thought long and hard about whether I should strike out on my own as a solo artist or forge ahead as part of Goodie Mob. The more I debated the issue, the more I felt that it would have been a conflict of interest for me to fly solo at first because my new musical older brothers had been waiting in the wings. To me, taking a solo deal back then would have seemed out of order and inappropriate to the other guys in Goodie Mob and to Rico Wade from Organized Noize who was playing a huge role in terms of producing what we were doing. I thought that I should do like Spike Lee would want, and do the right thing. At the same time, I also figured maybe there would be some safety in numbers for me. We weren’t strangers in the least bit, and I felt comfortable with each one of the guys. And in my heart, I felt like I wasn’t ready then to make it as a solo artist—at least not yet.

So when it was time to make a deal, I signed on with the Mob.

Along with Organized Noize, the most important ingredient in creating the sound of the Dirty South was LaFace Records. Back in 1989 Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds opened up shop as a joint venture with Arista, hoping to hop on the emerging Atlanta music scene. L.A. and Babyface had started out in an R&B band called the Deele, and as far as we were concerned, they were the deal we all wanted to make. L.A. had signed our sisters in TLC and was helping them put out platinum albums. OutKast was their first foray into rap. Goodie Mob was next.

The first time I met L.A. Reid was at an OutKast picnic in a mansion they’d rented outside of Atlanta. Biggie Smalls was just coming up, and he had opened for OutKast, so they had a really nice party. I knew L.A. Reid from the Deele, so I just started talking to him. I’ve never been excitable around people like him, because I’m so well informed and familiar with them. If I have the opportunity to speak with them, I know how to impress. L.A. took a liking to me, almost immediately. Who knows why? People said we favored each other. I guess I could see that we had a lot in common, although we never spoke about it much. He was a drummer, and that’s what I originally wanted to be before I realized I could program a drum machine. We’re both Geminis. And, as it turns out, he likes women as much as I do! Since those days, L.A. has gone on to become one of the major power players in the
music industry, now heading up Epic Records. But who would have guessed that years later we would be on rival music shows, with L.A. as a judge on the
X-Factor
and me on
The Voice
? As the Moody Blues would put it, “Isn’t Life Strange?”

LaFace Records signed Goodie Mob in 1994. The way that I saw it, Goodie Mob was like an exciting new family of old friends. Fundamentally, Goodie Mob was some serious fun. For all of our differences as individuals, our shared love for rap—and a few bad habits—brought us together. We all loved the name Goodie Mob. It just had an impressive ring to it—we were not to be fucked with lightly. Later on a track called “Fighting,” we explained that Goodie Mob stood for “The Good Die Young Mostly Over Bullshit”—which too often is still too true. Ultimately, we ended up giving the name Goodie Mob our own meaning with all of the music and all of the attitude we brought to the music. And as the record shows, Goodie Mob may have been short on big hits, but we were rarely if ever short on attitude.

Big Gipp:
A lot of our friends didn’t make it out of high school. We were just lucky because we found something else to do when other kids didn’t have anything. Music saved all of us.

Other kids thought we were kind of weird to be into music; they thought you had to be from New York to rap. We were trying to buy turntables and mics while kids were buying drugs. Of course, came the time, we were also selling drugs. And we were the type of guys who ran to the fights, we didn’t run away from them.

I used to sit in the trap house, where they sold cocaine. I’m a mellow guy and I didn’t like the way the customers acted, because they would act so crazy. I was the dude sitting in the cocaine trap, but I was selling weed! CeeLo never really sold drugs, but he was always around us. Khujo and T-Mo, we were more into it than André and Big Boi and CeeLo ’cause we were older than them. So they used to watch us and follow us into those scenes, but after some of our friends started dying from it, it started getting so close to us that we just had to realize that what you put out in the world, you get back. Those the rules.

Bean was a friend who died on the basketball court. He’s in a Goodie Mob song. Another one of our friends, Spanky, got killed right after he was in
a video with us and OutKast. We did the video on Friday, had a show Saturday night, and came home to find out he was dead. Somebody had come into the house and tried to rob him and they killed him. It was like the first time we started recognizing that the things that you do in the dark will come back to haunt you.