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Southern-Fried Rapper Moufs Off
12/19/2001 5:00 AM, Yahoo! Music
Dan Leroy
His freaky rhymes about ho's and pros put the "dirt" in the Dirty South on his hit debut last year. But while Ludacris is officially pretty new to the rap game, he's been rhyming about the ladies for a long time. Of course, his first efforts were a little more sedate than Southern-fried sex talk that's become his trademark.
"I made my first complete song when I was 9," Ludacris recalls in his deep drawl. "It was like, 'I'm cool, I'm bad, I might be 10/But I can't survive without my girlfriend.' And I wanted to say 'girlfriend, so I had to say I was 10, even though I was 9."
Now he's 25, and back to get his freak on again with Word Of Mouf. Filled with club-friendly comedy and X-rated fantasies, it picks up where Back For The First Time left off. But while the pressure to match that album's triple-platinum success is immense, Ludacris claims he's not feeling it yet. is pressure, because I gotta try to stay where I'm at and continue to grow. But I feel like I'm over one really, really big-ass hump just by gettin' that first album out there and gettin' established. Because now people are gonna listen to what the hell I'm sayin'."
On Word Of Mouf, producers like Timbaland, Organized Noize, and old friend Shondrae, plus guest stars like Mystikal and Nate Dogg, help Ludacris get his message across. And he shows he's freaky as ever on tunes like the hit "Area Codes," with its boasts about having a pro in every city and state, and the sultry party jam "Wait, Wait." However, he also goes deeper on tracks like "Hard Times" and "Cold Outside," revealing his determination to be a success and make his family proud. "I'm just basically spillin' out my emotions to the world," he says. "'Cause rap is about emotion. And I want you to feel what I'm feelin', 'cause that's what it's all about."
His determination to be a rapper led him to Atlanta's 97.5 FM, where he served as an intern with the goal of breaking into the hip-hop world. "First thing I did when I got up there was made all kinda drops, promos, intros, and outros for all the DJs that was on the air. And it really gave me a lotta exposure--people started hearin' me."
Some of those folks included heavy-hitters like Jermaine Dupri and P. Diddy. And after Ludacris's self-released debut, Incognegro, sold 50,000 copies, Def Jam also took note last year and made him the first signing to the Def Jam South label.
Now you can check Ludacris out at the theaters, as well: He's got a memorably profane cameo in the new Dr. Dre/Snoop Dogg comedy The Wash. But his most memorable experience in front of a camera lately came when he got O.J. Simpson to appear in the video for the song "Fatty Girl." Simpson's daughter does styling for video shoots, and the infamous former football star was on hand for the filming in Miami. "I went up to him, and I got this necklace with handcuffs on it. And the first thing he did was said, 'Man, I know all about those!' I couldn't believe that sh-t, man! Swear to God," remembers Ludacris, laughing.
"So I was like, he's so open right now, I went up to the director, Hype Williams, and said, 'Man, we gotta get this n-gga in this video somewhere, for real!' Everybody was scared to ask him. And I was like, 'Why y'all scared to ask this man to get in the video?' So he was like, 'Hell yeah, let's do it.' It's a ridiculous video."
Also ridiculous, Ludacris says, is the idea that his sex-heavy rhymes mean he's trying to dog the ladies. In fact, just to show he's an equal-opportunity kind of guy, he promises a tune called "Hoesband" on his next album. "Because husbands are hoes, y'know."
So female fans, take note. "I'll redeem myself," he says with a chuckle, "if they're thinkin' I'm trippin'."
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