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Part I
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Beefs, beefs and more beefs ...
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Part II
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T.I. chases "beepers, sneakers and car speakers" ...
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Part III
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T.I. tries to stop the kids from falling into the trap ...
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Home sweet home. T.I. will never take being home for granted, especially since he was almost forced to vacate it for a few years. On March 30 he turned himself in to authorities in Cobb County, Georgia, because the ghost of his past had come back to haunt him.
"I had a warrant for a probation violation," T.I. says, sitting at the boards in his main recording home, Patchwork studio in Atlanta. After starting off his day talking to wayward youths from ages 5 to 17 about setting goals for themselves, T.I. sought the sanctuary of the studio to relax and B.S. with his Pimp Squad Click before a late evening performance rehearsal.
Sitting at the boards had T.I. reflecting on some recently missed opportunities and his chance for redemption.
"I had been on probation for a minute for a charge I caught back when I was a teenager," he explains. "Basically, I had to go in there and answer that warrant. There wasn't no other way to fix it besides to turn myself in, so that's what I had to do."
Going to jail at the height of his popularity, just when his song "Rubber Band Man" had risen from chitterling-circuit rotation to mainstream playlists, would be a back-breaker for most artists. Tip simply sees it as "dirt that had to be swept under the rug," and shows no sign of bitterness when talking about his career speed bump.
"I'm definitely not living the way I would like to be living," he said of his work-release program. "But this is just a step closer to being done with my process."
T.I.'s never been one to listen to authority. Raised in the heart of the 'hood — Bankhead ATL — Tip fell victim to the ghetto (or as he calls it, "the trap") at a time when most kids his age were thinking about watching "Chip 'n' Dale's Rescue Rangers" after school.
T.I. started strongly navigating his way through the trap at 13.
"It was like a playground, I wasn't really taking it seriously," he thinks back. "I didn't really understand the ramifications of any of my actions. I wasn't really trippin' on none of that. I was having fun, I was young and getting money. It was basically all about buying a car. 'Beepers, sneakers and car speakers' is what me and my partners used to say. N---as out here hustling for beepers, sneakers and car speakers, ain't nothing else. They ain't really trying to buy no property. They ain't really trying to own no businesses. They living in the now, rather than the future. Some [drug dealers] are content with living in the projects, with the big-screen TV. 'I live in the projects, but I got a big-screen TV and a leather couch.' Some of the people are content with that."
Unlike some of his peers who used the streets as a conduit to cash flow, T.I. never wanted to live the rest of his life hustling drugs. Especially when he started getting a little older and wasn't able to keep the police at arm's length.
"Every time I caught a case it got more and more serious," he says. "I caught my first case at 15, [I was caught with] a couple pounds of marijuana, a pistol, a lot of money. I thought I was going to be locked up for some years at that time. Thanks to the grace of God and my family stickin' by me, that didn't happen. I stayed out of trouble until I think a year or two later, then I caught another case. Man, I don't even want to get into that. I could sit here all day, tellin' you about all the trouble I got into. I don't think I caught the same case twice."
Becoming a recurring guest of the state was less and less sexy every time he felt the silver bracelets around his skinny wrists. T.I. started figuring out it was time to dive a little bit deeper into fracturing beats on the microphone. He had been told he was nice on the mic since he was little, and maybe now was the time to listen.
Former LaFace A&R rep KP Prather, who was trying to start up his own label, took a liking to Tip's arrogant flow and wanted to sign him. Part of the wooing was taking the Rubber Band Man to the 1999 Source Awards. It was there that the hustler turned into a rapper. It was time to leave the drug game "cold turkey."
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"I just saw people doing what they wanted to do ... like a dope boy do." |
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"I just saw people doing what they wanted to do," he says about the celebrities at the event. "They was living like dope boys, but legally. They got up when they wanted to, like a dope boy do. They worked when they wanted to, like a dope boy do. They laid down when they wanted to, they partied all night, like a dope boy do."
But Tip noticed there was one major difference between being a dope boy and being a b-boy.
"They didn't have to worry about the stress or the ramifications of the law, of being caught up and catching cases. What they was doing was totally legit. I felt like I had every opportunity and I had enough talent to do just as much, if not more, than the people I was with."
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Photo: MTV News
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