Lloyd Banks is unsatisfied. Unsatisfied, despite having an incredibly
successful 2003. A 2003 where he was crowned the street's number
one artist, appeared on the year's top-selling record, and sold
another two million-plus copies of an album with his own rap troupe.
Lloyd Banks is so unsatisfied he's titled his G Unit/Interscope
Records debut The
Hunger For More.
"When I say The Hunger for More, it could be referring to
more success," says Lloyd Banks, the lyrical submachine gun
of
50 Cent's
G-Unit arsenal. "It could be more money. Or respect. More power.
More understanding. All those things lead up to that hunger for
more, because my 'more' isn't everybody else's 'more.' I feel
like I made it already, because I already got what everybody on
the corners of the neighborhood I grew up in is striving to get.
God forbid anything happen to me, my family is straight. So anything
that happens after this is just me progressing as a person."
Banks' personal progression is seen throughout his debut album,
especially on numbers like the soul-dipped "When the Chips
Are Down," which features The Game; and the
Eminem-produced "Til the End," an elegiac meditation on mortality
tinged with twinkling keys and bolstered by choral flourishes.
On the other end of the musical spectrum is the arena-rocking
"Playboy" the festive "Heart of Southside,"
which features G Unit Member
Young Buck and horns bigger than your speakers; and the melodically cacophonous
"Perfect Match," where Banks teams up with Brooklyn's
Fabolous to exchange pearled strings of witty bon mots geared at the fairer
sex. The Hunger For More's first single, the party-starting "On
Fire" proves that Banks' music is at home in the clubs as
it is the streets. "My record follows the same format of
Get Rich Or Die Tryin' and Beg For Mercy but it's just me so it's
a whole different sound," says Banks. "I got all new
producers. I'd rather break a producer, than do what everybody
else does. There's no guarantee that a big name producer is gonna
give you that hit record. You can pay $100,000 for one song, there's
no guarantee that it's gonna be that one. It's only what you make
it. And that's what I'm gonna show everyone."
Lloyd Banks was born Christopher Lloyd twenty-two years ago and
raised in Jamaica, Queens. "My mom is Puerto Rican, my pops
is black," he informs. "It was kinda like when I was
with my mother's side of the family I was the bad seed, I was
the one who was most unlikely to succeed. And then when I was
with the black side of the family, I was the angel, because all
my uncles are career felons." His parents were young and
never married. And his father, who choose to pursue tax-free income
on the streets, spent more time behind bars then he did with his
son. That left his mother to raise a young man who was close to
six feet tall by the 6th grade and who started sprouting facial
hair in his early teens. "My mother showed me everything,"
Banks says. "When I was in the third grade, she took a cucumber
and showed me how to put the condom on." Like many kids in
the inner city his age, Banks sought to escape the poverty and
death of his environment.
Early on he took to writing various musings-ghetto poetry, loose
narratives; nothing quite structured, though he was influenced
by rap gods like Big Daddy Kane and Slick Rick. "I listened
to Big Daddy Kane a lot, cause that's what my pops listened to,"
he says. Banks' favorite songs were Rick's "Young World"
and Kane's "Smooth Operator," and "Ain't No Half-Steppin'."
High school didn't agree with Banks, so he dropped out before
his 16th birthday. The freewriting he had been doing had morphed
into full-fledged rhymes, but that was a secret. "I never
let nobody know I did it," he says. But he soon got his courage
up. "I started rhyming outside and everybody started telling
me, 'You should shop your material.' This is before I even got
in the studio." Banks appeared on local mixtapes becoming
one of the neighborhood's best unsigned rappers. His only competition
was a childhood friend named Tony Yayo. One day, Tony, along with
another childhood friend who rapped under the name 50 Cent, approached
Banks with the idea of becoming a group. If Banks wanted to be
down, he could be part of the crew that they were calling G Unit.
Banks was down. "I always felt like if I was to get into
doing rap professionally, I wanted to get into it with somebody
who was from my neighborhood," he says. "Who better
than people who I've known my whole life?"
Fronted by 50 Cent, the G Unit quickly redefined the urban music
industry. They produced a series of street albums with original
numbers and high quality artwork, making the discs something more
than a bootleg, but not quite an independent release. 50 Cent
was soon signed to Shady/Aftermath/ Interscope Records and released
the instantly classic, record breaking Get Rich Or Die Tryin',
on which Banks was featured. Then came G Unit's Beg For Mercy,
which was still riding high in the top 20 of the Billboard 200
after four months on the shelves. Though these successes allowed
Lloyd Banks to tour the world multiple times over, one accomplishment
means a bit more than all the rest: Earlier this year, Banks was
anointed as 2003's Mixtape Artist of the Year due to his appearance
on G Unit mixtapes as well as his own Money in the Bank series.
"I take pride in that cause I'm not qualified for a MTV Awards
or a Vibe Awards or Grammys or any of that yet," says Banks.
"I got my name through the mixtapes."
That's why people know Lloyd Banks today. That's where it built
from. I skipped what a lot of rappers have to go through to get
put on. I skipped Making the Band, I skipped [106 & Park's]
Freestyle Fridays, the Lyricist Lounge - I skipped all that. I
made my name on the mixtapes, on the streets. And that's the hardest
thing to get right there." Despite so many things going his
way, Lloyd Banks is not prepared to take it easy. "People
will tell me all the time, 'Look at your set up. You're guaranteed
to make it.' I get upset when I hear that. Ain't nobody guaranteed
nothing. I feel like they're looking at the situation wrong cause
I don't take advantage of nobody. I don't work less because you're
working harder. I work real, real hard even though I know 50's
there. He's there, he supports me 110%, but I don't want to put
no extra pressure on him when I can do it. At the end of the day,
I find myself working twice as hard."
