Juvenile Hell

Photo by Peter Sutherland.

Out here on the East Coast, all MCs want to do is get signed. It’s like a race to see which sucker is going to be the next Fabolous. Our man Littles, however, would turn down just about any record deal. First he stole the show on the last two Mobb Deep projects, with a distinctive voice that sits somewhere between Slick Rick and Shyne. Then he concocted a business plan that’s so Master P, it’s almost punk rock. He reinvested his royalty money into single-handedly booking a 30-date tour for the Mobb, and then used all the contacts to independently sell his grimalicous debut CD, The Feeding. But it wasn’t always dandelions and roses for the most on-point rapper north of the Mississippi. We caught Littles reminiscing about his days as a juvenile delinquent and a rapping career that began in the unfortunately named Coxsackie, New York. VICE: So before getting locked up, rapping wasn’t your thing?
Littles: Nah, it was when I was in a maximum-security jail upstate that I built my reputation as a rapper. I was in a box for a year straight, 23 hours locked in, one hour out of that cage for air. Here I am, seventeen years old, in state clothes, locked in a ten-by-ten-foot cell with a bed, a fucking metal toilet, and a metal sink. So I started writing. When I would go to the yards, there was people crazy rhyming. Battle rhymes— that’s jail, you know what I mean? At first I was getting chewed up and spit out. Then a few people that was better than me moved on to other jails, so I just took over. I would write three or four rhymes every night and try to memorize them shits. Then I moved to another jail, Franklin, and that was my spot. No one could fuck with me over there. And back home, the Mobb would hear about it. Actually, for five whole years [Mobb Deep’s] Havoc was my only male visitor, out of everyone I ran with in the streets. You used to run with Hav’s deceased older brother, the legendary Killa Black, right?
Right. We was getting money together at a young age. I was living the life that rappers portray in their rhymes when I was fifteen. That was around the time when Reebok Pumps came out. On any given day, we would come out at like four in the morning and stay until early in the afternoon. At around three o’clock, that’s when the kids come out, so we would leave because we didn’t really want to sell drugs while kids were getting on the school bus. We would hide our guns in the garbage cans and stash the drugs in the grass. We had thousand-dollar packs scattered in different parts of the grass. By the time my shift was over, I would have sold, like, $12,000 worth of crack. So it was everyday gunplay.
We wore guns like belts. Sometimes, I would walk out of the house and forget I had a gun on me. And the Ds [detectives] would be right there, so I’d be like, “Oh shit, let me back in!” My first case was shooting at cops, as far as me going to Riker’s Island. I had just turned sixteen. We didn’t have any respect for life, man, nor for our freedom. We didn’t even know that word. When I was laying in my cell for all them years, I would get goose bumps from all the shit we used to do. That’s why I don’t see myself ever going back to selling drugs. I’m not leaving this rap game. And The Feeding is just one of the bullets that’s coming out of my clip. BUSTA NUT
The Feeding, which includes a bonus DVD, is out now at your local mom & pop.