Birdman has been in the rap game since forming Cash Money Records in 1991. But in a new interview, he has revealed a unique challenge during the label’s early years: raising two of his label’s artists, Lil Wayne and B.G., while he was still a young man.
A bit of context: Wayne (then known as “Baby D”) and B.G. (who rhymed under the name “Lil Doogie”) were signed to Cash Money in the early 1990s as a group called the B.G.’z. (B.G. would later take the group name as his own moniker). When the group’s debut album True Story was released in 1995, B.G. was 14 and Wayne was only 12.
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Birdman was reminiscing about those days in an interview excerpt that made its way to social media over the weekend. He recalled that, at one point during that era, both B.G. and Wayne were living with him.
You can see the clip below.
The interviewer began by prompting, “B.G. recorded his own album, Wayne came back, and he lived with you from then on out.” [Wayne’s mother famously ordered him to stop rapping when he was a pre-teen, which the young rapper took hard enough that he attempted suicide. In the aftermath of the incident, Wayne returned to the Cash Money fold.]
“B.G. was already living with me,” Birdman explained. “B.G.’s mom gave him to me.”
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“And you were at this point how old?” asked the interviewer.
“Seventeen, eighteen,” Birdman replied. “I was a kid. I was a baby raising babies.”
While the outlines of Birdman’s story certainly check out, most records, including newspaper accounts of old run-ins with the law, place the mogul’s birth year as 1969, making him 54 now — 13 years older than Wayne and 11 years older than B.G. This would place him somewhere between his early-mid twenties during Wayne and Gizzle’s early run as the B.G.’z.
Earlier this month, Birdman told another story about the early years of his historic label. He revealed on Clubhouse that he once tried to bring Cash Money to Rap-A-Lot’s J. Prince.
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“If n-ggas don’t know, I tried to sign with the old man [Prince] before I went to Universal,” Birdman said on Clubhouse. “I tried to sign with the old man. I respect the old man. He’s a great man, a respectable man, an honorable man. I have no ill feelings with the old man because he taught me so much and he taught me the game.
“I wanted to sign with J. Prince but he didn’t have the structure to sign me. What I respect about it, he said, ‘Y’all go do y’all because I can’t do it.’ That’s what I honored about it. He told me go ‘head man, I can’t do it.”
