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Here’s another one: name another artist who over at least the last decade has taken each and every aspect of their life, continued to grow with their audience, and turned simply inhaling and exhaling into a business. He was so deeply rooted in NOLA’s essence that he can call the late Soulja Slim a friend.
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He was with Lil Wayne when Tha Carter II dropped, watching him single-handedly change the landscape but being so close to it that he didn’t know history was being made. Curren$y was not only there but so deeply entrenched that he could go on The 85 South Show podcast and tell a hilarious story about C-Murder knocking on his parent’s front door in the early hours of the morning to grab him for a Jordan release. But Curren$y defies qualifiers.įor instance: name another artist who was on No Limit and Cash Money at the height of their respective popularity. Qualifiers are easy to make, especially in more recent times where history gets rewritten, and the past no longer serves as a measuring stick for what good music is and isn’t. The groundwork laid by both would gracefully pave a pathway for Spitta Andretti. His predecessors, artists like Devin the Dude, and of course, Snoop Dogg, found ways to enrapture fans in these various periods, while still putting on for all of rap’s stoners. Like when large movements such as Wu-Tang and Atlanta’s “Snap” sway the sound, image, and feel of the collective so much so that being outside of the shift can leave an artist just that: on the outside looking in. Though it has always been one of the most fluid and free flowing genres of music, it has also had moments of mass conformity–for better or for worse. For the latter part of a decade, the New Orleans-raised Curren$y has continued to raise the bar for what rap is and what, quote un quote, rappers do. Given name, age, and superlatives but fitting is not cool. It would be fitting to start this with the prototypical, born in such and such. Curren$y is one of the final stops on that path to effortless individuality. With each step it creates a longer yet short lineage of humans who just have it. Along these stops, folks have added to it, mixed it, and even subtracted from it to make it what it was. It made an unforgettable stop with Miles Davis who rebirthed it in a way that words wouldn’t be able to capture. It blossomed with Savile Row tailors creating bespoke menswear. It thrived when ancient Egyptians began putting gold on everything. It showed itself in the choice of animal early man used to cover themselves.
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