Young Buck Finally Gets A Solo Shot At Rap Fame In August 2004 Issue

After years spent putting in work behind stars like Juvenile and 50 Cent, G-Unit’s mouth of the South finally gets a solo shot at rap success. It’s Young Buck time. Let him shine.

Words: Vanessa Satten
Images: Michael Schreiber

It’s a humid Los Angeles day in June 2001. The kind of day where sweat drips uncomfortably down your back and your clothes stick to your skin. As the video crew scurries around the set of Juvenile’s “Set It Off” shoot, the newest signee of the New Orleans rapper’s fledgling UTP Records hides from the scorching sun under a large white tent. Quiet and reserved, 20-year-old Young Buck is a spectator, patiently waiting until he’s needed. “I wouldn’t mind having a couple of platinum albums under my belt one day,” says the shy aspiring rap star in his heavy Southern drawl. He leans back in a folding chair, in a weed-induced haze. His slit eyes dart back and forth between the sights on set and the tape recorder gripped tightly in his right hand. “I want whoever I am with at the time to be successful, so we can enjoy it together. So I can share it and have fun with it. With everybody having the same, everybody doing it, not just one person.”

Fast-forward to June 2004, an LA evening almost three years to the day from when Buck sat back and watched Juvie film his video. Things have changed for the Nashville rapper. No longer a benchwarmer on an underdeveloped label, he’s now a main focus of 50 Cent’s mighty, Interscope-funded G-Unit Records.

Having just finished a photo shoot that’ll put him and fellow G-Unit soldier Lloyd Banks on the cover of XXL, the crew’s Southern rep is in the parking lot of Smashbox Studios, winding down under the fading Culver City sky. As music blares from a parked van filled with security and crew, Buck does a little two-step—a blunt in one hand, thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of jewelry swinging from his neck.

“106, baby!” Buck shouts. “My song’s requested on Power 106 already, and I just gave it to radio!” He’s talking about “Let Me In,” the first single off his solo debut, Straight Outta Ca$hville. Since being plucked out of semi-obscurity 18 months ago by rap’s current King of New York, Buck has made a name for himself through his dark, menacing street rhymes and a vicious Tennessee twang. With the Dirty Dirty hot right now and G-Unit even hotter, the new mouth of the South is primed and ready to take the rap world by storm.

But his rims weren’t always spinning like that diamond encrusted G-Unit piece he wears so faithfully. Letdowns and disappointments have been aplenty for a dude who spent the better part of a decade trying to trade the hustle game for rap fame.

“My story is a story of paying dues, for real,” Buck says, steering his black Escalade down a Nashville road on a late night this past March. He passes the house at 1713 Seifried Street, where he spent most of his childhood. He drives through Tiffany’s Car Wash, the spot where, at age 13, he sold his first crack rock. There are the James Casey Homes (a.k.a. South 8), where his mother moved the family after losing her job as a social worker.

“We had no money and my father was never really around,” says Buck, who was born David Brown, March 15, 1981. “It was me and my little sister, and my mom had custody of her sister’s kids ’cause her sister was a crack fiend—in and out the penitentiary. There wasn’t no fuckin’ income, and I was too young to try to be the man of the house. But I stepped my game up quick. I felt like, Let me make some money and get out the way, so my mama could do for all these other kids in the house.

“We started moving so much in the streets I felt like I couldn’t be at my mama’s house and jeopardize her or myself,” says Buck, who moved into an apartment with his partners when he was 14. “We was getting money so quick that if you spent a day or two at your mom’s, that might cost you 10 dope fiends. It was all about the hustle.”

Such grim realities were everyday fare for Buck. And he doesn’t flinch when he says that his own father, a longtime addict, was one of his first customers. “I knew he was gonna get drugs somewhere,” he says. “So I was like, Fuck it, I’ll sell it to him, I’d rather get his money than have someone else get it. I don’t look at it like I was feeding into his problem, because by the time I was selling to him he was a fiend already.

“I was corrupted, you could say, by then. My mama’s my heart and the strongest thing I’ve ever seen. But she couldn’t teach me how to be a man.She seen that I was fuckin’ whylin’ and realized, ‘I’ma let this nigga go learn his own way. Pray to God that nothing happens to him.’”

In the mid-’90s, local rap scenes were starting to bubble throughout the Dirty South. Buck had played around with rhyming in the school cafeteria and knew he had a knack for it. An older kid from the neighborhood named Boogie signed with Relativity Records, and he taught Buck what bars were and how to build a song. “I didn’t know anything except that I liked to rap, to express myself and see the response,” says Buck of what was then just a hobby. “Boogie let me go into the studio and record a project called No Face No Case. That was the first time I heard myself recorded and I knew I was into it. From then when we was hustlin’, rap was always a part of me. I was always somehow trying to make it happen.”

No Face No Case never panned out, but by 1996 Buck and his boys were moving enough dope to support lifestyles worthy of rap stars. On the days they chose to go to school, they’d pull into the parking lot with Cadillacs and drop-top Lexuses.

One night in ’97, a friend called Buck to the studio to meet up with the principals of Cash Money Records, a New Orleans label which had some regional success with an artist named B.G. and the album Chopper City. Company co-owner Bryan “Baby” Williams took an instant liking to Buck and invited him along to join the crew on the road. “I dropped out of school and we left,” Buck says matter-of-factly. “From 15 on up to 18, we went back and forth from New Orleans, paying for everything ourselves, hoping we’d start rapping. Hoping to get a deal with them and get presented to the world.”

Buck was never offered a proper deal, though, and soon learned he wasn’t a high priority at the label. Cash Money was concentrating on the Hot Boys (B.G., Juvenile, Turk and Lil Wayne)—N.O. artists Baby signed before ever meeting Buck. In 1998, after moving major units independently, Cash Money landed a $30-million deal with Universal Records. Over the next year, as Juvenile’s album 400 Degreez blew into a quadruple-platinum smash, and the Hot Boys became nationwide stars, Buck was pushed further and further from the spotlight. After three years of traveling with Baby and co., and thousands of dollars spent on flights, hotel rooms and food, Buck and his friends knew it was time for a transition. “We’d spent so much working with those guys, we could’ve built our own studio,” Buck says angrily. “We saw how much money we had run through, and how much they were making. We knew it was time to go, no matter how much our hearts were invested... I left right at 400 Degreez, because all the cars that you see in Juvenile’s [“Ha”] video—from the yellow Ferrari to the blue Jaguar that they laying on and sitting on—do belong to us. We drove our cars to they video to show love and put our cars in they video... We looked at them niggas as family. I don’t know why it happened that way, but it switched over from being that to being nothing. After all that money and time, it was back to square one. I wasn’t sure what to do next.”

Buck took his crew back to Nashville, where he soon connected with a couple of local homeboys who were trying to get a new label, Totally Independent Productions, off the ground. In August 1999, T.I.P. hooked up a distribution deal through Houston’s Southwest Wholesale Records and Tapes, and dropped Riders, the debut album from South Carolina duo First Born. Before Buck, who was featured on a couple of Riders tracks, could release any music of his own, though, the T.I.P. principles ran afoul of the law, and the label’s short run was a wrap.

While his rap aspirations were continually thwarted, Buck was always able to make money selling drugs. On an early morning in April 2000, though, a mysterious gunman broke into the apartment he shared with partner Dante “D-Tay” Reed and sprayed the place with over 30 rounds. Buck took a bullet in the arm and one in the leg, and by the time his friends got him to the hospital, he’d lost so much blood he needed a transfusion.

He healed quickly, but his priorities were changed for good. “I got back on the battlefield,” he says. “That’s how you do it here. If you get
shot and can still move your toes and fingers, everything’s straight. But my attitude now was like, Fuck the streets. I got to focus on this rap shit hard. I’m 19 years old. This is all I got.”

Within a few months of the shooting, Buck and D-Tay signed with local label Next Level Records and released an album, Thuggin’ Til’ The End, that sold a meager 4,000 copies. Come early 2001, Buck found himself at a crossroads—unhappy with business dealings at Next Level, but less than eager to return to hustling. Then one day, out of the blue, Baby called, talking about a new group he was putting together: The Headbustas. He wanted Buck to be one.

“They’d had success,” says Buck of Cash Money, “and I’d done hit so many bad licks, I was willing to give it another shot.” Baby flew him to New Orleans, where he sat in company offices for four days without seeing a familiar face. Disappointed, Buck was once again ready to head home empty-handed when Juvenile pulled up to the office in a gray Rolls-Royce on 22s. Cash Money’s biggest star explained that, while things might look good on the surface, his relationship with label brass had soured. He was trying to get his own company up and running—UTP Records (named for New Orleans’ Uptown Projects).

Juvie brought Buck to his studio to meet the UTP artists. “It was the environment I was looking for,” Buck says of his first impressions. “It was love. Nobody had nothing, but still it seemed like everybody was on a positive note. So I decided to go ahead and run with Juvie.” For the next year or so, Buck stayed on the grind with Juvenile and UTP, crisscrossing the country performing shows and laying tape in their portable recording studio. One day, while the crew was in NYC for business meetings, their bus driver told the guys he could hook them up with alocal rapper who had been creating a big buzz on the streets with a series of self-made mixtapes. “I had already been listening to 50,” says Buck. “And I was a fan, so we told him to make it happen. Next thing you know, 50, Banks and Yayo ended up coming to our bus studio… We all just sat on that bus and played music we’d made and also freestyled together.

“I was feeling 50’s struggle the same way as I felt my own,” says Buck. “Without knowing his the full way I know it now, I thought that this nigga gotta be real if he’s poppin’ the shit he does, ’cause where I’m from, you don’t say certain shit like he says.”

Buck and 50 decided to stay in touch. 50 promised that if things worked out the way he’d planned, the two of them would work together in the future. Two months later, having signed a million-dollar deal with Eminem and Dr. Dre, 50 lived up to his word. “He called and said, ‘You know your joint “Blood Hound” that you and Juvie played me?’” Buck laughs at the memory. “‘I want that record for my album.’ That was hard for me. I’m like, ‘This muthafucka just signed with Eminem and Dr. Dre and they are overseeing his project. I know this nigga ain’t accepting Buck.’ It wasn’t low self-esteem, it’s just that I was used to being in situations that fell apart, and it was taking a toll on me. So it was hard for me to believe that 50 really wanted the song. After he took the record he came back and added his verses and was like, ‘Nigga, I told you I was coming to fuck with you.’”

“When I got on that bus that night, I thought Buck was the most talented out of that whole pack,” 50 says. “He stood out to me. I told him that if everything came together for me, I would work with him more. I believed in him. It wasn’t just that he was Southern, it was that he was someone I came across who stood out over everyone else.”

Meanwhile, things were not working out the way Juvie’d planned. Financially, he was not in a place to push a new artist, and legally, he was still entangled in Cash Money contracts. “The nigga told me, ‘If you ever run into the opportunity, take it,’” says Buck. “Once a muthafucka is telling me something like that, it’s as if he’s saying, ‘This shit is kinda like not really working.’ So it freed up a lot of feelings I had, of where do I go. I just seen an opportunity and felt like it was the best move for me. The muthafucka who is presenting you to the game is the backbone of the whole situation.”

“There’s always gonna be love for Buck,” says Juvenile, who appears in his old running mate’s “Let Me In” video. “Because I feel like I put a lot of time in the boy. Niggas ask me, ‘Man, is Buck real?’ ’Cause niggas is really listening to Buck now, and they wanna know. I’m like, ‘Man, Buck’s a G and he got that fire.’ I done did everything I could for my camp, for Buck, for everybody. I done put Cartiers on everybody’s arm and I ain’t fucking had it. I did everything I could to help my camp including Buck.”

Still, Buck obviously made the right decision. Juvie recently signed UTP to a deal with James Prince’s Rap-A-Lot Records, and the first official UTP album, The Beginning Of The End..., came out in May (having sold 16,000 copies as XXL went to press). But Get Rich Or Die Tryin’ sold a record-breaking 872,000 copies its first five days out, and has since gone sextuple-platinum. Buck joined 50 on the road in late 2002 and fell right into step with the G-Unit family—riding, recording, responding to rivals. “We had a lot of things in common,” Buck says of his early relationship with his boss.
“And we were thrown into situations at the same time. In thebeginning, it was beef with 50 and that little dude [Ja Rule], so the musical beef falls amongst everyone. You weren’t saying, ‘Fuck 50’ without saying, ‘Fuck Buck, Banks and Yayo.’ They didn’t stick to just 50, so we were all targets and aggressors. So that drew us stronger together.”

“Blood Hound” became a favorite down South, and the world got its first glimpse of G-Unit’s newest member at the end of 50’s “P.I.M.P.” video. Buck, 50 and Lloyd Banks spent summer 2003 on the road with the Rock The Mic tour and cutting material for G-Unit’s debut group effort, Beg For Mercy. (Tony Yayo was in prison on a weapons conviction.)

By October, when the first G-Unit single “Stunt 101” was released, rap fans were well familiar with Buck’s gold-toothed grimace. Beg For Mercy tracks like “Wanna Get To Know You,” “Poppin’ Them Thangs” and “Footprints” served to bolster his popularity. The album was certified double-platinum by the end of the year.

It’s now summer of 2004, and Young Buck is only weeks away from the day for which he’s waited 10 years: the release of his debut solo album. Straight Outta Ca$hville features some of the biggest names in hip-hop: Snoop Dogg, Lil’ Flip, Ludacris, T.I., David Banner, and of course, the G-Unit/Shady/Aftermath fam. “I think Buck is the best Southern rapper out there right now,” says 50. “And I’m not just saying that because I signed him. His album will prove it.”

Buck agrees. “I think my album really captures who I am. Rap is weird, man. A muthafucka can say what he wants in they music. But it’s just putting words together, so you gotta be your own judge of how real it is. I try to keep my shit as real as possible. I’d say I’m 10 percent fake, ’cause I lie to some of my bitches, and once you lie to your bitches that’ll be fake. So I’m almost 100 percent… But for the most part everything I spit I done lived through. I done been through it in this rap game and in life. But I’m here now, I’ve done paid my dues and I’m ready to kill these muthafuckas with my album.”