Unruly by Ja Rule

conference room smoking and we were glad to join him. We would talk as often as we could. Since we were young, Gil schooled us on the business. He talked to us about his ups and downs in the business. I value the time we spent with him and I will never forget it.
    We were all sitting in his office around his little round desk. “I like your sound. And, I like your name,” Steve said with a silly white-boy grin, his bare feet propped up on the desk, wiggling his toes.
    Although he never said it, I realized that Steve liked the idea that we were hustlers, which would give TVT the street credibility they wanted.
    Everyone at TVT sat on the same floor so the office was kind of boring. There was no creative vibe in there at all. The A&R guys were sitting right next to the lawyers. Everything was white in the office, especially Steve and his staff. Steve was a different kind of dude. He was one of those white hippie kids who looked like a hippie but his looks were deceiving because he went to Yale undergrad and Harvard Law School. All I knew about him was that he was going to give us money and a video. The rest didn’t matter.
    â€œ Get the Fortune, muthafuck the fame,” was the first line of the rhyme that we had been working on. My verse started:
    Don’t risk it, Ja Rule’s known for makin fat shit
    Fully-loaded clip, usin’ wax for targets
    Rattattat, rewind the DAT, Black
    I got your mind wide open and your wig pushed back
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    GOTTI WAS PROUD when he presented us with a stack of small-print contracts and a $10,000 check to be split evenly between the three of us. All of us were high as fuck as we posed with Steve and Irv for our signing photograph. The photo would go under a similar picture with Irv and Mic Geronimo. Mic and Cash Money Click would be the only rap artists at TVT. There was a lot of history at TVT. That’s where I first met Treach and Trent Reznor from Nine Inch Nails. Trent was trying to get off TVT. He was telling us how much of a thief Steve was.
    Steve missed out on signing many acts. TVT could have been Def Jam. Many rappers approached TVT before going to Def Jam, which was becoming an institution. TVT was independent and an ideal place for a startup rather than going to Warner or Universal to get your stuff placed. Steve passed on Dr. Dre’s The Chronic . He passed on Snoop, The Lady of Rage, Jay-Z and DMX. All of that was brought to his desk before it went anywhere else. He eventually went on to lose me and Nine Inch Nails. Steve didn’t get it. He wasn’t in tune with the culture.
    Black, O and me all laughed our asses off at the TVT check when we left the meeting. That $3,300 each was no fortune to us. We were already pulling down decent money on the streets. The three of us finally decided what would make the most sense would be for us to buy $10,000 worth of crack and flip it. Then, we would all make some real paper.
    We would release our first single with “4 My Click” as the A-side and “Get tha Fortune” as our B-side. We would get two videos out of the deal, not just one. We didn’t have money to shoot the video the way we wanted to for “Get tha Fortune.” They only gave us $10,000 to sign, so it can be imagined what the budget was to shoot the video. The budget was low, low, low. We were on a shoestring budget, but we had plans to get around that.
    Gotti was friends with Hype Williams. He had done videos with Jodeci, Mary, and Busta. Hype was the man. We were all from Queens. Gotti asked Hype for a favor.
    â€œWe got this new group. We need to do two videos because we want to do a video for the B-side, too.”
    Hype said he’d make it happen. He was shooting a video for Mary J. Blige, “Be Happy.” This was a big-budget video. Hype “borrowed” some of the film so we could have 35mm film to shoot with, instead of the low-budget 16mm film. We made it happen. We shot “Get tha fortune.”