The rapper was raised on Rakim (“He was my first professor,” Mac says) and sounded like a New York transplant, layering complex rhyme patterns to tell everyman stories about growing up in New Orleans. By 1996, he was an official member of No Limit Records, the hottest label in America.Īrtistically, though, the move didn’t make a lot of sense.
#No limits for mac free
Master P was scooping up talent across the city and Mac was a top free agent. Victory at a local talent show landed him a deal with Yo! Records, where at the age of 13 he’d release his album The Lyrical Midget, produced by then-relatively unknown Mannie Fresh in 1990.īy the late ’90s, New Orleans was becoming the unlikely rap capital of the world, thanks to the business acumen of Master P and his No Limit Records roster of Mia X, C-Murder, Mystikal and the California transplant Snoop Dogg. A product of the Broadmoor neighborhood in Uptown, Mac started writing rhymes in the ’80s, battling other kids and adults in the neighborhood. Mac, or “Lil Mac,” as he was known as a kid, was a New Orleans rap prodigy and one of hip-hop’s first child stars. From left to right: Nakiyah Imani Pearson, Khaliyah Ari Pearson, Angelique Phipps, McKinley Phipps, Chad Phipps, Tiffany Phipps-Cave, Sheila Phipps, McKinley Phipps Sr., Tybra Phipps, Joshua Phipps and Jeremy Phipps. The Phipps family gathers in Sheila Phipps’ art studio. When Phipps woke up, he decided to go ahead and perform. “I remember him sleeping and thinking ‘I could just let him sleep.’ I felt so guilty about waking him up.” “I think about that moment all the time,” Phipps Sr. Mac was asleep when his dad, Phipps Sr., came to get him to go to the show. He was scheduled to perform at a hole-in-the-wall venue, Club Mercedes in Slidell, Louisiana, about 90 minutes east of where he was living in Baton Rouge. The 22-year-old had just returned from doing shows in Mississippi and was about to embark on another tour. Phipps really didn’t want to perform on the night of Feb. The “down south Nas.” And the man who just got home after spending 21 years in prison for a murder Mac says he didn’t commit. This is the new normal for McKinley “Mac” Phipps, the gold-selling former No Limit Records artist. That session will get cut short to make sure he’s home for his mandatory 9 o’clock curfew. Then he’ll go to the studio to work on the music that will reintroduce him to the world. Afterward, Phipps will fiddle with the first iPhone he’s ever owned and try to coordinate picking up his teenage stepdaughters from summer school. In an hour, his manager is coming over to help fix a toilet and take him to his weekly meeting with his parole officer. Smooth’s 1994 album The Main Ingredient on his smart TV. The skinny 44-year-old with a salt-and-pepper goatee, gray sweatpants and a black T-shirt is listening to “I Get Physical” from Pete Rock and C.L. McKinley Phipps is sitting on the couch in the living room of his Uptown New Orleans house.
0 kommentar(er)
