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Karma isn't supposed to work this way. What you put out should boomerang back, right?
Through three albums, the Lost Boyz carried a party-and-bullshit vibe: Mr. Cheeks, Freaky Tah, Spigg Nice and Pretty Lou peddling rhymes about wine, women and weed, causing rumps to shake and earning gold and platinum plaques. Murder was the last worry of the Queens, New York, collective.
"We were wilding out, partying and having fun," Terrance Kelly (Mr. Cheeks) says. "We loved to party and weren't ashamed of it."
March 28, 1999: Raymond Rogers (a.k.a. Freaky Tah) is gunned down. Childhood friends, Rogers and Kelly battled rappers in New York parks together, ran the streets together, traded street life for rap life, together.
"Losing Tah ... that was a very ill loss to me," Kelly says. "He was my main partner. We started this Lost Boyz shit together ... [After Tah died] everyone went their own way because everyone didn't know how to deal with it. But I knew he wouldn't want me to sit down and be idle."
Still in a fog, Kelly returned to music as a soloist, eventually freeing himself from an oppressive contract with Universal Records to form Legal Drug Money Records. Five years removed from Roger's death, Kelly is ready to embrace life again, to capture the commercial success his previous solo didn't, but not at the expense of fun.
"It's back to wilding out and have fun, partying," Kelly chuckles. "But I got something for the people's ears—party joints, hang-out-with-your-shorty joints, drama, conversation. To let people know that we do go through things too."
In the end, "it's about making good music," something Kelly concedes that New York has struggled with of late. Too preoccupied with tough-guy posturing, not enough attention to the craft.
"We can make hits and all of that, but it seems like everyone in New York has a beef with each other. Ja [Rule] and 50 [Cent]. Jay Z and Nas. Everyone wants to be king of New York," Kelly says. "I don't want to be king. I just want a small piece, to get this money and to have fun."