Juvenile says his decision to join Cash Money was primarily based on, well, money.
During a recent interview with VladTV, the New Orleans native spoke about the time he was approached by label boss Birdman, who was initially hesitant to meet his demands. Juvenile said he was getting off work and waiting at the bus stop when Birdman pulled up and offered him a ride: “They drove me home, and that drive home changed everything,” he recalled.
“I was coming from work, and I had my hard hat and my fire-retardant suit on. And somebody’s like, ‘Man, what kind job do you got?’” the rapper said. “I’m like, ‘Man, I’m working on plants, you know, backwards and forwards.’ I was for Onsite Environmental, and I’m like, ‘Man, I do turnarounds, and stuff like that.’ And they was like, ‘You makin’ money?’ And I said, ‘Yeah I’m making a lot of money. Enough money to not want to quit my job to rap.’”
Juvenile told Birdman he was still making music, but it wasn’t his priority as he had to make ends meet.
“Rapping wasn’t paying the bills,” he recalled. “I said, ‘Look, if you can pay me two grand a week, I’ll quit my job. Matter of fact, I’ll take a leave of absence right now and just start going to the studio,’” he recalled, adding they didn’t want to make the deal right then and there. “But I guess he really couldn’t sleep on it. He called me back the next morning and said, ‘Look, it’s a deal.’ … We took it from there.”
Juvenile, who signed with Cash Money in the mid-1990s, said he had joined the label at a time when it was going through some big changes. He told DJ Vlad that at the time of his deal, Cash Money had dropped all of their artists except for two.
“When they signed me, they let all the artist on the label go, and kept B.G. and Lil Wayne,” Juvenile said. “So, the day I walked in was the day that a lot of the artists that they had, that they were have their success with, they let them go. They were tellin’ us, ‘This the new Cash Money. This the new wave, we about to do something big.’ I’m looking around like, ‘What happened to everybody?’ … They knew what they was talking about.”
You can check out Juvenile’s full comments above.
