Imagining Wayne hitting the highest peaks of rap stardom a decade later without Juve’s influence is impossible. Juvenile may have been Cash Money’s first flagship artist but Lil Wayne, whose youthful voice can be heard on a few tracks, became the label’s living legend. Strangely, Apple Music and Spotify are home to only the clean version. It might the most vicious dressing down of a fake hustler ever (“ You gotta go to court ha/ You got served a subpoena for child support ha”).ĭespite entering the US Billboard top 10 and enjoying plenty of MTV exposure, the album has become something of an oddity. Nothing distils Juvenile’s sparkle, though, like Ha. Over a beat that could almost be an alternate universe Bond theme, the title track finds him pondering the importance of reputation (“ How I’ma be runnin’ with these killas and backin’ down/ How I’ma look in front of my people, like a clown”). (It’s no surprise that when Louis Theroux went on his fish-out-of-water exploration of southern hip-hop, it was the Houston design firm he hired to create his cover.) Yet underneath the artwork, Juve brings a rich specificity to his writing, building his Magnolia Housing Projects home brick by brick. Mocked up by the artists at Pen & Pixel, the cover is gloriously brash and tasteless. Mannie gives Juvenile enough fresh looks. Examine the slap bass and peppy guitar stabs of Ghetto Children or the bossanova bounce of Flossin’ Season. And despite Mannie helming every track, 400 Degreez never repeats itself. This future-cop sound was different to the more bluesy beats of Houston label Rap-A-Lot or the Southern-meets-West-Coast fusion sound of fellow New Orleans outfit No Limit. Even when Fresh’s instrumentals feel lean and inexpensive – you can practically hear his fingertips pop off the electronic drum pads – they never sound weak. Cash Money’s in-house producer Mannie Fresh handles the beats from front-to-back, his New Orleans bounce orchestration shuffling through his tightly packed soundscapes.
Juvenile 400 degreez driver#
He spits like a man who never met a consonant he trusted but with the control of a Formula One driver hitting corners at speed.Ĥ00 Degreez is as musical as it is ferocious. Juve’s rapping can be dense and complex, forceful with finesse, infinitely listenable. The album showcases an impossibly fantastic rapper – a behemoth with an elastic voice capable of bending his larynx in insane ways. If confidence can be injected into the blood then Juve hit a double dose. It doesn’t take a genius to see why Baby – who’d become better known as Birdman, Wayne’s father figure turned business nemesis – was willing to throw the dice on the man born Terius Gray. Bon Appetit.ĭropped in the spring of 1998, Juvenile’s third album crystallised the Cash Money sound and established the then-23-year-old as its first star. Place Juvenile in the roaster for 72 scintillating minutes, sauté the pop ‘n’ click patterns of Mannie Fresh, add in the spices of Big Tymers and Juve’s fellow Hot Boyz, allow Bryan “Baby” Williams and Ronald “Slim” Williams to stir the pit, and voilà – or as a teenage Lil Wayne spits at the end of Juve’s Back That Azz Up video, “wobble-dee, wobble-dee” – Cash Money Records plates up a New Orleans gumbo fit for a king. As it turned out, 400 Degreez is the temperature at which Southern rap percolates.
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