Lil Boosie raps about what he knows: struggle. The emcee, also known as Boosie Badazz, has endured plenty of it—a childhood in poverty-stricken Baton Rouge, Louisiana, where the homicide rate is nearly three times that of Los Angeles; a grassroots hip-hop career that's seen him release over 1,000 songs, slowly gathering recognition as one of Southern rap's most beloved rappers; and a five-year prison stint at the Louisiana State Penitentiary at Angola on account of drug possession followed by murder charges. Boosie was found not guilty of murder, but the trial saw his own lyrics and videos introduced as evidence against him. "The stuff I rap about is what I've seen, you know?" Boosie, who was released from prison in March of last year, says over the phone from Atlanta. "That's basically why I rap more about the struggle than the shine and all that. Because I've seen more struggle than anything. Even when I had plenty money it was still a struggle. That's where my struggle music comes from: from life stories and life situations."
To his fans, the 32-year-old Boosie is a hero. He's a real-life phoenix representing the power of transformative passion and persistence. His hard-edged music connects with listeners fed up with racial injustice, economic imprisonment, and systemic subordination. "When I talk about [those subjects] I reach a lot of people that was in the situation I was in," he says. "When you touch those kind of people it's like you they family. It's like you grew up with them. The music is so deep... They worship you. You really touch their heart. You're saying something that happened in they family, that happened to them. And that touch people."
Boosie, who signed a three-year recording deal with Atlantic Records while still in prison and has his much-anticipated sixth studio album Touch Down 2 Cause Hell out this week, has been the soundtrack to demonstrations against police abuse in cities across the country. Protesters in the streets of Ferguson, Missouri, could be heard rapping Boosie's 2009 track "Fuck the Police" (a title almost identical to the '80s NWA anthem) off his fantastic mixtape Superbad: The Return of Mr. Wipe Me Down.
Ask Boosie how he feels about being called the "people's rapper" by his friend in a recent Playboy profile, and he says it's a natural result of channeling his own hardships into the music. "Basically that's me seeing what's going on in the world and not liking it and speaking about it. That's just Boosie." That doesn't mean he limits himself to any one kind of subject matter, however: "Shit, my uncle could steal from me and I'mma go in [the recording booth] and talk about it," he says. "That's just me being real with it."
Born Torrence Hatch to a mother who was a public-school teacher and a father who was a construction worker and street hustler, Boosie first gained notoriety in the music industry in 2000 as a member of the Baton Rouge rap crew Concentration Camp. Soon after, at 18, he released his solo debut, Youngest of da Camp. On the heels of its success, Boosie signed with respected local record label Trill Entertainment, an outfit helmed by Baton Rouge entrepreneurs Turk and Mel, who were affiliated with UGK's Pimp C. In the following years, the prolific, nasal-voiced Boosie released a barrage of genre-bending, critically-acclaimed tracks and projects. In the process he even popularized the now-ubiquitous term "ratchet."
While in prison, from 2010 to 2014, Boosie's mainstream popularity skyrocketed. As he was locked up, a "Free Boosie" movement exploded. Thousands celebrated his release last year ("I was hearing about the Boosie movement... but me seeing it with my own eyes was a whole other thing"). And now major hip-hop stars from Rick Ross to Jeezy and Chris Brown are appearing on his new album.
"When they got to using my lyrics, I was just thinking, 'This ain't fair.'"That didn't make his prison sentence any easier. During his time at Angola, Boosie was hardly concerned with his music career. "That never worried me," he says. "I was just trying to get out. I'd have a dollar on not coming home before I had a dollar on my music. I knew one thing, though: They ain't have nothing on me on all these cases they were throwing on me. They ain't have nothing on me. I was just hoping my past ain't get me convicted. Videos of me showing guns all the time and the young things I was doing, I was just hoping that ain't convict me.
"When they got to using my lyrics, I was just thinking, 'This ain't fair.' I thought we had a freedom-of-speech law. Damn, Johnny Cash said he 'shot a man down in Folsom Prison just to watch him die' and he ain't get in trouble. Bob Marley said he 'shot the sheriff.' He ain't get indicted."
Boosie is the first to insist his time spent in prison was not in vain. "Jail just made me wiser," he says. "It made me smarter. It made me wake up to a lot of stuff. And also it made me a better businessman. I had to learn the music business. It just made me a better person as far as the way I live."
It's been argued that Boosie's imprisonment was the direct effect of Louisiana having an overly harsh imprisonment policy, and more specifically, a stringent drug policy. The state's habitual-offender law, which doles out a mandatory prison sentence of "natural life" without parole to those convicted of three felonies (the category for many drug offenses), has been widely criticized. It's a system Boosie describes as promoting "Jim Crow laws." "We got real penitentiary laws that's crazy," he says. To that end, Boosie left his native Louisiana, the state where he's worshiped as a local hero by his followers and, in his eyes, demonized by his detractors as "public enemy number one." Atlanta is his new home, for now anyway. "It's basically 'cause of what I went through in Louisiana," he says of his retreat to Georgia. "That's why I left. That's no place you want to live. Period. There's too much going on. It's just like middle school and high school: You've got to graduate. I had to get up out there. I had to come to a place where music is the main thing, you know?"
Now finding himself a free man, and arguably at the height of his popularity, all while revealing his biggest album to date, Boosie can't help but feel grateful despite the obstacles he's overcome. "Can't nothing really piss me off right now," he says with a laugh. "I feel so good, man. I've been waiting on this album to drop. I had to go through a lot of stuff. This is a real project. It's a deep album. I wanted people to feel my pain."
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