Erik Visits an American Grave, Part 1,615

This is the grave of Soulja Slim.

Born in 1977 in New Orleans, James Tapp, Jr. grew up around music, but he also grew up around incredible poverty, crime, and an economy completely decimated by suburbanization and the loss of tax bases to inner cities when all the whites left town. The musical connections of his youth were quite real. His stepfather was Tuba Phil Frazier of the Rebirth Brass Band, which also includes the great Kermit Ruffins.

But if you are becoming a teenager in the early 90s in the Magnolia Projects in New Orleans, tuba is probably not likely to speak too much to you. Hip-hop was more likely and that had revolutionized the world of music already during Tapp’s short lifetime. That music came out of the desperation and poverty of the inner cities of that time and that’s something Tapp understood well. Like many public housing projects, the funding mechanism for Magnolia had turned out to be a disaster. The initial plan behind public housing in this country is that it would attract working class people with jobs who could pay rent, not become a place to stuff the poorest people in the nation. So when that didn’t happen and the only people who lived there were the poorest of Americans, there was no proper way to do basic things such as maintenance. Then, as the nation turned away from its extremely brief moment of caring about Black people in the 1950s and early 1960s, which let’s face it, never really reached Louisiana whites in the first place, the desire to do anything to fix these problems as public housing that were seen as Black problems.

So conditions in Magnolia completely collapsed as the drugs, especially crack and heroin, flowed into the projects. This was a story that was national, not only about New Orleans. The broader point here is that the teenage Tapp got hooked on both cocaine and heroin, dropped out of school, and had only one interest and one way forward in a world where there were only two ways forward for a kid like this–hip hop, the other option being in the drug trade. In fact, he was in the drug trade too, but that didn’t get in the way of his hip hop ambitions.

Tapp started performing as Magnolia Slim at New Orleans house parties in 1993 and by the next year, when he went into the studio, he was known as Soulja Slim. He put together a little album titled Soulja Fa Lyfe and in 1994, it was released on Parkway Pumpin’ and Hype Enough Records, a little New Orleans label run mostly by KLC, who remains around today. Now, the New Orleans rap scene never quite got the national respect it deserved. Of course, the early rap world was dominated by the rivalry between New York and Los Angeles, with Oakland poking its head up too. By the 1990s, OutKast forced people to pay attention to Atlanta, and while never receiving the same level of critical praise, Nelly’s success with the public got attention paid to St. Louis too. Although New Orleans is the home of much American music and had a super active and pretty different kind of hip hop scene, it really never has received the national attention it deserves.

Soulja Fa Lyfe sold 90,000 copies, which was great for the time on an independent label. He followed it with an EP the next year, showed up on mixtapes and compilations and was slowly rising in the hip hop game. In 1998, he released Give It 2 ‘Em Raw. He had moved onto No Limits Records, run by Master P. That was a big deal. Also, Snoop Dogg showed up as a guest on a song, as did several other big figures such as Master P himself, Mystikal, and others. So this was a sign of just how respected Soulja’s rhymes were getting. The album did great too. It hit #13 on the Billboard 200 and in the first week of sales, moved 82,000 copies.

But Soulja was also continuing to the live the life that he rhymed. In fact, he was in prison as the album came out, for a parole violation. His work began to suffer somewhat too. His 2001 release, The Streets Made Me, bombed. Receiving mixed reviews, which few hip hop fans particularly cared about anyway, it only hit #188 on the Billboard charts and #42 on the R&B charts. I am not sure if No Limit dropped him after this or if he just wanted to go out on his own, but he started his own label called Cut Throat Committee Records, to release his own work at the very least. He did in 2002, with an album named Years Later. It didn’t do a lot. In August 2003, he released Years Later…A Few Months After. It did a bit better.

In November 2003, Soulja Slim was shot in front of his home in New Orleans. No one really knows why. Officially, this is an unsolved murder, but it was almost certainly committed by a thug named Garelle Smith, who was a known murderer. But you couldn’t convict him because no witnesses would name him. Over the years, he was arrested for at least four murders, but the cops could never convict him. This was the conundrum of life in the Black community and especially New Orleans–violence might be endemic, but who was going to trust the police to look out for their interests? Would you trust the New Orleans police? Smith himself was murdered in 2011.

Soulja Slim was 26 years old.

Shortly after his death, a track Soulja did with Juvenile and released on the latter’s album Juve the Great, hit #1. This was “Slow Motion” and it made Soulja only the 6th artist in history to have a posthumous #1.

Let’s listen to some Soulja Slim.

Soulja Slim is buried in Mount Olivet Cemetery, New Orleans, Louisiana.

If you would like this series to visit other hip hop artists, you can donate to cover the required expenses here. Nipsey Hustle is in Hollywood and Left Eye Lopes is in Lithonia, Georgia. Previous posts in this series are archived here and here.