|
 Lloyd
Banks is unsatisfied. Unsatisfied, despite having an incredibly
successful 2003. A 2003 where he was crowned the street's number one
artist, appeared on the year's top-selling record, and sold another 2
million-plus copies of an album with his own rap troupe. Lloyd Banks is
so unsatisfied he's titled his G-Unit/Interscope Records debut The
Hunger For More.
"When I say The Hunger For More, it could be referring to more success,"
says Banks, the lyrical submachine gun of 50 Cent's G-Unit arsenal. "It
could be more money. Or respect. More power. More understanding. All
those things lead up to that hunger for more, because my 'more' isn't
everybody else's 'more.' I feel like I made it already, because I
already got what everybody on the corners of the neighborhood I grew up
in is striving to get. God forbid anything happen to me, my family is
straight. So anything that happens after this is just me progressing as
a person."
Lloyd
Banks Links
Banks's
personal progression is seen throughout his debut album, especially on
numbers like the soul-dipped "When The Chips Are Down," which features
the Game; and the Eminem-produced "Til The End," an elegiac meditation
on mortality tinged with twinkling keys and bolstered by choral
flourishes. On the other end of the musical spectrum is the
arena-rocking "Playboy" the festive "Heart Of Southside," which features
G-Unit member Young Buck and horns bigger than your speakers; and the
melodically cacophonous "Perfect Match," where Banks teams up with
Brooklyn's Fabolous to exchange pearled strings of witty bon mots geared
at the fairer sex. The Hunger For More's first single, the
party-starting "On Fire" proves that Banks's music is at home in the
clubs as it is the streets. "My record follows the same format of Get
Rich Or Die Tryin' and Beg For Mercy, but it's just me so it's a whole
different sound," says Banks. "I got all new producers. I'd rather break
a producer than do what everybody else does. There's no guarantee that a
big-name producer is gonna give you that hit record. You can pay
$100,000 for one song; there's no guarantee that it's gonna be that one.
It's only what you make it. And that's what I'm gonna show everyone."
Lloyd Banks was born Christopher Lloyd 22 years ago and raised in
Jamaica, Queens. "My mom is Puerto Rican, my pops is black," he informs.
"It was kinda like when I was with my mother's side of the family I was
the bad seed, I was the one who was most unlikely to succeed. And then
when I was with the black side of the family, I was the angel, because
all my uncles are career felons." His parents were young and never
married. And his father, who chose to pursue tax-free income on the
streets, spent more time behind bars then he did with his son. That left
his mother to raise a young man who was close to 6 feet tall by the 6th
grade and who started sprouting facial hair in his early teens. "My
mother showed me everything," Banks says. "When I was in the 3rd grade,
she took a cucumber and showed me how to put the condom on." Like many
kids in the inner city his age, Banks sought to escape the poverty and
death of his environment.
Early on he took to writing various musings--ghetto poetry, loose
narratives, nothing quite structured, though he was influenced by rap
gods like Big Daddy Kane and Slick Rick. "I listened to Big Daddy Kane a
lot, cause that's what my pops listened to," he says. Banks's favorite
songs were Rick's "Young World" and Kane's "Smooth Operator," and "Ain't
No Half-Steppin'." High school didn't agree with Banks, so he dropped
out before his 16th birthday. The freewriting he had been doing had
morphed into full-fledged rhymes, but that was a secret. "I never let
nobody know I did it," he says. But he soon got his courage up. "I
started rhyming outside and everybody started telling me, 'You should
shop your material.' This is before I even got in the studio."
Banks appeared on local mixtapes, becoming one of the neighborhood's
best unsigned rappers. His only competition was a childhood friend named
Tony Yayo. One day, Tony, along with another childhood friend who rapped
under the name 50 Cent, approached Banks with the idea of becoming a
group. If Banks wanted to be down, he could be part of the crew that
they were calling G-Unit. Banks was down. "I always felt like if I was
to get into doing rap professionally, I wanted to get into it with
somebody who was from my neighborhood," he says. "Who better than people
who I've known my whole life?"
Fronted by 50 Cent, G-Unit quickly redefined the urban music industry.
They produced a series of street albums with original numbers and
high-quality artwork, making the discs something more than a bootleg,
but not quite an independent release. 50 Cent was soon signed to
Shady/Aftermath/Interscope Records and released the instantly classic,
record-breaking Get Rich Or Die Tryin', on which Banks was featured.
Then came G-Unit's Beg For Mercy, which was still riding high in the top
20 of the Billboard 200 after four months on the shelves. Though these
successes allowed Lloyd Banks to tour the world multiple times over, one
accomplishment means a bit more than all the rest: Earlier this year,
Banks was anointed as 2003's Mixtape Artist Of The Year due to his
appearance on G-Unit mixtapes as well as his own Money In The Bank
series.
"I take pride in that, 'cause I'm not qualified for an MTV Award or a
Vibe Award or a Grammysor any of that yet," says Banks. "I got my name
through the mixtapes. That's why people know Lloyd Banks today. That's
where it built from. I skipped what a lot of rappers have to go through
to get put on. I skipped Making The Band, I skipped [106 & Park's]
'Freestyle Fridays,' the Lyricist Lounge--I skipped all that. I made my
name on the mixtapes, on the streets. And that's the hardest thing to
get right there."
Despite so many things going his way, Lloyd Banks is not prepared to
take it easy. "People will tell me all the time, 'Look at your setup.
You're guaranteed to make it.' I get upset when I hear that. Ain't
nobody guaranteed nothing. I feel like they're looking at the situation
wrong, 'cause I don't take advantage of nobody. I don't work less
because you're working harder. I work real, real hard even though I know
50's there. He's there, he supports me 110 percent, but I don't want to
put no extra pressure on him when I can do it. At the end of the day, I
find myself working twice as hard."
Working twice as hard and still hungry. |
