Everybody's Brother (4 page)

While I was still being Superman, I also went through a break-dancing phase. I must have been in the third or fourth grade. I would take thick sheets of cardboard and tape them together, then invite the neighborhood kids wherever we were living at the time to come over and practice some b-boy moves. Now, you may have noticed that I’ve got a big head. Believe me, it looked even bigger when I was a kid, and I used to get teased about it. But it turned into an advantage when it came time to learn those head spins. There was another move called the
centipede where you bounce on the ground like a worm. I got good at that too.

When my mother went shopping at the mall, I would dress up as Superman and go with her. Mom had found religion by then and didn’t approve of secular music, but as soon as she would go into a store, I’d ask Shedonna to be the lookout while I slipped out and started breaking for tips. I’d tell her, “Just give me ten minutes and see how much money I can make!” A crowd would gather to watch the cute little Superman breaking, but as soon as I got the signal I’d scoop my coins and run. Mom would never know what happened.

My sister, Shedonna, was my protector and sometimes my accomplice. She wasn’t so busy causing trouble like I was all the time, and she got labeled “the good child” because she learned how to stay out of Mom’s way. We were always two very different people. She was more of an introvert, and me, well, I was more of a lovable psychopath. Shedonna had common sense, and I had none at all. But the two of us went through the same crazy childhood, and we’re bonded forever. Looking back, I think the truth is that my sister tried to look out for her extremely troublesome little brother the best that she could under some very difficult circumstances.

There was a lot of love in our home, but growing up, Shedonna and I would argue over just about anything. I was short for my age, and people often thought we were twins, and maybe that just intensified the sibling rivalry. We always bickered about whose turn it was to do the
chores. I used to drive her crazy when I stuffed my dirty clothes in the closet and ended up borrowing her clean socks to go to school. Yes, sometimes those socks had frilly ruffles, but I didn’t care. I told you I was peculiar.

Even while we were torturing each other, there were still so many acts of kindness from my sister that I will never forget. For instance, growing up we didn’t have much money, so when we got McDonald’s, that was something very, very special. And I savored every bite, but as slowly as I ate, there would still come the moment when my Big Mac was gone. And I knew that however much we fought, my sister loved me because she would make the ultimate sacrifice—in my mind at least—and give me the last bite of her Big Mac. That, ladies and gentleman, is one definition of true love.

Shedonna was always a great student, but I never liked school. I thought it was kind of stupid, and I was always speaking my mind and getting in trouble. For the third grade we were bused to a mostly white school in Buckhead, one of Atlanta’s fanciest neighborhoods. One day the teacher was lecturing us about George Washington and I raised my hand.

“Why can’t we talk about Martin Luther King?” I said.

I guess the teacher wasn’t used to being challenged by a little black kid, so she didn’t have much of an answer. She said something about that’s not what we were studying and that Martin Luther King didn’t come from this neighborhood.

“Well, neither did George Washington!” I said.

The only good thing I remember about that class was that I met a kid my age named André Benjamin, who was also bused up from the Southwest. He would play a big role in my life later on, when I met him again in high school, and later as part of the Dungeon Family and a member of OutKast. But then he was just Dré, who used to get teased because his mother would smear Vaseline on his face every day before school. Teasing was something I already knew about.

There were many times growing up in the Dirty South when I wondered if the big mistake was not my father dying so young but me being born at all. My body was too short, my head was too big, I was strange and I dressed different, so I would get picked on. Sometimes I felt like I was just one big mistake. And there were people along the way who took one look at me and told me that I looked like a mistake too. For a long time, I didn’t know if I had any purpose for being here. I looked different and I felt different.

I was always trying to test the theory that I was a mistake of some sort. You know the RCA dog they called Nipper, how he cocked his head and gave that quizzical look. As I got older, I could see people giving me that Nipper look from every direction. I got used to that look. It wasn’t really hate—it was more like “he’s peculiar.” And I wasn’t dumb—I could feel confusion from people then. I can feel it now. And I’m still just as determined as I ever was. And I still in an instant would protect and defend my right to be exactly who I am.

I know now that I am not a mistake, that I have a purpose
and a gift from the Creator. But that’s a big statement for me, and it took a long time for me to get there.

The truth is that just like the voices on the radio helped me find my voice, television taught me everything I ever really needed to know about the world. It gave me a vocabulary, it showed me how to talk to people. The way that I see it I have always been a bit like that strange, little blond girl staring at the TV set in
Poltergeist
. That little girl was me—and I look just like her too, don’t I? All kidding aside, growing up TV was my favorite teacher, and too often it was my best friend as well. Television was shelter, and security, and solace—all of it broadcast straight into my home in color—wherever my home was at the moment. For me, TV always seemed supernatural and extraordinary, yet it was accessible to anyone who paid enough attention. Trust me, I’ve always paid full attention to the TV—unlike I did to the poor teachers at school.

They say we are all created equal. Well, we may all be equal in opportunity but we are not in ability, and for some reason, I have always had this odd—sometimes very odd—ability to focus. I was never much for the skill sets in reading, writing, or arithmetic. Those studies somehow left me cold. Yet there is a skill set to focusing too, and it’s one I acquired early. First, I focused on those voices in my head. Next, I focused on how people acted on TV, and I tried to act and communicate like they did. I’ve always been a sponge—a big sponge soaking up everything that
I’m exposed to and somehow making it my own in the process. There have been many times in my life when I have come across as rude to the people around me just because my focus can get so intense when I’m watching or listening to something. I don’t mean it that way. Please don’t blame me for it—it’s who I am. For better and for worse, I am a true product of pop culture.

In retrospect, I think a lot of people use television and the radio to shut life out, but as a child, I did precisely the opposite. For me, music and then television were my windows into what a better life could potentially sound or look like. Sometimes they were the only windows I could see through. I learned to speak well by watching the characters I loved on TV just as I learned how to sing from all the men on the radio. But what I learned from the songs I heard and the shows I watched went way beyond that. They taught me about walking and talking—the rhythm of life, which if you think about it is very percussive. Everything I heard on the radio and saw on TV became the music of my mind that I’m still listening to closely. I’m always thinking in circles and patterns, and cursive calligraphy. I always see these beautiful things in my mind—like my life is one long-running TV show with a fiercely moving theme song that I’m still writing.

I love great TV theme songs. I especially loved the
Soap
theme, and of course there were more famous theme songs like
Sanford & Son
’s, for which the all-time genius Quincy Jones was responsible. I just found out recently that Quincy did
Ironside
too—and I loved that one. Not
long ago, I was talking about great TV shows with my country
Voice
buddy Blake Shelton and for some reason he asked me if I remembered
Benson
. I immediately began singing the theme song from memory because those old shows hit very deep with me. They weren’t just sitcoms to me—they were life; they were an escape and an alternate reality that seemed a little more predictable and stable than my own.

Big Gipp:
I grew up in neighborhood where Jean Carne lived. She was one of the biggest seventies’ stars. In Atlanta in that time, you had Gladys Knight, Jean Carne, Peabo Bryson, all these soul stars of the seventies. They would shop at the mall on Saturdays with no bodyguards, not like today. We saw all the wrestling stars too. We never thought of it as “us” and “them.” It was “we,” all mixed together. It helped with building the scene at the time.

In the eighties there were only a few record labels, and most music was local. We didn’t really turn into a real music city until the nineties, when L.A. Reid and Babyface came to town. It changed the city, and the attitude of people who wanted to be in music. All of a sudden Whitney Houston showed up in Atlanta, and Bobby Brown was around. And now we were seeing actual stars and artists doing it—right now. So we felt like—hey, this is our time! We thought, we don’t have to make music for the locals anymore, let’s make music for everybody. All of us were coming up together—the girls in TLC lived down the street from me all their lives. Rico Wade stayed up the street. Dallas Austin was the first breakout star from Atlanta, leaving school at sixteen and moving to Los Angeles. It was like,
Yo
! We got actual people that we grew up with who are making
actual waves in the music business! So it helped with us formulating who we wanted to be. Dallas came first, then came Jermaine Dupri. His father was a big rap promoter and brought Fresh Prince and some New York acts to Atlanta. So we saw the best. But because we were raised to think for ourselves, when our generation started making music, we never just followed what other artists were doing. I feel like it’s where we come from that makes us go to the studio thinking we can change somebody’s life.

My tastes in life and in music have always been unusually varied. In the beginning, I was introduced to music by the greats—by those soulful voices on the radio that became my first father figures. Then gradually, slowly but surely, I discovered the music of my own generation—all kinds of music. My uncle Ricky was an amateur DJ with a huge record collection. I would spend hours and hours over at his place, listening to the music and memorizing everything on the record labels and jackets—writers, producers, sidemen, everything. My knowledge became deep and encyclopedic—and ecumenical. Soon there were all sorts of other voices that spoke to me—like Prince, who blew my mind wide open then and still does every time I hear him. Or Michael Jackson, who worshipped Jackie Wilson and James Brown too, and had learned their lessons way before me and then created something all his
own that will live forever. And don’t even get me started talking about the genius of Stevie Wonder, Marvin Gaye, Bobby Womack, and Sly Stone. Then there were all the rockier voices that spoke to me too, like Mick Jagger singing “Miss You” with the Rolling Stones. I loved singing along with “Miss You” so much that when I think back, I’m pretty sure I must have been missing someone pretty badly myself. I also loved Boy George and Culture Club and Duran Duran—and we should never forget Kiss.

Kiss scared the shit out of me growing up, and you have to study and examine what scares you because it means that on some level it connects with you. So I was frightened, but I was locked in, because you couldn’t miss them and you could never forget them. They created a sort of comic book version of rock and roll and that was right up my alley. I had a Kiss lunch box for a while. I also had a Bee Gees lunch box. I love the Bee Gees too. At the same exact time, I loved George Clinton too, and still do. I’ve always been drawn to artists who will go to extremes to spare your soul and blow the cobwebs out of your mind, the ones who change the game and redefine the rules. I am a student of that.