— by Shaheem Reid
James Brown sang, "This is a man's world, but it wouldn't be nothing without a woman or a girl," and in the male-dominated field of hip-hop, some of the most successful guys have often incorporated females in their cliques to give it just the right balance of flava.
Biggie and Junior M.A.F.I.A. had Lil' Kim, the Firm had Foxy Brown, Jay-Z put Amil down with his Roc-A-Fella family a few years ago, and Eve mixed it up with DMX and the LOX in the Ruff Ryders fam.
So when Ludacris was putting his Disturbing Tha Peace posse together, he looked at the blueprint that was laid down by his predecessors and decided his camp was missing one thing: estrogen.
"I guess I was like the last piece of the puzzle," Shawnna Guy explained late last year in California. "Their team was ready to hit and they said, 'There's one more thing that we need.' It was a girl. They came and grabbed me and I played my role."
Last summer Shawnna's role was to steal the show during Luda's set on the Anger Management tour. Without Mystikal making the rounds on the tour to perform "Move B***h," the sexy Chicago fire starter stepped to the plate and floored audiences every night with her relentless flow.
Two summers before that, everyone was saying Shawnna's rhymes before they even knew her name. That's the curvy rapstress rhyming the hook "I, I wanna, li-li-li-lick you from yo' head to yo' toes" on Cris' 2000 smash "What's Your Fantasy?" Not to mention that her solo joint, "Posted," was one of the highlights of DTP's fall 2002 group debut, Golden Grain.
But Shawnna has been spitting raw lyrics with the frequency and precision of a machine-gun-toting hit man for years. In 1998 she was half of the duo Infamous Syndicate, who hit the road on the Lyricist Lounge Tour. Through hitting radio stations to promote the string of concerts, the ladies met Luda, who used to go by Cris Lover Lover when he hosted an Atlanta radio program.
"He interviewed us, and I threw that tape on in between commercials and he was like, 'I'mma get at you. I'm feeling you. We gotta do something.' Time went on and his manager, Chaka, hit me three years later like, 'What you doing? Where you at? Remember we said we wanna do something with you? Fly to Atlanta.' "
Since meeting Cris, she and the Syndicate had dropped a poorly received album in 1999 and had lost their deal with Relativity when it folded into Loud Records. Shawnna, who had also given birth to a son, was unsure whether she would get a second shot in the game.
"I caught the bird to ATL," she recalled. "They were in the studio banging. I'm like, 'What's this?' It was 'What's Your Fantasy?' We can still do that record anywhere and they go crazy."
Shawnna is hoping songs off her debut LP, Worth the Wait, will cause their own frenzy with listeners. "The album doesn't have one main direction, it's everywhere," she said of the disc, which she recorded mostly in Atlanta with DTP on hand to give feedback. "It gets wild, it gets serious. I talk about my kids, I talk about being a single parent. I talk about females getting away from the BS and getting this money. My album is a pot of gumbo."
Like music, the New Orleans dish is also something Shawnna knows a few things about. Both are in her blood. Her father is the legendary jazzman Buddy Guy.
"That's what my album is like," she said, continuing to compare her LP to gumbo. "Everything is thrown in there, but it all came together to make that pot."
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