fourteen doin’ that shit. He used to instigate fights. He would tell the next nigga, “My lil cousin can beat up yo lil brother.” I used to have to scrap; crazy shit like that. But the nigga was a good nigga overall. Nobody had complaints about him, except rival niggas. But nobody in the hood. He was a jokester. He was a funny nigga. He was the popular nigga in school. I started hangin’ out with him when I was ten or eleven and he got smoked when I was twelve, goin’ on thirteen. Did you find yourself getting consumed by that lifestyle while you were kickin’ it with him or was it strictly about you being with your cousin? It was just about me being with my cousin ‘cause I didn’t understand it. I didn’t understand it ‘til he died. I used to mimic it. I tried to act like him a little bit cause I was inspired by him. But I never understood gangs. I didn’t know he was Broadway. I didn’t know he had enemies. I didn’t understand none of that shit. He used to have the pistol. He used to show me how to hold it and he let me carry it around one time so I thought I was cool. But I didn’t even think about gettin’ into it until the day he died at his funeral when I saw him laying in the casket like that. Moms told me the nigga got shot like fifteen times, well, really twenty-one if you count the buckshots. Yeah, they got that nigga. They did a drive by at my granny’s house. They pulled up and he got out. He was goin’ on sixteen and the day he died I saw all the homies, and that’s the day I learned how to throw up the hood. They all took pictures at my granny’s house. At the funeral is when I put it all together. I saw all those red rags and black rags and I really understood what it was. I didn’t see no blue rags. That’s when I started taggin’ and throwin’ up the hood whenever I got the chance. Any little piece of paper, I’d write his name on it and say Rest In Peace. All at school, that’s when I started gangbangin’. I sprayed the school up and I got in trouble for that. I was the only nigga from Broadway at the time and I went to school with paint all on my hands the next day. I didn’t even realize it. I went to jail for like five days for that, and I was young, like thirteen. You started selling dope about a year later, and your father was one of your best customers? How surreal of an experience was that? Honestly, it was nothin’, my nigga. Now that I understand what it was, it was crazy, but at the time it was nothin’, cause all his lil partners smoked and they was my main clientele. But it wasn’t just my pops. It was my aunties. A lot of my family smoked something. My grandma, who is Mexican, has 23 children and my grandfather has 47 kids. That’s 203 grandchildren. I was selling to all my aunties, my uncles, even weed. I was the little nigga. All my cousins that sold weed, I was selling it to them. But it was really that crack though. That crack had a nigga rollin’. But that’s when a nigga was young and stupid. When I got kicked out of school, for shootin’ ol’ boy, I had to go to jail for couple days. They tried to charge me with attempted [murder], but they didn’t have nothin’ on me so they had to let me go. It was the beginning of my sophomore year and they wouldn’t let me go to no other school in the district. So that’s when I dropped out of school and really started sellin’ crack. Six months later I got locked up on armed robbery and I was facing seven to twenty one for that. They dropped it down to three years and I got out when I was eighteen. The East/West beef inspired you to write while you were in jail and you admittedly adopted pieces of your delivery from Jay-Z. Being an emcee from the West, how did you allow yourself to be that open to the music when people from your block were choosing sides? I always had a hidden talent. My pops was in a band. He played like three or four instruments growing up. Music was always around like that, moms havin’ me in talent shows. The talent was always there. When I heard Jay he wasn’t even on like that. This was his first album. When I heard Jay, whatever was in me heard that this nigga was hot. To me he was the muthafuckin’ best rapper at the time. And look at where he’s at now. At the time before he was really hyped up and niggas was listenin’ to him on the West, I was. The only other East Coast nigga that had me back in those days when I was straight West Coast was Redman. But I was way more into Hov than I was Biggie. Me listening to him helped me change my swag a little bit – at that time. It was good for me at that time. It took me away from that straight West Coast, “mark ass nigga, trick ass ho, busta ass nigga” type shit. It made me realize there was more to music than killin’ niggas and shit. I’m sure that had a lot to do with how people perceived you as an artist once you got out. How soon after you were released did you record “Garbage Disposal”? When I got out of jail that’s when I was listening to Jay and I knew I was eatin’ niggas asses in Phoenix. I was killin’ niggas. But everybody used to be like, “Man, I think he tryna sound like Jay-Z” and that shit used to get me mad cause I never tried to mimic that nigga. But if you like Michael [Jordan], you’re naturally going to do shit like he do while you’re in a basketball game. At the time I was only eighteen years old and at that time that was my nigga. So niggas used to hate on me and I used to get mad. And I wasn’t feelin’ no-
body beats. So I used to go into the studios that was owned by other rappers and rap on they beats and kill the shit that they was doin’ and I never hopped on songs that they was doin’. I never hopped on songs with niggas. I was always secluded, cause I wasn’t feelin’ niggas’ shit. I had a little job so I used to spend my money on studio time and them niggas couldn’t stop me ‘cause I was spending my own money. But they would still give me a hard time. Every time I walked in the studio they used to hate on me. So I said, “Fuck these niggas. I’m about to diss all these niggas.” If they wanted to come kill me I was like, “Fuck it,” cause it wasn’t just about rap. It was deeper than that. The niggas I was dissin’ was street niggas, niggas that was snitchin’. I was about to just go in and try to create something big. So how did it all unfold? At the time I wasn’t trying to get my name out. I was just trying to get something off my chest. Everybody thought I pulled a 50 [Cent], but it wasn’t no 50. It was some real shit. I felt that way. Everybody that was sittin’ in my little car listening to my shit, everybody was on my dick and then they’d walk away hatin’. So I decided to make a diss track. I got to thinking about what I wanted to call it and knew that it had to be strong. I was like, “These punk ass, garbage ass...” and I was washing dishes at the time. I turned the disposal on and I’m like, “Aw, SHIT!” I put it all out in the streets and niggas was callin’ me, ‘cause they knew I was a threat. They called tryna squash shit and I ended up takin’ like at least like seven, eight names off the list. I was dissin’ niggas that was runnin’ studios. I was dissin’ radio stations. I went all in on everybody. I dissed everybody and at the end I gave a speech and I think that’s what did it. I was smart enough to give a shout out to the real niggas that I fucked with on the streets. I gave ‘em a shout out so all they could do is honor me in the streets. I wasn’t about to be stupid and diss all of Phoenix and just depend on my hood to be there for me when shit popped off. I was dissin’ killers. That was either going to make me or break me and after that I was a threat. Things kinda started to take off for you after that. What popped off between you and Hot Rod? He had dissed me. I’m not going to make Rod look bad. We cool now, but at the time, anybody who dissed me on some street shit, I was going to bring it to them on some real shit and I was listening closely. So Rod had called me a bitch and he didn’t know me. Everybody on the streets knew that he had set himself up and they was talkin’ about it real tough. He didn’t know who I was and he called me a bitch. I was locked up for three years. You call a nigga a bitch, it’s that business. But I was never going to diss a nobody. Everybody I was dissin’ back then had names and Rod didn’t have no name. He was an internet rapper. He wasn’t in the streets in Arizona so nobody knew who he was. He was a lil internet nigga. So I basically called the nigga and had a little conversation with him and was tryna put the boogeyman in him. We had a little talk and basically it was squashed cause he wasn’t that kind of a nigga. He was talkin’ greasy, but he wasn’t like that. But I told him it was a good diss track. It was the best shit I’d heard at the time and at that time I didn’t fuck with nobody. I kinda put him under my wing and he [eventually] told me that he had a G-Unit connect. So a couple weeks later he called me and we met up at the chicken wing spot. I basically told him, “Nigga, you ain’t from Arizona. You gon’ need real niggas behind you. If [50 Cent] asks you about your crew, tell him about your boy.” And he did it. And it really helped push me to want to have my own situation. Why did things never materialize for you at G Unit? 50 called me and told me he wanted me to fuck with Rod to be like Tony Yayo is to him, or even Lloyd Banks. He [told] me all this shit about how we were about to do it and he eventually sent for me. It took about a year, longer than I expected, but he finally flew me out. But I was always frustrated, ‘cause my career was based on Hot Rod blowin’; like I was supposed to be his Yayo or Lloyd Banks. And the state was lookin’ at it like, “You’z a real thorough nigga. How’d you get behind a nigga that they don’t really see like that?” See, cause if I got behind him then the whole AZ was going to have to get behind him. And they wasn’t fuckin’ with him like that at the time. My career was based on him blowing up so I left that situation alone cause it was kinda slowin’ me down. And then along came DTP? Well, I came back and found a manager. It was this girl Tiffany Johnson who I had been knowing for almost 20 years; a long time. She was working for Blue at Family Tree Entertainment. She never knew me as Willy Northpole. She’s from Phoenix also, but she lives in Atlanta. Everybody kept askin’ her who the fuck Willy Northpole was, and she came to find out it was Lil’ Bill Bill, the lil’ nigga she knew. She asked who managed me and I was like, “Nobody,” and it went from there. That’s how I got that DTP connect and ever since then it’s been that business. // Words by N. Ali Early // Photo by Eric Johnson OZONE WEST // 23