Bryan "Birdman" Williams introduced New Orleans residents to high-end cars since he's the "#1 Stunna."
The Cash Money Records co-founder sat down with former NBA player Jalen Rose on podcast Renaissance Man, where around the 22:30 mark of the video above, Birdman got into the origins of his 'Stunna' nickname.
Birdman recalled that "#1 Stunna" came to him when a friend told him about the stunts on 1980s show MacGyver. "And it clicked, I said, 'I'm about to be the number-one stunna," he said.
The rapper and entreprenuer added that he also wanted to give his hometown a taste of his success. "Back then, we ain't really have shit," he said. "I said I'm about to change our identity of how we look at [...] We might've had one car, with no AC, you know, n****s riding with the windows down. I didn't understand why we had to have one car, one house."
Wanting more for his community, it was a trip to New York that kicked off Birdman's "bling bling" era, allowing him to buy cars for people in New Orleans.
“In New Orleans, we ain’t know nothing about none of that,” he said. “We ain’t know nothing about Rolls Royces and foreign whips. We wore Dickies suits, dope boys... that was normal for our city," he said.
He continued, "Honestly I went to New York and seen them n***as in foreign cars and all that shit [...] rocking big chains and I’m like, ‘Man, I’ma bring that shit down bottom.’ We ain’t never seen this shit down bottom, and that what influenced me, bro.”
Birdman shared that him and his crew were "treating cars like it was nothing," but still gave back to the people of New Orleans. “We wore Dickies suits, dope boys — that was normal for our city.”
"I bought 50 whips for everybody. $15,000 was the maximum [I spent] for some of them, but a couple of my partners, I spent a little more, but yeah, everybody in the project that had a license, I bought them a car."
The massive purchase probably didn't put a dent in Birdman's wallet, as he has a reported net worth of $150 million, per HotNewHipHop.
