Bubba Sparxxx

Bubba Sparxxx: Man, I can't even explain it. A year ago, I'd never been out of the Southeast. I've been to Mississippi, Florida ... but all of a sudden I get on a plane and I'm in L.A.? I see the Hollywood sign and I'm like, "Man, I gotta be dreaming." You go through 23 years of your life and you've never seen this stuff except on TV. You begin to think it's a fictional world, maybe it don't really exist. ... This is a fantasy. I know it sounds like a cliché, but if I can be sitting here right now, anything ... chase those dreams. Anything can happen. I promise it can.

MTV: Being a white rapper coming up, did you have to prove yourself to other kids in your town?

"Ugly" [RealVideo]

Sparxxx: No, 'cause there was no hip-hop scene in the town I grew up in, LaGrange, Georgia. All the black kids in my community, we all played ball together. My mama would work with their daddies. Race relations are nothing new down there. In the rural South, you have a town of 30,000 people and everybody's pretty much thrown on the same pile of doo-doo. You just learn to make the best of it and live with one another. If something happens that impacts this community negatively, then it's going to affect us all. ... The racism and the prejudice of the past definitely still exists. We're not out of the woods. But I think ... just Timbaland and I sitting here together ... [proves] that we can all coexist in this world. That's a statement that things have improved.

MTV: The video for your first single, "Ugly," is very authentic. Who are all those people?

Sparxxx: We knew it had to be perfect, because we were doing something more than just introducing a new song and a new artist. We were introducing a new culture. Timbaland came up with the pigsty idea. The rest of it happened when [director] Marc Klasfeld came down. He spent three or four days with us and soaked up the vibe of what was going on down there. It's the most authentic video on TV right now. You cannot stay any truer to who you are and what your upbringing was than what we did on that one.

[The people in the video] come from around there. Every person in that video, with the exception of the stars, lived within 20 minutes of my house. It was a great event for the community, because small towns never get to see [that kind of action]. It's like Jay-Z said, "I didn't cross over/ I brought the suburbs to the 'hood." I took my world back to the mainstream.

Bubba Sparxxx Flipbook

MTV: You take some shots at those who would try to classify you in "Bubba Talk." What's that song about?

Sparxxx: That's a stab back to this "redneck rapper," "outhouse MC" stuff [people are saying about me]. It's like, "Y'all don't know me. I say the same things that you say. I just say it the way I say it." I wanted to make a hip-hop statement.

MTV: You said you never thought the "TRL" crowd would embrace you, but they have. Other rappers are really into you as well. The Dungeon Family have accepted you as one of their own, but Tim was saying you had to earn your stripes.

Sparxxx: I don't think they quite knew [what to make of] me in the beginning. I think maybe they just thought ... another white dude rapping. It was like a trial period. We just hung out and I remember when it all changed. We'd be rhyming in the studio and I'd notice [Organized Noize producer] Rico [Wade] looking at me out of the corner of his eye. I'd look and he'd turn his head. Finally, I was like, "Rico, just tell me what the deal is. I look at you out of the corner of my eye and it's like you're saying, 'I hate the fact that you exist.' " He said, "No. I'll tell you what I'm thinking when I'm looking at you like that: 'This better be everything that it appears to be, white boy.' 'Cause I'm a believer right now. I believe in it." That was a real big deal, because Organized Noize, Outkast, the whole Dungeon Family, are the foundation of Southern hip-hop to me.

MTV: How did you get from there to here? How did your tape get in Tim's hands? What was your first meeting like?

Sparxxx: Gerardo Mejia, an A&R executive at Interscope, the "Rico Suave" guy, brought it to [co-chairman] Jimmy [Iovine]. Jimmy was sitting on it for me. He knew he liked it, but there was still some direction lacking. He played it for Tim late one Friday night. Eight o'clock the next morning, I'm on a plane to Los Angeles. I felt a lot of pressure [the first time I met Tim]. We talked and clicked. We knew our vision was the same. The first song we worked on was "Bubba Talk." We get to work and I'm having problems writing. I'm on edge. I'm throwing away verses. I'm staying up 24 hours straight trying to write this song. He looks over at me and he could tell I was tense. He's like, "We're just making music." From then on I was like, "You know what? No matter what happens, that's what it's always going to boil down to. That's all we're doing. We're just making music."

MTV: There's got to be a good story behind your name. What is it?

Sparxxx: It's just a thing in the South. I was always the youngest, running around, getting dirty. My family started calling me Bubba. Like, "Bubba, get yo' ass in the tub." I also thought, "What better name for a white dude from the South than Bubba?" Sparxxx is the hip-hop side. Like, "Let's spark it." The xxx is the unknown variables, expect the unexpected. This project is going to throw you for a loop. Those are my roots. I'm proud of them, but don't limit what we're doing by pigeonholing me.