Just as much as something like Wu-Tang, Cash Money came into the public eye fully-formed, a snowball already halfway down the mountain. In that time, Cash Money became a sound, an aesthetic, a viewpoint, a visual sensibility, and maybe even a philosophy. In that time, they went from bounce music, New Orleans’ distinctly local form of chant-along dance music, to rap that simply sounded a lot like bounce music, adapting its cadences and catcalls. The New Orleans label had been spending seven years developing by the time most of us got to hear what they were doing. Unless I’m forgetting something, Jay wouldn’t show up on another Cash Money record until a decade later, when he and Lil Wayne made “Mr. On that “Ha” remix, Jay was clumsy and ungainly, sounding like a tourist trying to ask for directions while flipping through a foreign-language dictionary. Jay was the first non-New Orleans artist ever to show up on a Cash Money track, and his voice immediately stood out, but not in the good way. The last song on 400 Degreez, Juvenile’s third album and the first record that his label Cash Money released as part of its deal with Universal, ended with a remix of “Ha” that featured Jay-Z. The Jay-Z of 1998 had that same bloodhound sensibility that Drake has now - the power of knowing when a movement is cresting and realizing that he should get himself involved. 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.
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.
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