She Liked my NECKLACE and started relaxin’, that’s what the fuck I call a…
YO GOTTI
YO! MTV RAPS TRIBUTE
Y
O! MTV Raps was probably one of the first shows that I had seen with rap videos on it back in the day. I saw somebody who had a shirt with the [YO! MTV Raps] logo on it but it had my name, Yo Gotti. I saw the shirt about a year ago so when I decided to get a new chain, that’s the design I decided to use. I always wanted to get a chain that’s unique. I don’t remember the exact videos on YO! MTV Raps that were my favorite, but all the [old school] rappers were on there. It wasn’t one video in particular; I was into the whole Hip Hop thing back then. They’d have Kool Mo Dee and them on the show. I never knew what area they were from back then. When I was lookin’ at it, it wasn’t even broken down to [West or East] Coast or [down] South. They were all just artists to me.
22 // OZONE MAG
Emmett [the jeweler] in Houston did the piece for me. Emmett’s good. He does a lot of people’s shit. I paid about $25,000 just for the piece and the chain was another $2,000. I bought a watch and a ring and all that with it, so he gave me one price for everything. A white watch and a white ring. You can tell if a chain is real or not. For one, if you see three or four people with [the same design] it’s probably not [real]; that’s what I call a “stock chain” because [the jeweler] has already made them up. With certain people’s chains, you can see the work that goes into them. That’s not saying that it still couldn’t be fake, but why would they put that much work into a fake piece? It takes a lot of work to do the detailing on [some chains]. // Words by Julia Beverly Photo by Terrence Tyson