Master P, Suge Knight Spit Game
by Tha Blunted Child

If there's a problem with the current issue of The Source and its interviews of the respective heads of No Limit and Death Row Records, it's the length. In my opinion, 124 of the magazine’s 248 pages should have been devoted to Master P and the other 124 to Suge Knight. I could have read transcripts of what either of these music moguls had to say for hours. Everything else we do in this urban publication game - whether newsstand or online - is, in one way or another, hype. What The Source served up, with its candid interviews of P and Suge, was steak and potatoes. The stuff that really sticks to your ribs. Most of what we kids (cause we're all children) have been getting from these articles and pieces on "rap cats" and "industry types" is bologna. It doesn’t matter if you fry it in chicken grease and layer it with salad dressing. It's still baloney.

It's rare that real, independent black men get a chance to "rap" to the uneducated masses. Any real (NAACP, forgive me) n***a, should have a pad and pencil ready to take notes when men speak. Most of these Jordan-buying, platinum jewelry addicted Peter Pans out here won't realize that, with the articles on P and Suge, The Source picked the brains of over a half-billion dollars in black money. Real money. not that "fantasy rap," play dough. Most of these cats don't know how many G's in a million, let alone 500 of 'em.

P and Suge are real ones. Cats that let 'em hang. Men that refuse to deal from a point of weakness. My kind of (sorry again) n***as. What you get from the interviews, are two sides of, essentially, the same breed of man.

With Suge, you get the scathingly painful truth. Putting you in your place. When he tells interviewer P-Frank Williams "I would like to educate thug n***as on some million-dollar game: When Steve Stoute wants to get one dollar, he has to ask Jimmy [Iovine] for it," or "We [Blacks] have so much hatred inside. It’s a crab mentality. That’s why we feed into that Black-on-Black feuding so much. Too many Black people have that crab mentality which stops us from makin’ money. We thinkin’ white people ice is colder than ours," I almost jumped up and shouted like I was at church.

Then P laces the little ones with true grit. When asked (foolishly, I might add) by interviewer Carlito if he or his No Limit empire suffered financially in 1999, Mr. Miller had this to say,

"Never. Never. You know what doin’ bad is? Growin’ up in the projects, not havin nuthin’. That’s bad. Nah, I prepare for down time. That’s why everything I get, I own it. I got at least six or seven million-dollar homes that I own. Three million, four million, five million, six million. I can’t never do bad. I’ll start tradin’ them muthaf**kas in like cars, and start all over again. And I’m not ashamed to say it. I got two, three hundred thousand-dollar Rolexes, jewelry. I got four, five Rolls Royces, I got four, five Ferraris. All paid for. I’ll trade all that sh*t in ‘fore I go broke. And start over again."

Recognize game boys ‘n girls. For more on what P had to say about Cash Money Records and Suge’s comments on DMX, Jay-Z, Puffy and "that ‘bout it, ‘bout it sh*t," be sure to pick up the June 2000 issue of The Source.