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For a while there, Rap City was playing it every single day. It’s fascinating and immersive and overwhelming, and it remains one of the best music videos ever made. The video shows such a collision of money and desolation that your brain can get whiplash just watching it. Juvenile wears crispy white clothes and stands in puddles, staring the camera down. It’s a visual tone poem, a meditation on snakes and boarded-up houses and above-ground graveyards and neon-color Porsches and ambulance lights and air-conditioner sweat and yellowing eyes. The song’s music video, from director Marc Klasfeld, turned Juvenile’s New Orleans into a whole world unto itself. It was a James Brown grunt, a simple verbal emphasis: “You brought our tape with a check, ha / You wearin’ a vest, ha / You tryin’ to protect your chest, ha.” Over a beat that sounded like an evil robot’s spicy-food-before-bed nightmare, Juvenile, his New Orleans drawl a mile deep, mercilessly clowned some mysterious, all-pervading “you.” The “Ha” of the title wasn’t a laugh.
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This album, of course, made Juvenile a superstar and, in turn, towered over him for years as the achievement by which he would always be measured.In the fall of 1998, a 23-year-old rapper named Juvenile had erupted out of nowhere - or, more specifically, out of the CJ Peete housing projects in New Orleans - with a song so profoundly, overwhelmingly Southern that it felt like a transmission from some other, much funkier alien civilization. All of this, along with perfect timing, dropping just as the Dirty South broke into the mainstream, made 400 Degreez a phenomenal release for Cash Money, quite arguably the label's crowning achievement. In particular, 'Flossin Season' features some incredibly brash boasts from the Big Tymers, and 'Rich Niggaz' features an absolutely frantic beat that ricochets on for five breathtaking minutes. Among the singles and the filler here, there are also a few great album tracks as well. And, yes, there is filler here, as with any Cash Money album, but even it is worthwhile, either because of Juvenile's carefully structured rhyming or producer Mannie Fresh's seemingly bottomless well of hot beats. These four highlights - 'Ha,' 'Back That Azz Up,' and the 'Ha' remixes - break up the album, somewhat concealing the filler. Moreover, two remixes of 'Ha' come late on the album, one with the Hot Boys, the other with Jay-Z.
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They're absolutely two of the best songs to come out of the late-'90s Dirty South boom. But nothing prepared anyone for the success of 400 Degreez, particularly its two anthemic singles, the tongue-twisting 'Ha' and the booty-calling 'Back That Azz Up.' These two songs alone make 400 Degreez noteworthy. Before 400 Degreez, Cash Money had been operating relatively well, securing a distribution deal with Universal and broadening its audience with every successive release. Hot Boys - Guerrilla Warfare (Full Album) 98.84MB - 1:10:17Īmong the flurry of Cash Money releases during the late '90s, 400 Degreez certainly stands out, and not just as Juvenile's shining moment but also as the album that forced everyone to suddenly take this Dirty South collective very seriously.