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By the age of 17, Wayne was confident. He knew, 'This is what I am. I'm an MC.' You had Missy Elliott saying she loved Lil Wayne. Lyrically, he was getting better and better.
The name Hot Boys was based on a time in New Orleans where if you were really doing something or if the police were looking for you, people would be like, 'He hot. That boy hot.'
I remember that my dad worked on cars from the '70s and '80s, and that's where my love came from: appreciating - even if it was a piece of crap - how much he loved American muscle.
Don't just sit around and wait for it to happen. 'Get Your Roll On.' If you're going to buy some rims, graduate from college, or whatever, get your roll on and make something shake.
I've had some bad business lessons and learned some things. It's not always about going platinum. So long as I know who is buying my records and I generate revenue that's mine, then it's cool.
The reason that I like 'Game of Thrones' is because it's based on all these royal families. And it's cutthroat - just like hip-hop. It's all about positioning and figuring out who's going to last.
Cash Money really had no intentions of being a rap label because when it started, it really was based on bounce. It was one bounce song after another. I started to doing bounce songs for them, and they jumped off.
I did albums for Cash Money. I didn't do singles - I did whole albums for Cash Money - and at the end of the day, I'm saying I wasn't paid for albums, so its like you're doing 10 songs, and somebody pays you for 1.
A lot of artists are scared when they see trumpet players show up - they like, 'Nah, that ain't what I want.' I try to tell them, 'Dude, I'll give you trademark Mannie Fresh, but it's not about keyboards and a drum machine.'
I'm really working hard at regaining Mannie Fresh as a household name. But for me, it's always been the long road. What the long road means is if I gotta go city to city, town to town or whatever it is, that's what I gotta do.
That's what I'm tryin' to achieve. I want to be a heavyweight in this game, and I'm tryin' to get the big money. By the same token, the title 'Big Money Heavyweight' applies to everybody in the world. That's what everybody's tryin' to achieve.
With Hurricane Katrina and all that kind of stuff happening, you needed somebody to rally for your city, to tell that story. Since Hurricane Katrina, we didn't really have nobody that said, 'I'm gonna tell New Orleans' story, and I'm gonna stick to New Orleans.'
To have Run-DMC acknowledge you, something like that, you're like, 'Oh, I'm that dude.' To have Jay-Z do a verse, you that dude. To have Jay-Z shout you out in an intro, you're that dude. Like, it doesn't get any greater than that. Nobody can take that from you.
With Dr. Dre, he's a perfectionist. A lot of people ask why 'Detox' is taking so long. It's because Dre is somebody that is trying to top what he's done. Will he do it? I don't know if he ever will, but I respect that he's trying to do so. You have to wait for a masterpiece.
You had Cash Money: that was just the flashy dudes. Like I said, you had different genres of rap, and we were just one of them. So that's how we fit in. What makes it all confusing - and this is where it's the gift and the curse - we never set out for hip-hop to turn into just something flashy. That was just our thing. It wasn't everybody's thing.