Everybody's Brother (11 page)

We recorded our first album,
Soul Food
, at the home studio of the one of the greatest music men of all time, Curtis Mayfield—who was one of the leaders of the Impressions, for whom he wrote twentieth-century soul classics like “People Get Ready” and “We’re a Winner.” Then as a solo superstar, Curtis cut unforgettable soundtracks for
Super Fly
and another movie classic called
Sparkle
. Truth be told, I’m not even sure now why we recorded there. I heard stories that maybe our producers, Organized Noize, were discussing buying the home and the studio. In retrospect, if we were there, it was probably because we got a very reasonable rate. Knowing Goodie Mob and our situation then, a good price was probably more incentive than the sense of music history or any kind of nostalgia.

Curtis Mayfield—who was paralyzed in a stage accident in 1990 and passed in 1999—was not around the studio at the time we were recording. But his stuff was still in the house. There was a room filled with reels from
Super Fly
. Gipp even went into his closet to borrow a sweat suit
that he wore on the jacket cover of
Soul Food
. So in a way the album is infused with his spirit. And I believe that Curtis Mayfield is still around anywhere people are making good, soulful, and socially conscious music. Which is exactly what Goodie Mob was trying to do.

Right from the start, Goodie Mob wasn’t just trying to get a hit record. Fools and geniuses that we were, we dreamed of changing the world. We wanted to be like Public Enemy for the Dirty South. We wanted respect as much as we wanted hits, and as with Public Enemy, we felt as if it would take a nation of millions to hold us back. And even against a nation of millions, we liked our odds.

There had been Southern rap before us, but a lot of it wasn’t very good or very deep. We wanted to bring Southern hip-hop newfound respect with albums that were intelligent and progressive, like the work Public Enemy had done on the East Coast.
Soul Food
was in essence a compilation of the things we had all been doing as individuals. Taken as a whole, it was pretty tough stuff, dark, political, angry. Gipp acted almost like our group’s alderman—he’s always had a strong political point of view. He was once a member of the Nation of Islam and was always enlightened in terms of politics and social consciousness and had a savvy for social media before people even called it that. I think Gipp brought a lot of that edge to the music that we made. Honestly, I’m not really like that so much—I’m all heart. So while Gipp brought the politics, I brought my own kind of soul and gospel aspect to the music of Goodie Mob.

Church roots run deep—even for sinners like me. No matter what I had done wrong by that time—or whatever I still might do someday—the fact is both of my parents were ministers. I always loved gospel music because it spoke to your soul. Music at its best is religious, it is spiritual. It is a practice. It is a faith. It’s sincere. It’s supernatural. It’s extraordinary. It’s surreal. It’s a paranormal activity if you will. And in the wrong hands, sometimes it’s a sin. My musical life began in church, and therefore in some ways it became about praise. And if you praise and exalt, it’s an act of selflessness. I still think of myself as only being the messenger. Look at Goodie Mob’s first album cover, and it looks like we’re praying to do our job right. Take a listen to “Free” on
Soul Food
, and there’s not much confusion about where I was coming from then.

“Free” was the song I wrote about my mom, and I wanted it to be the first song on our first album. Her journey was full of amazing grace and terrible pain. For all our difficulties, I loved her deeply for everything she had given me. And in her suffering, she was about to give me the most miraculous and supernatural gift of all.

GOODIE GOODIE

I love sharing the stage with the guys in Goodie Mob, now more than ever.

Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images

T
he longer that you live, the more that you discover that life is an epic journey—one that is made up of a seemingly endless series of beginnings and endings.

In most of your finer epics, feelings of overwhelming joy are closely tied to moments of devastating loss. The secret of life—revealed here for the first time anywhere—is realizing that all of it is part of life’s rich tapestry. As someone far wiser than me once noted, we all have to begin somewhere. And as we all learn sooner or later, we all have to end up somewhere too. But life does not transpire on our schedules, and sometimes our beginnings and our endings seem to take place at the same times.

One door opens.

Another door shuts forever.

And so it came to pass that just as my mother began her long, slow, and painful fade in her earthly journey, the Goodie Mob and I started our rise to the top—or wherever else we would end up.

Something told me to go home. I had been living with a friend while we were in the studio making
Soul Food
when
I decided to move back in with my grandmother and my mother. I guess I knew my mom was nearing the end. She was sick all the time, and often in the hospital. The truth is that I’d hardly ever lived with my mother because of the insane and scattered lives we both had lived as we improvised our ways through this world. So I was not always tuned in to her state of mind. But my intuitiveness was very advanced, and something told me that I should move back home around that time. I believe that kind of foresight came in part from my street sensibility. When you’re living the street life, you have to be able to feel when the heat is around the corner. I had a kind of criminally advanced skill set that was sharpened from experience. When you’re living on the edge, you have to have that sixth sense.

I moved into the den and I tried to help to the best of my abilities. My grandmother was recovering from another hip surgery, and she was hobbling around, trying to nurse my mom. Shedonna was living with Aunt Audrey, coming over every night to give Grandma a break. But our grandmother was coming down with serious stomach problems too. The whole thing was wearing her down, and the situation was looking very grim.

I have never been a man who focuses much on regrets. Maybe that’s because I have done too many things I could regret if I ever took time to focus on them. But I do have one regret from that time when my mother was dying. There was this one night I was at the house, feeling tired and irritable, and my mother had to be turned in her bed.
She sensed that I didn’t want to help her at that moment. She looked at me and said, “Well, the Lord knows if I could do it myself, I would.” I hate that memory. I hate that I reacted that way.

But even though she was dying, she was still my mother, and strong in spirit. She was concerned for my soul, and she was a formidable presence. Gipp told me he could feel it the first time he met her—which happened to be the day she learned that I had joined a group called Goodie Mob. We were making our EPK—electronic press kit—and filming at locations all over Atlanta. We had done some filming at my aunt Audrey’s apartment complex—that’s the one you’ll see in the “Cell Therapy” video. And then we wanted to do a scene with my mother, where I rise up out of her body. It was kind of a surprise to everyone the afternoon I showed up at my grandmother’s house trailed by a video crew and Goodie Mob.

“Momma,” I said. “We’re making our album for real.” She just looked back and forth between the cameras and my crew, which I must say was a colorful bunch. She knew something was happening.

Shedonna tells me that this was the day when my family realized I was serious about making my life in the music business. But my mother was still very tied to the church and she didn’t approve of secular music. So for our mother, having her only son grow up to become a rapper was a pretty big no-no. She didn’t want to know about my music, right up until the time she passed away. Shedonna told me she begged her to listen to an advance CD of the
first Goodie Mob album, but Mom would say, “No, that’s of the devil! I’m not listening to it.” Then one night, out of the blue, she told Shedonna to put on the CD and let her listen to it. I was on the road, but Shedonna called me from the back bedroom and said, “Guess what? Mom is listening to your entire CD.”

“What? No!”

“Yeah, the whole thing,” Shedonna said. “She hasn’t turned it off yet!”

I think it was her way of just making sure that I was okay and that I had a positive message for the world. Shedonna believes that on some level she knew what was going to happen in my life, and she approved. She never said anything to either of us, but she didn’t have to. She listened, and we knew.

Around this time we were doing all kinds of traveling to launch Goodie Mob, and I remember being on a plane sitting next to T-Mo and telling him, “I think I’m about to face the biggest test of my life. I think I’m going to lose my grandmother and my mother at the same time.” I believe that my mother saw my grandmother getting weak and began the process of sacrificing herself. Deep down, I sense that my mother felt that no one ever could—or would—take care of her the way my grandmother did. So I’m sure she felt that if her mother wasn’t going to be around, then she didn’t want to be around either. The last thing my mother ever asked of me was for me and Shedonna to visit her together in the hospital. Usually, my sister would go, and I’d come by later, after she was gone.
But on that day, we rode down to the hospital together. As we were walking into her room, the doctor was walking out and saying “Okay, Sheila, if you don’t eat, we’re going to have to put the tube down you.” My mother had this look on her face, and she said, “Don’t you let them be putting any tube down me.” And we were saying “Well, Mom, you’ve got to eat if you want to live. I guess if you don’t want to live, you shouldn’t eat.” My mother said, “Don’t you run any of that reverse psychology shit on me.” We just had to laugh. At the time, I didn’t realize what she was doing. Not then. Not at that moment.

Some days in your life fade away instantly. Other days are never-ending, and stay with you forever. I remember Goodie Mob had just gotten done doing an outdoor concert at Clark Atlanta University. This particular night really sticks out in everyone’s mind. We were on a very high stage, and at one point in the show I drank from a water bottle, shook it up a little, then sprayed it on the crowd a little and threw the bottle out there in the crowd for fun. Someone in the crowd threw the bottle back hard, and it hit T-Mo right in the face. Now, that might not make me flinch these days. But back then, I was a young man, someone you should never push because I was always close to the edge. I had a total hair-trigger temper—real reactionary in that way.