With all due respect to Death Row, no rap record label has ever consolidated and celebrated its power the way Cash Money Records did in the final year of the 20th century. All four albums the young crew released that year—B.G.’s Chopper City In The Ghetto, the Hot Boys’ Guerrilla Warfare, Lil Wayne’s Tha Block Is Hot, and Juvenile’s Tha G-Code—would be platinum by January 2000, propelled by outrageous swagger and Mannie Fresh’s electro-swamp beats. Cash Money’s members did everything at a more extreme rate than their competitors for radio and MTV airtime would ever dare. Their pimping was bigger than JAY-Z’s. They were more mambo than Lou Bega, higher than Tal Bachman, and hornier than Sisqó. They stole Len’s sunshine. They forced Master P into the Continental Basketball Association. And in a twist more bonkers than a Mannie Fresh ad-lib, they added a word to the dictionary by the time it was all done. It’s no wonder the Big Tymers were buying platinum football fields in the Y2K.
Money—as a theoretical concept and a promise as much as hard currency—was the gasoline combusting in CMR’s engine as they did doughnuts on the Top 40. The label had been founded in New Orleans in the early 1990s by brothers Brian “Baby” (also “Birdman”) Williams and Ronald “Slim” Williams, who went from releasing bounce records to being players in the region’s hip-hop scene. In March 1998, Baby and Slim brokered an historic deal with Universal Records that netted Cash Money an estimated $30 million, 80% of royalties, and full ownership of masters and publishing, suddenly granting a handful of rappers, one in-house producer, and two bosses hailing from the notoriously rough Magnolia Projects an extraordinary amount of money, power, and freedom for self-determination. Cash Money immediately became one of the most valuable boutique labels on earth, worth more than JAY-Z’s nascent Roc-A-Fella.
Rapping about wealth was nothing new when the video for “Bling Bling” dropped a year later, in the spring of 1999; B.G. was fighting for Billboard space with Warren G’s “I Want It All,” to name but one example. But the Cash Money clique was practically rococo in its boasting. Juvenile’s 400 Degreez had already been conceived when the Universal deal was signed, and its two monster singles concerned life in the projects and the magnetic power of an unnamed woman’s ass, with videos to match. “Bling Bling,” with its outdoor feast, bushels of cash, private island, mysterious briefcase, legion of cars (including, somewhat incongruously, a New Beetle), and helicopter, seemed to come out of nowhere, especially for the huge, mostly white audience encountering them for the first time via MTV. Who were these dudes? How did they get all of this money? Why were they wearing pinkie rings? It was hard to tell how serious they were being.
What was clear was the boundless charisma shared by everyone on the track. Fresh, whose beat punches and twirls like a bounce track duded up for the Met Ball, claims to have bought a private plane, which he then sold in a joint venture to Juvenile and Lil Wayne, who in turn kit the jet out with 30-inch rims. Juvenile, leaning way over the front of a motorcycle, introduces himself as “a 1999 driver,” a lyric that had to have felt dated within a week, and which gets better with every passing year because of it.
But it’s Lil Wayne who steals the show. On the day the group recorded “Bling Bling”’s radio edit, fellow Hot Boy Turk, who was struggling with a drug addiction, was high and ashamed to show his face at the studio. Always at the ready, Weezy punched in a verse that hints at the monster rapper he’d become. He shifts up his flow, running it over every gleaming facet of the beat, pulling back on the throttle to bump through a stuttering “no, nah, no, nah, no-uh, no he didn’t.” In the video, he pulls the front of his shirt back behind his head, shows off a flip phone, and basically looks like a star.
“Bling Bling” was a Hope Diamond of a track, impossible to ignore, its title phrase delivered with so much charm—and the video stuffed with so much giddy money-tossing—that it was inevitable it would become so ubiquitous in this era. The video played so frequently, Turk claims that his absence effectively derailed his solo career before it ever started, and he’s probably right, even though his debut, 2001’s Young & Thuggin’, sold over half a million copies.
The group dynamic was integral to the sound Cash Money was developing. Creatively, the label functioned like a flossed-out version of the Brill Building, with each of the rappers working simultaneously on whoever’s record was up next in the release cycle. They rarely recorded with outside artists, their endless ciphers instead rolling in a closed system that generated incredible amounts of heat. It also meant that their slang—“woadie,” “bezeled-up,” “the Nolia”—arrived on the national stage seeming like a fully formed language.
Some of their intrigue has to do with the insular nature of pre-Katrina New Orleans, too; not many rappers were casually referencing second lines on hit singles. Like any New Orleanian anxious about their cosmopolitan taste, Fresh likes to say that his production style is a “gumbo,” with ingredients pulled from around the country: a little West Coast swing, some East Coast class, whatever. As Simon Reynolds reported in The Village Voice, Fresh spent time in Chicago working with producer Steve “Silk” Hurley, and ripples of various electronic scenes pulse through his production, from boogie to acid house.
But as anyone who’s eaten their fair share of gumbo knows, whatever you toss in the pot usually just ends up tasting like gumbo, and Fresh’s early style is as deeply New Orleans as red beans on a Monday and the Special Man financing your tufted couch. The Baroque arrangements and harpsichord tones he favored in his keyboards amplifies the rappers’ performative fanciness, like it’s mocking the uptight bling of the Rex Mardi Gras ball, while the drum programming is lacy and intricate, a cluttered grid of sound with just enough gaps for you to jump between, like a drum line playing cadences as it waits for the parade to start moving again.
Fresh’s production forced the rappers to be nimble, and it favored the kinds of call-and-response vocals that mark both bounce and the chants of the Mardi Gras Indians who would frequently meet at A.L. Davis Park across Washington Avenue from the Magnolia. Juvenile’s sing-song delivery and B.G.’s slurred chorus in Guerrilla Warfare’s “Boys At War” may as well be lifted from Wild Tchoupitoulas; in a nice bit of serendipity, the latter’s accent makes the title phrase sound like “them boys that walk,” which may as well be a reference to the spy boys who lead the way when the Indians come marching.
Streaking across 1999’s skies like water from a bottle being shaken over a crowd is the song that would define this era of Cash Money Records and New Orleans hip-hop generally: “Back That Azz Up.” The sudden shudder that runs through a club when Juvenile’s voice declares “Cash Money taking over for the 9-9 and the 2000” in the song’s intro, and the way a room tremors and jiggles and just fucking moves when Fresh’s drums start to kick, is the greatest evidence that we are, in fact, corporeal beings with actual bodies and not merely thought experiments in some greater mind. In Juvenile’s hands, it is purely physical music that celebrates the purely physical. (The less said about Fresh’s verse, the better, but suffice it to say that when André 3000 declared “The South got something to say” at the 1995 Source Awards, this isn’t what he was talking about.)
“Back That Azz Up” was released as a single on February 24, 1999, and spent 46 weeks on the Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs chart. Perhaps owing to the stifling humidity of New Orleans summers, it didn’t peak in popularity until September, when the action of backing that ass up was less likely to lead to dehydration. It is a perfect representation of everything Cash Money did well at the turn of the millennium: Juvenile resuscitating his skills as a bounce rapper to lead the crowd, Fresh layering mournful strings (which he says he included to hook “white America”) and banging the beat on the one like James Brown, Wayne tagging the song with his first great verse of sublime wobbledy-wobbledy nonsense.
The hits would keep coming, with Fresh and Baby’s Big Tymers scoring the next year. Mainstream rap would become more and more commercialized. Juvenile and B.G. eventually split from the label, but Wayne stuck around and built an empire, albeit one on someone else’s property and subject to that overlord’s whims. Young Money/Cash Money became the most powerful rap label of this millennium, but with global fame came a kind of flattened, globalized sound, Drake appropriating the “Triggaman” beat notwithstanding. If there’s a Cash Money aesthetic now, it doesn’t bear the imprint of the dudes that brung you “Put Up Your Solja Rags.”
Which is inevitable. Things change, even in places like New Orleans that seem constitutionally opposed to it; there’s a James Beard Award–winning bar a short walk from what was once the Magnolia Projects. Juve’s now an elder statesman at the age of 44, “Ha” the kind of universally recognized masterpiece into which a rapper as highbrow as Kendrick Lamar can swerve with confidence. Fresh is so integrated into the New Orleans community he gets to DJ at Saints playoff games. Wayne is still a sensation capable of occasional greatness. But the temptation to revel in who they were in 1999 is nearly as difficult to resist as a Mannie Fresh beat. For all of its success in the ensuing 20 years, Cash Money Records never had another moment like this, when its artistic and financial fortunes were so deeply intertwined. That sense of impermanence was built into the music. Like the flash of light off a bezeled-out earring, it was gone in an instant, but you can still see it bling from here.
66 Comments
I was in my second year of college in the fall of 1999 and my white freshman dorm roommate for some reason got obsessed with “Back That Azz Up.” He had it set to repeat that one track on his boombox. He’d wake up in the morning and hit play, hit pause to go take a shower, hit play again when he got back to the room, hit pause to go to class, hit play again when he got back to the room, hit pause to go to his next class, and so on. After a few weeks of this going on, I finally had to lay the law down and demand that he at least play something else. Later in the semester, he got really into DMX. But at least he played the whole album that time.
I had a nearly identical story from my dorm a few years earlier with “Regulate.”
Fall of 2003, the guy in the dorm room next to mine played Hey Ya – and only Hey Ya – from the first week of September until Finals started. We shared an AC vent, which let me hear tinny, distant vocals in addition to muffled bass through the wall. It was wonderful. (In December, he got really into Stacie Orrico’s (There’s Gotta Be) More to Life, which he would play for any visitor to his room. Then he’d explain why it was so meaningful to him. And, again, there was a foot-wide hole at the top of the wall that sound readily passed through, so I got to hear that speech more than a few times.)
This was my college roommate only with Dave Matthews
Lived in a duplex about 10 years ago and my neighbor was a 20-something woman who was either doing internet porn or just liked to get fucked really loudly while other men instructed her on how to move and suck and moan. Either way, when this neighbor wasn’t getting logjammed at 11 (in every sense of the word), she was blasting Nickelback’s “Rock Star” nonstop. Also, she had two pit bulls that fought constantly (also very loudly) and once jumped the fence in an attempt to attack my girlfriend and her dog. You may be surprised to learn that I did not renew my lease.
Can confirm New Orleans clubs still lose their fucking minds over Back that Azz Up. It’s like when Clevelander’s hear “Bone bone bone BONE bone BONE bone BONE now tell me whatcha gonna do…”
That’s because we 1.) Still miss our Uncle Charles, ya’ll. 2.) Still wonder what we gonna do, when judgement comes for us.
“Why they kill my dog?”- John Wick, 2014
*Clubs in very city of the USA* FTFY
That’s… well and good, but 1999 was the year of Dr. Dre’s 2001, Eminem’s Slim Shady LP, Mos Def’s Black on Both Sides, 2Pac & the Outlawz’ Still I Rise, and Slick Rick’s The Art of Storytelling. All of those have individual tracks that are better than everything mentioned in this article.
cool story bro
My balls, your mouth. Say 6:00 this evening.
There’s no denying the impact of The Slim Shady LP and “Still Dre” and “The Next Episode” are still bangers but Things Fall Apart is, by far, the best hip-hop album of ‘99 IMO. (I’d also add Murda Muzik with “Quiet Storm” to your list.)
Good call, good call.
But honestly none of that had the cultural force of this particular track. They’re basically entirely different genres of music, still within hip hop, but they’re another article. This track is also very specific to 1999 in a way that those aren’t. Slim Shady could get made today.
I suppose chasing down the quintessence of 1999ness is its own venture. It just strikes me as likely to lead one to ponder something other than the best media that came out that year.
Yes, I think that’s what it’s meant to do, give you a jumping off point to ruminate on all things 1999, which was 20 years ago, because all of us who are able to have any sort of opinion on music from 1999 are old AF.
And as one of the oldsters, I’m more interested in discussing it with fellow oldsters. I do try to find ways to relate to pop culture as teenagers do today,because I’m a teacher and need to relate to my students. But I’m happy to leave that behind when doing something like browsing this site.
I can’t. 🙁 I can keep up (sort of) with movies and TV, but new music…I got nothing. I’m a Black woman and I still haven’t even heard the Lemonade album.
I can’t either, really, but I make some effort. I make the comparison that for an adult to try to appreciate kids’ culture is homework in the same way that it’s homework for the kids to appreciate adults’ culture. That doesn’t tend to make them more likely to put in the effort to get into Shakespeare or whatever, but I like the comparison. Because for a lot of young enough people, there’s barely much difference between reading an old dead author like that and approaching any other culture that isn’t of their era. It blows my mind sometimes. I try to illustrate something by using a clip from a movie or TV show from say the ‘60s or ‘70s and kids will react to it like it’s from some ancient culture in National Geographic.
You’re not wrong, but are those productions still being played today? “Back That Azz Up” is still played at many of the gatherings that I attend and even younger generations embrace the song. I heard the song on the radio yesterday, and it wasn’t old school hour. They are still just throwing it in mixes. That’s amazing for a 20 year old song.
Well, I mean… People play Piano Man and Sweet Caroline and Margaritaville at gatherings too, you know what I mean?
Agreed, but songs like that are rare. Dr See, Eminem, Most Def, and other works are not played in a similar fashion. The remaining cultural relevance is why BTAU is better and why this article exists.
In my eyes, Back That Ass Up has never risen above, and will never rise above, the coolness level of the person I discovered it from, which was someone’s dopey, beer-chugging cousin from Wisconsin who showed up at a house party and shouted the phrase “back that ass up!” loudly and randomly every few minutes throughout the whole party, always with a big shit-eating grin, holding up his red Solo cup in cheers to anyone who made eye contact.
Wait, back the fuck up.But it’s Lil Wayne who steals the show. On the day the group recorded “Bling Bling”’s radio edit, fellow Hot Boy Turk, who was struggling with a drug addiction, was high and ashamed to show his face at the studio. Always at the ready, Weezy punched in a verse that hints at the monster rapper he’d become. He shifts up his flow, running it over every gleaming facet of the beat, pulling back on the throttle to bump through a stuttering “no, nah, no, nah, no-uh, no he didn’t.” In the video, he pulls the front of his shirt back behind his head, shows off a flip phone, and basically looks like a star.Wayne doesn’t have a verse on Bling Bling. He does the chorus and the outro.
I think he’s referring to the radio edit. He definitely has a verse on that version.
“Perhaps owing to the stifling humidity of New Orleans summers, it didn’t peak in popularity until September, when the action of backing that ass up was less likely to lead to dehydration.”I love this whole article, but I particularly love everything about this sentence.
Back That Azz Up is one of those So-Stupid-It-Circles-Around-To-Being-Genius things. Like the original Star Wars or Leroy Jenkins.
I’m trying to think of another cameo that launched a career like Wayne in “Back That Azz Up.” I don’t think you can even call it a verse—it’s like he’s dropping a different chorus at the end of the song but everyone knew it and repeated it. Also, lukewarm take: “Back That Thang Up” is better than “Back That Azz Up” (for Manny’s “brrrrrr drummer chick” alone).
Beat me to it.There probably should be another paragraph specifically about how “Back That Thang Up” is what blew up and not the album explicit version which has other differences besides being clean.And noting that “Thang” sounding like slang just makes the song catchier than “Azz”.
But “you’s a fine motherfucker” is better than “you’s a big fine woman”.
Hate to be a total Dwight Schrute, but “FALSE”. I have called my mother a ‘big fine woman’ at family and social events on and off since 1999, to her frustration and the embarrassment of my loved ones, so that is better. P.S., she is not very big, and it is obviously in jest. I’m not a bitch.
Calling your mom a big fine woman is odd. Calling her a fine motherfucker is cause for an evaluation and possibly an order of protection.
Nikki Minaj’s verse on “Monster” was one of those seemingly out-of-nowhere moments that announced a new talent. Sadly (in my opinion, anyway) her solo work didn’t live up to her early hype nearly as well as Wayne’s did.
To me that is more like Busta on “Scenario”—she already had a proper album out and cameos on several songs that charted but it was her “arrival” to the masses. Maybe Snoop on “Deep Cover?” That was a true, who is that? moment since he was really unknown but it was still a full verse w/chorus vs. just dropping in some gibberish.
Good points. I honestly thought it came before her first album was released (my pop/hip-hop knowledge is sparse) so I guess the analogy doesn’t line up. Now if you’ll excuse me, I suddenly have “Deep Cover” stuck in my head…
OMG… In that parade of cars that New Beetle is indeed incongruous, but also hilariously 1999.
I remember my friend had a CD-R with all the best Cash Money tracks on it and we played the absolute shit out of it. They taught my little seventh grade self a lot of really cool southern slang/profanity. Also, any list of the best hip-hop producers that doesn’t include Mannie Fresh is a joke.
Speaking of Mannie, “The Mind of Mannie Fresh” album is criminally slept on.
Growing up in NOLA, Cash Money was ubiquitous, and this article is speaking deep to my nostalgia in a way that few other 90’s articles can. I’ve seen Juvenile and Mannie Fresh perform live SO MANY TIMES, and the day that I ran into Birdman at Walgreens is still seared into my memory as one of the great moments of my life. Thank you for writing this; I’m going to back my late 30’s azz up one more time, just for the memories.
In the cough and cold aisle?
Parking lot – I squealed and said “Birdman I love you!” and he said “I love you too baby” LIFE WAS PERFECT FOR ONE FLEETING MOMENT.
Not sure if I would love or hate complete strangers informing me that they loved me—not an indictment of the strangers, mind you, but just my general disposition—but I like to think that I would love it and I would handle it as coolly as Birdman does in this story. Being famous has to be a mindfuck, though.
I love this article. Even today you can’t hear “Cash Money Records taking over for the ‘99 & the 2000″ anywhere and not see literally everyone stop what they’re doing to go wild.
I played “Back That Azz Up” a few weeks ago and my mom went wild. If that doesn’t say Cultural Zeitgeist I don’t know what does. Classic.
We had a post-Endymion party at a friend’s house and playing the latest hits off someone’s Spotify playlist. When “Back That Azz Up” came on, someone laughed and said “It ain’t a party in New Orleans until that song plays!” Everyone started dancing.
This helped usher in one of the worst eras of rap to date.
You’re wrong a lot aren’t you
Do you think you’ll be alone for the rest of your life because you’re such a sanctimonious dipshit or because of how unattractive you almost certainly are? Or both? Discuss.
This is the best you’ve got, huh?
Nah. Someone like you isn’t worth much more attention though. Because everything you write is pretty obviously a sad cry for attention. Spoiler alert: You’re a bitter asshole who isn’t ever going to be happy. So congrats on that.
Oh it’s you again. What are you on, your 30th burner?
I have literally no idea what you’re talking about. Looking at your feed, all you do is find people to pick fights with. And you seem to have been doing it for years. That isn’t how mentally healthy or happy people act.
I do like the idea though that you’ve been told this by others before but choose to believe it’s one person. Don’t let me stand in your way though. I bet you have a bunch of shit going on today.
https://i.kinja-img.com/gawker-media/image/upload/f_auto/brqzuygkxkkztd7xpl1e.mp4
Homer ends up not being Guy Incognito at the end of that clip dumbass.You are a sad….sad person.
Were…you under the impression that Homer was supposed to be anyone else but Homer?
Your question is incoherent. In that episode Guy Incognito is thrown out of Moes bar, and the real Homer walks by and is amazed that he’s met his exact double. Thus, by you using that clip, the implication would be that I’m not whatever person you seem to think I am. Learn to express yourself better.
I was shifted from Island to Universal Records in the Polygram/UMG merger of 98/99 and I remember moaning to a colleague that they had no one on their roster other than Erykah Badu and he said, “they just signed a deal with this little label from New Orleans and you’re going to be FINE.” He was, of course, right, and it was the best thing about being there.
I remember a marketing meeting where the GM said, “we’re going to put out a clean version of Back That Azz Up….. it’s going to be called, Would You Kindly Back That Azz Up.” (it was of course, Back That Thang Up). Fun times, thanks for the memories.
Do you have more stories?!
honest curiousity, why is a white male a hitler-esque monster if they even look at a woman, yet every single sentence in a rap song features at least 9 of the most misogynistic things you can say… and AV club is completely smitten with it?
Ah, The Special Man. He was fuckin awesome. Him and the old white guy w/ the shitty toupee were always on in the morning during cartoons before school.
Juvenile is the Cash Money Craig Mack
Yeah go ahead and remind me how bad hip hop was in the late 90’s. Cash Money is some garbage tier shit. The Art of Storytelling, Operation Doomsday were a couple of bright spots of 99 and the only albums I return to from that year. “DK Rap” on Nintendo 64 came out in 99. You know what?… put that shit up against anything Cash Money was doing at the time. I’m not wrong.
Yo, I grew up in the late eighties and nineties in NY and let me tell you, these guys had a DOPE lineup even before 1999 they’re getting credit for right now. They just didn’t have the longevity because greed got in the way, way too early on. You look at cats like the RZA, it was a long time before he felt he deserved 50% of tracks etc… but then he also deserved it. Regardless, with the right management and artistic direction, they could have made 1000 times more money for the massa. Goes to show most of these big labels stumble onto talent and are still terrible at shaping their persona.