Rick Ross: Can’t Knock the Hustle [Full Story from October 2011 Issue]

“We need to get in there before they get to us."

Red, Rick Ross's Security Chief, a man with the shoulders of a linebacker, speaks as if the rapper's tour bus were being swarmed by flesh-starved zombies. It’s 3 a.m. on a Saturday night, and the enormous vehicle has pulled up behind Club Adrianna’s, a nightclub outside of Chicago.

This kind of place can be perilous for visiting rappers, a fact underscored by the 2006 shooting of T.I.’s friend Philant Johnson after a similar appearance in Cincinnati. As Ross and his entourage are shepherded through a back entrance by hulking club security personnel, people in the crowd shout “Rozay!” and mimic the rapper’s signature deep-bellied grunt.

By the time the convoy cleanses several rooms of locals and shoves through a mobbed mezzanine, the DJ has shifted into a set of Ross’s hits. Finally deposited in a private area, Ross is presented with bottles of Champagne and sparklers. The crowd crushes inward, looking for photo opportunities and handshakes. A sequoia-sized member of Ross’s crew stands sentinel, scanning the sea of faces for anyone whose expression is a little too excited or icy. Wearing a black nylon jacket and his ever-present sunglasses, Ross is at home in the swirl of chaos. At this moment, he is exactly what he has always wanted to be: a rap star who performs in front of thousands but still gets love in the hood.

Later on, back on the bus, after a frenzied extraction, the 35-year-old rapper launches into an animated, 30-minute paean to his own authenticity. “There was five different gangs in that room,” he says, grabbing a handrail as the bus curls through the Illinois darkness. “Crips. Folks. You don’t see these other tough-guy rappers there. Check their tour schedule. They don’t go to Detroit, to Chicago. That’s the difference.” The spiel includes talk of his murderous Miami mentor, meeting with Larry Hoover’s son and the foulness of snitches. He even threatens Kreayshawn, the fledgling Bay Area rapper who called Ross “fake” in a recent freestyle verse. “I can’t wait to slap the shit out of whoever carries her bags,” he says with a sneer. “And I hope it’s her nigga. Dirty bitch. You better know who the fuck you talking about. I’ll pay 50K to mess up your whole week.”

If the last year has proven anything, it’s that Rick Ross should not be concerned about his credibility. Despite a number of issues that could have doomed an inferior artist—the discovery that he worked as a correctional officer in Florida’s Dade County, an embarrassing ex-girlfriend who pranced around New York City with his rival 50 Cent, a lingering perception that his persona as a cocaine baron was overblown—he has risen to greater stardom than ever before. His last album, 2010’s Teflon Don, was critically lauded and spawned monster hits like “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)” and “Aston Martin Music.” Ashes to Ashes, a follow-up mixtape, yielded more of the same with “John Doe” and “9 Piece.” He made high-profile cameos on tracks with Drake, Kanye West and Lil Wayne. He assembled a divergent group of artists for his Maybach Music Group label and, in May, elevated their stature with the compilation album MMG Presents: Self Made, Vol. 1. Squabbles with other rappers (Kreayshawn notwithstanding) and questions about his past are old news. With his fifth album, God Forgives, I Don’t, scheduled to come out this fall, Ross has his pudgy toes on the precipice of greatness.

“I’m enjoying my last few moments at No. 2,” Ross says, sitting on the bed in the back of his tour bus. “It’s like I’m watching the No. 1 man on stage, my legs crossed, I’m smoking big, hollering at the bitches in the crowd. And this album gonna do it. I got the formula.” His sunglasses are off, and his eyes are heavily lidded but alive. “Everybody on my dick,” he says, “like they supposed to be.”

The First Midwest Bank Amphitheatre, a concert venue about 30 minutes outside of Chicago, has towering support pillars and an ugly roof, which provide all the ambiance of a freeway overpass. After an afternoon of rain and hail, skies clear up in time for performances from Ross, Lil Wayne, Keri Hilson and Far East Movement. The sprawling crowd is a snapshot of the rap audience in 2011: kids with braids throwing up gang signs, frat bros in Hollister shirts, groupies in shrink-wrapped dresses and teenyboppers wearing hoodies emblazoned with “Love Pink.” And there is Ross, leading this weird congregation in chants of “I think I’m Big Meech.” He bounces along the catwalk, hunched down, his chin tucked into his chest. It looks a bit like a turtle trying to get off of a hot plate. “Took me 10 years to stand right here,” he announces to acknowledging applause. As Ross polishes off a set that includes hits like “Hustlin’?” and “I’m on One,” steam rises from his bald, sweat-sheened head. Walking backstage, he yanks off his shirt.

For a man of significant huskiness, Ross is not bashful. Whether performing, during photo shoots or in the privacy of his trailer, he strips off his tent-sized tees with the casual exhibitionism of a sunbathing Frenchwoman. The folds of his upper body are a maze of tattoos—he says he has more than 100. Abraham Lincoln and George Washington are inked on his chest. The Statue of Liberty and Richard Pryor on his abdomen. On his right thigh is a portrait of Jean-Michel Basquiat, the New York City painter, who died in 1988 of a heroin overdose. Basquiat, who did the cover art for Rammellzee and K-Rob’s “Beat Bop” in 1983, has become a popular name-drop among rap’s aspiring art appreciators; Jay-Z, Nas and Swizz Beatz have all made their admiration known. Ross doesn’t say much about Basquiat’s actual work, but he is enamored of his storied rise from homeless obscurity to the top of the art world. “I connected to that totally,” Ross says. “Just chasing his dream. It wasn’t about how much knowledge he had or who he knew. It was just his talent. And that’s what it was with me.”

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Born William Leonard Roberts II in Mississippi, Ross was raised in Carol City, Florida, an area afflicted by grim poverty. Ross and his sister grew up living with their mother, who worked multiple jobs, the most prestigious being a nurse. Ross wandered into trouble as a kid, getting into the habit of breaking into houses, and paid a harsh price when people robbed his family’s home and torched it in retaliation. It was an awful truth to conceal. He, his mother and his sister were forced to move into a single motel room. When asked how long they stayed in those suffocating quarters, he exhales loudly.

“It was a good little minute,” he says, staring into space. “Fuck. That shit was the worst.”

Hip-hop offered an escape from such desperate surroundings. As a kid, Ross wrote lyrics and listened to rap, ranging from A Tribe Called Quest to Tela to Raekwon, on his knockoff Sony Sport Walkman. In music videos were glimpses of places that occasionally resembled what he witnessed from his own window. “When I saw Eric B. and Rakim walking through the grimy-ass streets of New York, it was like, Damn, that’s the kind of shit I live in,” he says. “I used to love Ice Cube when I saw them niggas driving jeep Isuzus through the ghetto with curly perms. I felt they struggle. Those were the niggas I looked up to. For me to idolize you, you had to first start with nothing. You had to live in the conditions we were living in—that way it was fair grounds.” There were also promises of a better life. “Muthafuckas where I came from were always mean, mad, upset, crazy, hair nappy, dreads and shit,” he says. “Me listening to The Great Adventures of Slick Rick, seeing muthafuckas in good moods, telling stories—I was blowed away. I remember Cool C and the Hilltop Hustlers.

I remember them niggas wearing Bally’s and silk suits, [thinking,] Damn, that’s how I wanted to dress right there.”

Most rap listeners were introduced to Ross when his anthemic 2006 single “Hustlin’?” broke nationally, but the title of the track applies as much to his rap career as it does to distributing cocaine with “the real Noriega.” In an era when a teenager with skinny jeans can post up a video on Tumblr and rack up a million YouTube views in a week, Ross is a member of an older caste that plowed barren dirt for years without seeing much in return. He boasts of being rich without rap, but his résumé reflects someone deeply dedicated to finding a toehold in the hip-hop game. In 2000, he signed with Tony Draper’s Suave House label, a deal he now calls “the most fucked-up record deal in the history of the music business”; his debut album, Rise to Power, was put on hold. Later, Ross linked up with Jazze Pha and recorded in peripheral studio spaces while artists like T.I. and 8Ball & MJG worked in the main rooms. He signed with Slip-N-Slide in 2002 and ghostwrote lyrics for Trina. It was a frustrating time. “It took me longer than a lot of muthafuckas,” says Ross. “I was running around the industry, writing songs here and there for different muthafuckas who heard I was lyrical, but coming from a space where they ain’t really know what to do with me in Miami.” Once, when Ross learned reps from Atlantic Records were in town, he was confident his time had come. “Yo, they signed Pretty Ricky,” he says, shaking his head. “What the fuck? Okay, I wish y’all little niggas much success, but I’m finna show these muthafuckas. I’ma punish the game. That was my inspiration.”

When Rick Ross finally got his chance, he didn’t squander it. Led by the singles “Hustlin’?” and “Push It,” his 2006 debut album, Port of Miami, sold almost one million copies and established him as a leading figure in the burgeoning coke-rap genre. His second album, 2008’s Trilla, sold another 750,000-plus units and yielded a single with T-Pain, “The Boss,” that still stands as his biggest mainstream hit. Amid a scandal touched off by photos that proved he had worked as a correctional officer, and a flurry of taunts from 50 Cent, the following year’s Deeper Than Rap fared less well. But it was his most artistically adept album up to that point, earning some strong reviews, and was, in retrospect, an indication of what was to come.

The elevation of Ross’s stature during the last year can be attributed to the most simple of reasons: He has been making thrilling music. Some recent hits from Teflon Don—like “I’m Not a Star” or “MC Hammer”—are insistent bundles of ricocheting snares, nasty synths and declarative hooks. These records are punctuated with grunts and hoots, ad-libs that have become key components of the Rozay aesthetic. In July, Atlanta’s Yung Joc even dropped “Ugh,” a song built around Ross’s sonic calling card. “I been to performances, and they want those more than the lyrics,” Ross says. “They want that ‘Hunngh!’?”

But other records convey a lushly layered, almost orchestral musicality. There is depth—emotional and sonic—to Teflon Don that Ross had only hinted at on his earlier albums. He has improved at songwriting and constructing cohesive albums, while branding Maybach Music’s sound as simultaneously aggressive and soulful.

FOR MORE RICK ROSS, GO TO PAGE 3

Regarded by the cognoscenti as a one-trick pony for much of his career, Ross has finally begun receiving critical acclaim. One New York Times critic ranked Teflon Don as the best album of 2010. Pitchfork.com, the notoriously picky music site, gave it an excellent 8.0/10 and wrote, “Sometimes a guy who was underrated, underappreciated and even considered a joke…generates so much momentum they eventually become undeniable.” On God Forgives, I Don’t, Ross is planning to duplicate the feat. It will be another short, “highly concentrated” album, he says, reminiscent of his last effort. “When I make music, I go back to my late nights of me by myself, listening to Curtis Mayfield or R. Kelly’s 12 Play. There’s certain depths that music can take you to. There’s certain feels that you need to have. When you get to the last song on the album, I want you to have that feeling of being whole. I want to give these muthafuckas classic joints. That means more to me than anything else.”

For all of Ross’s omnipresence on the streets, clubs and urban radio over the last year, it hasn’t translated into monumental sales or commercial radio play. Teflon Don has sold a little over 650,000 copies, a solid but less-than-blockbusting number. “Aston Martin Music” and “B.M.F. (Blowin’ Money Fast)” topped out at 50th and 60th, respectively, on the Billboard Hot 100 chart. The wave of cocaine-centric rappers who emerged in the mid-2000s—a class that included Ross, Jeezy, Gucci Mane and Clipse—subsided, and a gentler, more whimsical group, led by Drake, Nicki Minaj, Wiz Khalifa, Big Sean and Kid Cudi, flooded in. From a commercial standpoint, have gangsta rappers become dinosaurs? “Most definitely times have changed,” Ross says. “But that increases my value for what I do right now. Because the streets will never change. No matter what the climate in the music industry, muthafuckas still in the struggle, for real, that’s tapped into that. If everybody in the mainstream ain’t catch on, they’ll catch the next one.”

Members of Ross’s crew—his manager, his DJ, his videographers, his security—call him “The Bawse,” or simply “Bawse.” It is a title taken literally. After the Chicago concert, some of these young men lounge in the front of his tour bus, flipping between a preseason NFL game and Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome. Word is sent from the back that The Bawse has a hankering for Popeyes. Again. There is some grumbling, but everyone respects the hierarchy. “Let’s not be selfish; it’s for The Bawse,” says DJ Sam Sneak, a skinny dude with Foamposites, a Fendi belt and two vicious scars raking down his left cheek. “Make it happen.”

Soon the bus is freighted with enough deep-fried poultry to feed a small battalion.

Ross’s sphere of influence has grown to include the Maybach Music Group stable of artists—a collective that, like Young Money or G.O.O.D. Music, has little loyalty to any specific philosophy, sound or geographical region. Wale is from D.C.’s street-wear and go-go scene. Meek Mill is a classic blood-and-guts Philly spitter. Pill is an Atlanta rapper who merges social commentary with street narratives. Stalley is an everyman from Ohio. “We have different styles and come from different parts of the U.S., but we tell the same story,” Stalley says. “We were self-made artists who did what we had to do to get our music heard.” He believes Ross is headed for historical heights. “He’s on his way to being Kanye, Jay-Z status,” he says. “To be involved with that is a beautiful thing.”
Ross describes “spirit” and “energy” as the character attributes he values most in members of his camp. “To me, it don’t matter where you from,” he says. “I come from a time and place when Miami wasn’t the most poppin’. Everybody wasn’t as eager to open they door, give you a hand. For me to be in this position, I want to make sure I do the opposite that a lot of these niggas did.”
According to Forbes’s list of hip-hop’s top earners, Ross made $6 million over the past year. This pales in comparison to Jay-Z ($37 million) or Diddy ($35 million), but it clearly allows for a comfortable lifestyle. Ross says he smokes an ounce of weed daily. He is on his fifth Rolls-Royce and recently bought a yacht. The dressing room on his bus is strewn with luxury items from Louis Vuitton and Gucci. A cache of jewelry—two Jesus pieces, a diamond-covered Audemars Piguet watch, a pinky ring, colored beads—is laid out on the bedspread next to him.

“I’m stacking my money, but there is a side of me that love to fuck up money,” Ross says of his lavish spending. “I could spend $100,000 in one day, just ballin’. If I’m fuckin’ with a chick, I want this chick to know all them niggas is losers compared to me, baby. You gonna eat good with me. I’m gonna put you up on these $10,000 Birkin bags.”

This is not enough. “I want to do that,” Ross says, pointing up at the TV screen. It’s a scene from Blow, a film about a cocaine kingpin, where Johnny Depp is rolling on the floor in heaps of dollar bills. “Wait ’til we buy a piece of the Miami Dolphins,” Ross says. “Sitting in the box with the majority owners, smoking cigars. They’ll say, ‘He’s smart.’?” He snorts. “You just slow.” Beneath the TV are DVD cases for Pretty Woman and Exit Through the Gift Shop, a movie about a street-art documentarian who fools the public into thinking he himself is the authentic article. There are a dwindling number of critics still grumbling that Ross has pulled off a similar caper, but everyone else just wants that “Hunngh!”

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