by CeeLo Green
And if you listen to the first OutKast album, you notice CeeLo and me were really solo artists then who were kind of Mob-adjacent. In the beginning, Khujo was in charge because he was a serious gangster back then. Khujo’s name was even bigger and louder in the street than Lo’s had been because of all the stuff he had done. So Khujo commanded a lot of respect. T-Mo also commanded a lot of respect, but in a different way because T-Mo was personally real quiet. T-Mo had been adopted as a child, and he was usually by himself and only messed with those he really had to mess with. T-Mo never had a lot of people around him, but he was a fighter when he had to be and a damn good one. We always said Khujo was the meat, T-Mo was the vegetables, CeeLo was the water—because what he has to say is crystal clear. I was the glue that somehow kept the whole meal together.
People looked at Goodie Mob like we were a little scary no matter what we did. People were intimidated by us, and maybe they had some reason to be. As a group, we stood for something, and we stood strong. If Goodie Mob had said something soft and safe with the music that we made, I don’t think we’d be remembered today. But we wanted to say something, and at the same time, we might really kick your ass if you didn’t listen to us and agree.
Remember, the Dungeon Family was like a collective—we were very deeply associated, yet all separate entities. OutKast and Goodie Mob had two totally different dynamics. We couldn’t be the same unless we tried, and I give you my word, we didn’t try. As proud as we were for our Dungeon brothers, we weren’t an offshoot of them. We weren’t broken, so we didn’t need any fixing. And we were too crazy in our own right to ever want to borrow their brand of crazy. That said, OutKast was family to us and they did a lot to help spread the word about us.
Listen to that first album, Southernplayalisticadillacmuzik, and you’ll hear Goodie Mob represented on two tracks—on “Call of Da Wild” and more famously on a very cool number called “Git Up, Git Out.” Gipp and I co-wrote “Git Up, Git Out” with the OutKast guys and more than any other track, that’s the one that helped me make my point of entry into the hip-hop pantheon. It also brought together all the elements of Goodie Mob for the first time.
“Git Up, Git Out” is a politically charged statement about the need to take charge of your own destiny and go out and do something in this world. It’s an inspirational street message that struck a big chord with all of us because it expressed exactly where we were in our lives at that very moment. It was intensely personal, and universal at the same time.
The reaction to the track was strong and immediate: For the first—but not last—time people in the music industry started talking about me. As a result of doing the verse for “Git Up, Git Out,” I was named Doper’s Rhyme of the Month in The Source magazine, which was an extremely sought-after honor back in the day. What made this honor even more meaningful to me was the fact that “Git Up, Git Out” was my very first-ever recorded verse—my real entry into the game. Just on the basis of that track, I was actually offered a few different solo record deals.
I thought long and hard about whether I should strike out on my own as a solo artist or forge ahead as part of Goodie Mob. The more I debated the issue, the more I felt that it would have been a conflict of interest for me to fly solo at first because my new musical older brothers had been waiting in the wings. To me, taking a solo deal back then would have seemed out of order and inappropriate to the other guys in Goodie Mob and to Rico Wade from Organized Noize who was playing a huge role in terms of producing what we were doing. I thought that I should do like Spike Lee would want, and do the right thing. At the same time, I also figured maybe there would be some safety in numbers for me. We weren’t strangers in the least bit, and I felt comfortable with each one of the guys. And in my heart, I felt like I wasn’t ready then to make it as a solo artist—at least not yet.
So when it was time to make a deal, I signed on with the Mob.
Along with Organized Noize, the most important ingredient in creating the sound of the Dirty South was LaFace Records. Back in 1989 Antonio “L.A.” Reid and Kenneth “Babyface” Edmonds opened up shop as a joint venture with Arista, hoping to hop on the emerging Atlanta music scene. L.A. and Babyface had started out in an R&B band called the Deele, and as far as we were concerned, they were the deal we all wanted to make. L.A. had signed our sisters in TLC and was helping them put out platinum albums. OutKast was their first foray into rap. Goodie Mob was next.
The first time I met L.A. Reid was at an OutKast picnic in a mansion they’d rented outside of Atlanta. Biggie Smalls was just coming up, and he had opened for OutKast, so they had a really nice party. I knew L.A. Reid from the Deele, so I just started talking to him. I’ve never been excitable around people like him, because I’m so well informed and familiar with them. If I have the opportunity to speak with them, I know how to impress. L.A. took a liking to me, almost immediately. Who knows why? People said we favored each other. I guess I could see that we had a lot in common, although we never spoke about it much. He was a drummer, and that’s what I originally wanted to be before I realized I could program a drum machine. We’re both Geminis. And, as it turns out, he likes women as much as I do! Since those days, L.A. has gone on to become one of the major power players in the music industry, now heading up Epic Records. But who would have guessed that years later we would be on rival music shows, with L.A. as a judge on the X-Factor and me on The Voice? As the Moody Blues would put it, “Isn’t Life Strange?”
LaFace Records signed Goodie Mob in 1994. The way that I saw it, Goodie Mob was like an exciting new family of old friends. Fundamentally, Goodie Mob was some serious fun. For all of our differences as individuals, our shared love for rap—and a few bad habits—brought us together. We all loved the name Goodie Mob. It just had an impressive ring to it—we were not to be fucked with lightly. Later on a track called “Fighting,” we explained that Goodie Mob stood for “The Good Die Young Mostly Over Bullshit”—which too often is still too true. Ultimately, we ended up giving the name Goodie Mob our own meaning with all of the music and all of the attitude we brought to the music. And as the record shows, Goodie Mob may have been short on big hits, but we were rarely if ever short on attitude.
Big Gipp: A lot of our friends didn’t make it out of high school. We were just lucky because we found something else to do when other kids didn’t have anything. Music saved all of us.
Other kids thought we were kind of weird to be into music; they thought you had to be from New York to rap. We were trying to buy turntables and mics while kids were buying drugs. Of course, came the time, we were also selling drugs. And we were the type of guys who ran to the fights, we didn’t run away from them.
I used to sit in the trap house, where they sold cocaine. I’m a mellow guy and I didn’t like the way the customers acted, because they would act so crazy. I was the dude sitting in the cocaine trap, but I was selling weed! CeeLo never really sold drugs, but he was always around us. Khujo and T-Mo, we were more into it than André and Big Boi and CeeLo ’cause we were older than them. So they used to watch us and follow us into those scenes, but after some of our friends started dying from it, it started getting so close to us that we just had to realize that what you put out in the world, you get back. Those the rules.
Bean was a friend who died on the basketball court. He’s in a Goodie Mob song. Another one of our friends, Spanky, got killed right after he was in a video with us and OutKast. We did the video on Friday, had a show Saturday night, and came home to find out he was dead. Somebody had come into the house and tried to rob him and they killed him. It was like the first time we started recognizing that the things that you do in the dark will come back to haunt you.
We recorded our first album, Soul Food, at the home studio of the one of the greatest music men of all time, Curtis Mayfield—who was one of the leaders of the Impressions, for whom he wrote twentieth-century soul classics like “People Get Ready” and “We’re a Winner.” Then as a solo superstar, Curtis cut unfor
gettable soundtracks for Super Fly and another movie classic called Sparkle. Truth be told, I’m not even sure now why we recorded there. I heard stories that maybe our producers, Organized Noize, were discussing buying the home and the studio. In retrospect, if we were there, it was probably because we got a very reasonable rate. Knowing Goodie Mob and our situation then, a good price was probably more incentive than the sense of music history or any kind of nostalgia.
Curtis Mayfield—who was paralyzed in a stage accident in 1990 and passed in 1999—was not around the studio at the time we were recording. But his stuff was still in the house. There was a room filled with reels from Super Fly. Gipp even went into his closet to borrow a sweat suit that he wore on the jacket cover of Soul Food. So in a way the album is infused with his spirit. And I believe that Curtis Mayfield is still around anywhere people are making good, soulful, and socially conscious music. Which is exactly what Goodie Mob was trying to do.
Right from the start, Goodie Mob wasn’t just trying to get a hit record. Fools and geniuses that we were, we dreamed of changing the world. We wanted to be like Public Enemy for the Dirty South. We wanted respect as much as we wanted hits, and as with Public Enemy, we felt as if it would take a nation of millions to hold us back. And even against a nation of millions, we liked our odds.
There had been Southern rap before us, but a lot of it wasn’t very good or very deep. We wanted to bring Southern hip-hop newfound respect with albums that were intelligent and progressive, like the work Public Enemy had done on the East Coast. Soul Food was in essence a compilation of the things we had all been doing as individuals. Taken as a whole, it was pretty tough stuff, dark, political, angry. Gipp acted almost like our group’s alderman—he’s always had a strong political point of view. He was once a member of the Nation of Islam and was always enlightened in terms of politics and social consciousness and had a savvy for social media before people even called it that. I think Gipp brought a lot of that edge to the music that we made. Honestly, I’m not really like that so much—I’m all heart. So while Gipp brought the politics, I brought my own kind of soul and gospel aspect to the music of Goodie Mob.
Church roots run deep—even for sinners like me. No matter what I had done wrong by that time—or whatever I still might do someday—the fact is both of my parents were ministers. I always loved gospel music because it spoke to your soul. Music at its best is religious, it is spiritual. It is a practice. It is a faith. It’s sincere. It’s supernatural. It’s extraordinary. It’s surreal. It’s a paranormal activity if you will. And in the wrong hands, sometimes it’s a sin. My musical life began in church, and therefore in some ways it became about praise. And if you praise and exalt, it’s an act of selflessness. I still think of myself as only being the messenger. Look at Goodie Mob’s first album cover, and it looks like we’re praying to do our job right. Take a listen to “Free” on Soul Food, and there’s not much confusion about where I was coming from then.
“Free” was the song I wrote about my mom, and I wanted it to be the first song on our first album. Her journey was full of amazing grace and terrible pain. For all our difficulties, I loved her deeply for everything she had given me. And in her suffering, she was about to give me the most miraculous and supernatural gift of all.
CHAPTER FIVE
Getting Up and Getting Out
Endings and Beginnings
My Momma, destination unknown, went out on her own
She was barely even grown and became my Momma
I never knew my dad, so even when the times got bad
I was glad cause I had my Momma
For so long she had to be strong
I know at certain times she was wrong
But she still my Momma, it still amazes me
The Lord had to help her raise me judging from the way I used to be
My Momma, the biggest player that I know I love her so
Hell everything I got I owe to my Momma
—Goodie Mob, “Guess Who”
GOODIE GOODIE
I love sharing the stage with the guys in Goodie Mob, now more than ever.
Photo by Catherine McGann/Getty Images
The longer that you live, the more that you discover that life is an epic journey—one that is made up of a seemingly endless series of beginnings and endings.
In most of your finer epics, feelings of overwhelming joy are closely tied to moments of devastating loss. The secret of life—revealed here for the first time anywhere—is realizing that all of it is part of life’s rich tapestry. As someone far wiser than me once noted, we all have to begin somewhere. And as we all learn sooner or later, we all have to end up somewhere too. But life does not transpire on our schedules, and sometimes our beginnings and our endings seem to take place at the same times.
One door opens.
Another door shuts forever.
And so it came to pass that just as my mother began her long, slow, and painful fade in her earthly journey, the Goodie Mob and I started our rise to the top—or wherever else we would end up.
Something told me to go home. I had been living with a friend while we were in the studio making Soul Food when I decided to move back in with my grandmother and my mother. I guess I knew my mom was nearing the end. She was sick all the time, and often in the hospital. The truth is that I’d hardly ever lived with my mother because of the insane and scattered lives we both had lived as we improvised our ways through this world. So I was not always tuned in to her state of mind. But my intuitiveness was very advanced, and something told me that I should move back home around that time. I believe that kind of foresight came in part from my street sensibility. When you’re living the street life, you have to be able to feel when the heat is around the corner. I had a kind of criminally advanced skill set that was sharpened from experience. When you’re living on the edge, you have to have that sixth sense.
I moved into the den and I tried to help to the best of my abilities. My grandmother was recovering from another hip surgery, and she was hobbling around, trying to nurse my mom. Shedonna was living with Aunt Audrey, coming over every night to give Grandma a break. But our grandmother was coming down with serious stomach problems too. The whole thing was wearing her down, and the situation was looking very grim.
I have never been a man who focuses much on regrets. Maybe that’s because I have done too many things I could regret if I ever took time to focus on them. But I do have one regret from that time when my mother was dying. There was this one night I was at the house, feeling tired and irritable, and my mother had to be turned in her bed. She sensed that I didn’t want to help her at that moment. She looked at me and said, “Well, the Lord knows if I could do it myself, I would.” I hate that memory. I hate that I reacted that way.
But even though she was dying, she was still my mother, and strong in spirit. She was concerned for my soul, and she was a formidable presence. Gipp told me he could feel it the first time he met her—which happened to be the day she learned that I had joined a group called Goodie Mob. We were making our EPK—electronic press kit—and filming at locations all over Atlanta. We had done some filming at my aunt Audrey’s apartment complex—that’s the one you’ll see in the “Cell Therapy” video. And then we wanted to do a scene with my mother, where I rise up out of her body. It was kind of a surprise to everyone the afternoon I showed up at my grandmother’s house trailed by a video crew and Goodie Mob.
“Momma,” I said. “We’re making our album for real.” She just looked back and forth between the cameras and my crew, which I must say was a colorful bunch. She knew something was happening.
Shedonna tells me that this was the day when my family realized I was serious about making my life in the music business. But my mother was still very tied to the church and she didn’t approve of secular music. So for our mother, having her only son grow up to become a rapper was a pretty big no-no. She didn’t want to know about my music, right up until the time she passed away. Shedonna tol
d me she begged her to listen to an advance CD of the first Goodie Mob album, but Mom would say, “No, that’s of the devil! I’m not listening to it.” Then one night, out of the blue, she told Shedonna to put on the CD and let her listen to it. I was on the road, but Shedonna called me from the back bedroom and said, “Guess what? Mom is listening to your entire CD.”
“What? No!”
“Yeah, the whole thing,” Shedonna said. “She hasn’t turned it off yet!”
I think it was her way of just making sure that I was okay and that I had a positive message for the world. Shedonna believes that on some level she knew what was going to happen in my life, and she approved. She never said anything to either of us, but she didn’t have to. She listened, and we knew.
Around this time we were doing all kinds of traveling to launch Goodie Mob, and I remember being on a plane sitting next to T-Mo and telling him, “I think I’m about to face the biggest test of my life. I think I’m going to lose my grandmother and my mother at the same time.” I believe that my mother saw my grandmother getting weak and began the process of sacrificing herself. Deep down, I sense that my mother felt that no one ever could—or would—take care of her the way my grandmother did. So I’m sure she felt that if her mother wasn’t going to be around, then she didn’t want to be around either. The last thing my mother ever asked of me was for me and Shedonna to visit her together in the hospital. Usually, my sister would go, and I’d come by later, after she was gone. But on that day, we rode down to the hospital together. As we were walking into her room, the doctor was walking out and saying “Okay, Sheila, if you don’t eat, we’re going to have to put the tube down you.” My mother had this look on her face, and she said, “Don’t you let them be putting any tube down me.” And we were saying “Well, Mom, you’ve got to eat if you want to live. I guess if you don’t want to live, you shouldn’t eat.” My mother said, “Don’t you run any of that reverse psychology shit on me.” We just had to laugh. At the time, I didn’t realize what she was doing. Not then. Not at that moment.