These days, Mannie Fresh wears a pricey-looking watch and a ring, but there’s nothing around his neck. Sick of taking too many shots.” Fresh says he knew it was time to leave when he started dipping into money he put away for retirement. I never knew y'all was trynna get in touch with me.’ I was sick of waiting. “They were like, ‘Dude, Mannie, we wanted you to do a song on the Game album and we know your schedule was too busy but hopefully we gonna get you on the next one.’ So I’m like, ‘Wow. “Last year at a DJ seminar I bumped into people from Interscope,” Fresh recalls. “The Cash Money sound pretty much changed the era,” Fresh says without hesitation. The message is clear- We can't even wear all this shit!!!-and the label posted the album sales to back it up. The cover of one of Big Tymers album sports a photo of Fresh and Baby wearing pounds of gaudy jewelry while sitting at a table that is likewise covered in iced-out watches and chains. Over-the-top materialism had been a part of hip-hop for years, but Cash Money ramped up the values of its signifiers according to just how lucrative the industry had become. But not only did those critics fail to recognize the potential for longevity in the music-especially in the Mannie Fresh beats-but also what was being called hyperbole soon proved to be, in some sense, a reflection of a new truth. At the time, many critics complained about the outlandish materialism of Cash Money’s lyrics, and even as the label’s records sold and sold, outsiders wrote the crew off as a fad-a temporary empire built on the shifty sands of hyperbole. “But we were doing close to gold independently so if the offer was mediocre it was like, ‘Yeah, we don’t need it.’” Eventually the Williams brothers came to a $30M agreement with Universal and a new era in hip-hop was minted. “When the major label deal first happened, everybody was like, ‘Why they gave them so much money?” Mannie recalls of Cash Money’s deal with Universal Records. The follow up release by the Big Tymers (Mannie Fresh and Baby) sold, according to Fresh, around 400,000 units. According to Fresh, the label released an album by Juvenile that sold 495,000 copies around the South completely independently. The word “crazy” is as overused in and around hip-hop this year as “incredible” was last year, but in this case its no exaggeration. “It was just Brian and Ronald coming to me, saying, “We want to start a record company.’ And I was saying to them as some street dudes, ‘If y’all really want to do this dude, it's either the streets or this.’ And they were like, 'We really believe in it.' So it was me-my ideas or whatever-and them funding it, and from there it went crazy.” “Cash Money was a group, not even a label,” Fresh says of the crew’s beginnings. Although Cash Money is also remembered as the sound of 1998, it was formed in the early ‘90s when Baby and Slim Williams-a pair of brothers from the Northside of New Orleans-hollered at Fresh-an already establish DJ and producer who hails from the Southside-about starting a music venture. Cash Money is mostly broadly famous for coining the term “bling,” which holds the dubious claim of being perhaps the most persistent bit of slanguage to jump from hip-hop into the mainstream. Mannie Fresh himself, of course, claims that his intros are something that just fell out his head one day, and while that’s probably true, they also intimate a lot more about him.įresh is associated first and foremost with Cash Money Records out of New Orleans, Louisiana. On songs from the last couple months by everyone from TI to Jeezy to Trina to Slim Thug, Fresh has kicked things off by shouting out ladies, gentlemen, bad-ass babies, crackers, gays, rednecks, coloreds, ducks, chickens, mammals, cats, dogs, Valujet, bad mamba-jambas and “all that in-between.” It is a quirky, unhinged, awesome, absurd, populist, hilarious, and confusing trademark that is ultimately irresistible, but also kind of inspiring. The first time you experience one of those Mannie Fresh introductions is kind of like the first time you experience one of his patented snare rolls-a genuine What the FUCK?! moment. Fags, hags, and scallywags! Get y’all motherfuckin ass on the floor ya heard?! Its about to go down like a motherfuckin plane crash! Its about to burn like a bad-ass perm! Niggas, bitches, bitch-ass niggas, dyke-ass hoes, black-ass and bright-ass hoes! Fresh calls out from the mic as soon as the beak kicks off. Young Jeezy, the Atlanta-based rapper who released his debut album this summer, had a pretty substantial hit with the catchy BOOM-BOOM-CLAP and hustle talk of his single “And Then What.” But unless you copped the album or its bootleg, chances are the version you heard time and again on the radio, on the TV and in the club was without the spoken introduction by Mannie Fresh, the man who produced the song.
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