EWA100 - #96. Master P - Bout It, Bout It II

96. Master P - Bout It Bout It II (No Limit/Priority. 1996. From The LP Ice Cream Man)

(Editor's Note: TRU's 'I'm Bout It Bout It' is basically the same song without the Mia X verse, so the TRU version also shares this spot, but I think the Master P/Mia X version is slightly more well known.)

Mike Dikk: This was probably Northern America’s first real introduction to Master P. I think his obnoxious Pen & Pixel ads in The Source and other various low grade Rap Magazines kind of predate this song, but this was his first real introduction nonetheless. From what I understand, this was basically a Southern Anthem for a while, but it was considered a novelty up north. We northerners still weren’t assimilated to hearing southern people rap, so this just sounded like gibberish back in the day. It was also a few years before No Limit "found" their own sound, so this is soaked in G-Funk, which we were all pretty fucking sick of by 1996. I don’t think the south had the internet yet, so no one bothered to tell them.
I’m not really sure what happened over the course of a few years to turn Master P from an example of rap comedy to some dude making 60 million dollars a year. I always admired him, because he seemed like a real smart dude businesswise who knew what to do to make money, but at the same time, seemed like a dude who should never, ever have that much money.
His business model was genius. Spending jack shit on production and mainstream advertising and churning out poor to mediocre tapes by dudes with ridiculous names every other week. That’s all it took! 60 million just like that! I guess he also invested a lot of the money in things like car dealerships and no budget straight to video "movies" that people who aren’t me apparently watched. Of course, he then went and spent his money on things like constructing a 4 million dollar solid gold bedroom for himself (which would later float away in Hurricane Katrina), starting up possibly the worst rapper related clothing line ever, designing a talking doll of himself, and making a real embarrassing attempt at becoming a pro basketball player. I still don’t know how that could account for losing that much money, but it happened somehow.
He was still a pioneer of sorts though. People to this day still try and duplicate the way he ran his label. Dipset is shining proof. They actually remade "Bout it Bout" with Master P a few years back. It wasn’t an improvement, but it wasn’t any worse either.
For what it’s worth, No Limit produced some great songs. Unfortunately, I’m not really going to prop up this song. I’d like to see Hamburglar spit over this and change all the "Bout it Bout it"s to "Robble Robbles" though. That’s basically what I imagine anytime I hear this song, which is really never anymore. I’m more of an “IT AIN’T MAH FAULT. DIDIDODAT??” type of guy. Oh, and I really wanted to become an honorary No Limit Soldier and buy one of those bootleg No Limit medallions that was going around all the county fairs and flea markets in the late '90s because one time I went to the grocery store and my bag boy was wearing one, and I thought if a Bag Boy was a No Limit Soldier, then I had a real good chance of becoming one too! Before I go, FREE C-MURDER! That dude has now been in jail longer than Master P’s rap career.

Raven Mack: I was living back in shitty Farmville, mired a little too far in the perfect small town hopelessness of the south again, and was away from the city I went to college for the first time in some time, so I was hanging with real-life actual black people again, and not just the type of black dudes who have ironic tattoos and love The Dwarves. So at this point, hearing "Bout It Bout It" for the first time, I loved it, even though the simple lyrical content and even simpler choice of words worked against the mental structure I had achieved in higher education (the average "above-average" mind cringes when it hears "shit" rhymed with "bitch"), the perfect simplicity rocked my inner-soul, because deep down inside, all of us just want to be gangstas.
And I thought C-Murder got out of jail, but then got murdered, and then after New Orleans sent all their felons to Houston after the hurricane, other people were getting murdered over C-Murder's murder, and Houston was pissed at how thuggish ruggish and bout it bout it these New Orleans transplants turned out to be. Motherfuckers murdering you kind of tends to ruin a good codeine buzz.

Download: Master P feat. Mia X - Bout It Bout It II

Here's the video for the original Bout It Bout. Also check out Dipset's Bout It Bout III (I was hoping to have this as a downloadable track too, but the CD is unavailable at the moment and I don't have it ripped on my hard drive anymore. You'll have to live.