Slim Thug loves his occupation, but hates his job. You know, the same way a painter may love to create, but dreads trying to sell IT. Or the way truck driver loves the feeling he gets when sitting behind the wheel, but loathes having to drive across the country at the drop of a dime. That’s the way Slim Thug feels right now. “I like rapping, but I don’t like the bullshit,” he says matter-of-factly sitting inside the lobby of Atlanta’s 95.5 The Beat. “It’s a lot of bullshit that comes along with it. Everybody in the business has to do a lot of politicking. It stifles creativity, makes you not want to do it.” He pauses, shrugging off any notion of impending frustration. “Say you got a song that you fuck with, that you know will go. But you’re working with a bunch of people who ain’t from where you’re from, don’t know shit about anything you ever did. They just feel like they know what they’re talking about. So you go in there with the record you believe in and want to push, they don’t have to do nothing. You can give them the record and they don’t send it
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nowhere, don’t put their machine behind it at all. So it looks like the song ain’t work when really they ain’t push it.” “The bullshit” is a term that way too many rappers are familiar with. Though it can be applied to relationships with friends, dealings with groupies or squabbles with other rappers, it’s mostly used when describing being signed to a label that does little more than stamp their logo on the album. It’s almost as if the header on their contracts say just that, “The Bullshit.” The ones who manage to have careers A.B. (After Bullshit) are few and far between. Rap A.B. usually ends with either your face on a milk carton or your name being at the bad end of a “what happened to” question.
released Slim’s Already Platinum, an album chock-full of high priced beats and features. The album didn’t exactly live up to the lofty title. The years that followed saw numerous delays of his sophomore album Boss of All Bosses and an eventual split from the conglomerate. Since the split Slim has returned to his independent roots and inked a distribution deal with Koch Records for his Boss Hogg Outlawz label and group. After releasing two installments of BHO’s Serve & Collect series, Slim is stepping back out on the solo front.
For Slim, “The Bullshit” explains his stint at Interscope Records. After a half-decade of building his own buzz and brand via his affiliation with Swisha House and his own Boss Hogg Outlawz collective, the mega-label came knocking and came up with the idea of pairing him with uberproducer Pharrell and his Star Trak imprint.
Boss of All Bosses has been a long time coming. What all have you been up to since Already Platinum? Yeah, man. I really wanna se my artists [Boss Hogg Outlawz] be successful, so I was taking my time trying to promote them. At the same time I was trying to get off of Interscope. Now that I got that out of the way it’s time to drop another album. My whole dream is to see my artists surpass my success. If I can have my artists get hot and sell records, I’m cool. That’s what I’m in the game to see.
Hoping to cash in on the Houston Takeover that Slim’s appearance on Mike Jones’ breakout single “Still Tippin’” helped spark, Interscope quickly
Is the material on your album new, or is it leftovers from the Interscope days? Most of the leaks ain’t on the album, maybe 1 or