according to tvt records’
PITBULL, there’s only one thing separating the rap game from the drug game: one is a legal hustle; the other isn’t.
photos & interview julia beverly
“W
ake up, muthafucker!” Pitbull barks into his cell phone. “What, you think money grows on trees?” It’s barely 8 am, but the Miami sun is already beating down overhead. Pit shakes his head in mock exasperation. “Dawg, you need to get up.” If there’s one thing Pit can’t tolerate, it’s laziness. According to him, his hustler’s mentality comes from his father. After years of pushing his own product on the streets - first drugs, then music - his hustle is finally starting to pay off. His debut album, M.I.A.M.I. (Money Is A Major Issue), is scheduled for an August 23rd release on TVT Records. There are a million and one rappers claiming they move keys, stash bricks, and stack chips, but Pit sets himself apart from the masses by rhyming about the full spectrum of the drug game and how it relates to the music industry. It seems like a requirement for rappers to be former crack dealers. I’ll give you my personal experience with crack. I sold crack for probably two days, and that’s it. That’s all it took for me to learn. It’s like this: anything that has to do with crack, coke, heroin, is a fucked-up game. I’ll tell you why. I bought myself some yay. I gave it to my dawg that lived on the same floor as me. “Oh, I got you. I’ll teach you how to cook this up.” Cool. He took it. This is how bad crack does people, though. See, I’m lookin’ out for this dude. Lettin’ him eat, whatever. At the same time, he’s supposed to be lookin’ out for me, teaching me how to do the shit. Now, first of all, it’s the worst muthafuckin’ smell when you cookin’ that shit up, right? Number two, he took it and whupped me for my own shit. Since I was a newcomer, like 17, he knew that the stuff that was left at the bottom, he could take it and whip it and make almost a whole ‘nother cookie off the shit. So I’m basically letting this nigga get down on my operation, but since he knew I’m a rookie, he whupped me for my shit. So that’s one strike already, that’s letting me know that I don’t need to be in this game. You already see that people you think you can trust are whuppin’ you from the jump. So I told him to hold the stash for me so my mother wouldn’t see me with the shit. My mother ain’t no dummy, she knows what time it is. She caught me with all types of shit. She threw me out the house like three days later. She ain’t even find no crack or coke, she just found the baggie. She knew that I sold weed, she ain’t care about weed. Weed, to her, should be legalized. She knew I sold weed and she
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OZONE MAGAZINE JUNE 2004
done caught me selling acid before, too. She took that shit and flushed it. So she already knew that I’m always doing some shit, but I was trying to be smart about it. So I go back and tell him, “Yo, dawg, let me get that stash.” I already had people ready to buy. I lived in South Miami Heights at the time, and I was peepin’ game. You had three buildings: A, B, and C. I lived in building C, and A was making a killing. So this guy gives me back like a quarter of what he was really supposed to give me. But me being a rookie, I really didn’t know that shit. Later on, I put the puzzle together. I was like, “Yo, dawg, this shit should be coming back more.” I knew it was some raw shit. So he told me his nephew flushed the rest down the toilet. Oh really? Mind you, this nigga lives on the same floor as me, so I really can’t do no crazy shit ‘cause we know each other. So I come to find out that this muthafucker smoked my shit. I didn’t know he smoked. He was on the low with the shit! So that was strike two: he smoked that shit. Strike three; four o’clock in the morning, these muthafuckers are knocking on my door like, “Yo, we need some shit.” My mother was like, “Who the fuck is that?” So that was it for me. I don’t need to be dealing with this. Fuck this bullshit. Then I seen everybody getting locked up and Jump Out coming around getting everybody. Describe the typical buyer; is it someone that’s obviously a drug addict, or people that you would never guess? Oh yeah! You’ve got both. You’ve got muthafuckers that you would never think. But there’s just a certain point where you can just tell. If a person is close to you, there’s warning signs. One: lose weight. Two: lose job. Three: lose personality. Basically lose everything. They look a little dead, you know? But they had people lined up. Everybody. It was so bad, they had grandfathers coming through on bikes that had no wheels, just rims. I didn’t see no pregnant women, thank God. That shit woulda really fucked me up. I seen heroin addicts, too. They’re really fucked up. Always scratchin’ themselves and shit. And crackheads, in Miami when you smoke crack and weed they call ‘em “ginks.” If you smoke crack you start talking all this shit and you think you fuckin’ rule the world. You’ve got a solution to everything. They really don’t know what they’re talking about and they’re just looking for that extra shit. They’ll suck dick, they’ll rob, they’ll do whatever for a hit. They’ll go behind your back and do some shit; that’s one reason rap is like the crack game.