Описание
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 2 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 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's 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's 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 22 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 chose 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 6 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 3rd 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's 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 ...
