In 95 he moved back to New Orleans and started signing every rapper he could find, amassing an unwieldy roster of varying talent. Master P started NL in Richmond, California in the early 1990s. And second, I found that CMR usually picked the best songs to be singles, while NL singles were often much less interesting than tracks buried deep in the albums’ tracklists. I had to actively search for slower CMR tracks, and faster NL tracks. Ordering the tracks I was considering for this mix by BPM meant that the two label’s material would have basically been split evenly into two halves. First, NL songs are, on average, much slower than CMR songs.
Here are a few material things I learned while selecting songs, and then some reasons as to why I think these things are the case. In actually sitting down to make this mix, I’ve developed a new sense of this history, without regard for the sensationalized beef that a clueless white teenager from the Bay Area had no understanding of, or access to. Shortly after, No Limit released Snoop Dogg’s No Limit Top Dogg, probably his best for the label, but by then many fans, including my friends and myself, had felt the power shift away from the Tank. Dick’s insufferable R&B marathon Gangsta Harmony and Boot Camp, by Lil Soldiers, a novelty duo composed of one seven and one nine year old rapper, which is as repellant as you think it is. At the beginning of ’99 they were still moving at that pace, but April’s two releases were Mo B. Throughout 1998, the label put out twenty three albums, averaging one almost every two weeks. Unfortunately for this narrative I’m half-remembering/half-inventing, that April wasn’t a strong month for No Limit. No Limit Records had been dominant in mainstream rap music since the release of Master P’s Ghetto D in 1997, while Cash Money was still a strictly regional label with almost no distribution outside of Louisiana. In hindsight, that was the only period during which that rivalry actually felt like it could go either way. In my personal life, the album kicked off the spring and summer of 99’s most active debate among my high school friend group-No Limit vs. Although it followed Cash Money Records’s breakout hit, Juvenile’s 400 Degreez, by six months, it was B.G.’s album that confirmed the label’s takeover of southern hip hop by demonstrating that “Back That Azz Up” wasn’t an accident, and that the Hoy Boy$ had more than one member with star potential. In an effort to manufacture a timely explanation for why I made this mix-the likeliest actual reason being a mid-30s nostalgia that I’d rather leave unexamined-I discovered that this month marks the twentieth anniversary of the release of B.G.’s s Chopper City in the Ghetto. When he’s not lecturing on UNLV at UNLV, William Hutson is a producer in the excellent rap group Clipping. To help us buy a gold tank or at least survive in the modern click-bait and corporate media world, please donate to our Patreon.