Despite his stage fright, Rasheed Jamal always seemed to find himself in the spotlight as a kid: in a class for gifted students, being asked to write poems and perform in after-school plays, and—as the only Black kid available—even tapped to perform a rap song for his school’s 92nd anniversary celebration. “I didn’t know shit about rapping,” Jamal says. “Legitimately bro, I just acted like Kahlil from Bébé’s Kids and ended up on the front page of the paper for rapping.
During one Thanksgiving weekend, Jamal went to Houston with his granddaddy, where his cousin Patrick had a CD player with a tape recorder. During black Friday, they bought a Cash Money instrumental CD at the mall. “He put a blank tape in there,” Jamal says. “And I didn’t want to rap, I had that block where I didn’t want to, you know, look stupid. And [Patrick] started rapping about me being scared to rap. It felt too much like a challenge man, so we was up until like two or three o’clock in the morning rapping. And after that I got bit with the bug.”
