— by Abbey Goodman, with reporting by Matt Paco
Usher, TLC, Monica, Kris Kross — Atlantan Jermaine Dupri is one of the biggest hitmakers of the last dozen years, and his next two hopefuls are R&B singer Johnta Austin and battle rapper SunN.Y.
Before Dupri, Austin worked with another Atlanta institution: CNN. Starting out as the host of a show called "Real News for Kids," Austin interviewed everyone from George H.W. Bush to Michael Jordan, but it was a prospective interview with Arsenio Hall that marked the beginning of his music career.
"We sent him a tape of some of the things that I did and he was like, 'I want you to come on the show,' " Austin recalled. When Hall asked the 12-year-old Austin what he wanted to be and he said a singer, the host let him sing the show to a commercial. "I sung a little eight-bar of Shai's 'If I Ever Fall in Love,' and he invited me to hang around for the rest of the show. Somebody saw me singing on there and called — that's how I got jump-started in the business."
Those eight bars got Austin a deal with RCA Records — albeit a short-lived one.
"Nah, I didn't have it too long," Austin explained. "Puberty: I went through a wicked voice change and lost my voice as I knew it. Also, the people that brought me in [to the label] left and new people came in, so I got replaced by Tyrese."
But Austin didn't just get dropped, he got even: He wrote Tyrese's hit "Sweet Lady" and, more recently, Mariah Carey's "We Belong Together." But we're getting ahead of ourselves.
After a friend put the bug in JD's ear about Austin, they started working together.
"We were sitting around one night working on 'Lil' More Love,' " Austin continued. "And [Dupri] was like, 'It's really time for you to do your artist thing, because I don't think anybody would be able to bring the kind of personality to this record the way you bring it across."
And that's how "Lil' More Love" became the first single from Austin's solo album, Ocean Drive, which comes out on So So Def October 25.
When SunN.Y. relocated from Rochester, New York, to Atlanta on Super Bowl weekend 2004, he wasn't sure what would await him down there, but he thought, "I could be the average schmuck in my city, or I could get out and spread my wings. Moving to Atlanta helped me do that."
The rapper became interested in hip-hop from his older brother who, when Sun was 5, came home with a big nameplate belt, Adidas with no shoelaces and a bomber jacket with a fur hood.
When he was old enough, Sun honed his craft doing ciphers in his neighborhood under the name of Sun God. "But once I made the move to Atlanta, I started thinking more about business and wanted a more ... not to say friendlier name, but something more common," he recalled. "So I went with SunN.Y. — from me being in the South and being from New York."
With his new moniker, Sun set out for open-mic nights in ATL and, by his second weekend in town, was featured on Freestyle Friday on the city's Hot 107 radio station.
With his quick local fame and his ability to "go to where it's poppin' at," Sun got the chance to talk to Dupri. He told him he had been on Freestyle Friday and asked JD to listen. In the meantime, SunN.Y. battled on BET's "106 & Park."
Shortly after that, Dupri made an announcement on the radio asking SunN.Y. to come meet him if he won six consecutive weeks on Freestyle Friday.
"So the sixth week I won, I went to his radio show, introduced myself and did a freestyle. He told me to rap about a Sidekick, so I did that," Sun recalled. "Then he told me to rap about New York, which is sort of easy, so I flipped it to rapping about Atlanta."
The next time SunN.Y. was booked on BET, he was told that Dupri would be judging the show, but when he got there, JD was nowhere to be found. Then, just as he was about to be declared a "106 & Park" hall of famer, Dupri came from backstage and presented SunN.Y. with a So So Def chain.
"It's the actual chain that you can see in pictures. He took it out of his pocket and gave it to me."
Both Sun and JD are hoping that the title of the rapper's debut album, Overnight Celebrity, due September 13, is a self-fulfilling prophecy.
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