What's the deal ladies and gents?! This salute goes to a rapper/entrepreneur that is among the most successful rags to riches stories to ever be seen within hip-hop and music in general. Coming from the Calliope PJs in New Orleans, this man had basically seen and done it all in the streets. He brought a new sound from the south that was different from the soulful, bluesy stylings of the likes of UGK, Outkast, or Eightball & MJG. This was almost a pre-trap type sound we were getting from this label thanks to their production team, Beats By The Pound, and they almost heavily relied on sampling and reworking original songs and turning them into some of the most hood-sounding cuts you could imagine. This man not only brought up a bunch of his homies and family members into stardom, but officially put New Orleans on the map on a nationwide, mainstream level, and eventually became one of the most talked about artists in the game. In '98, he delivered what would be his biggest selling album and put him into America's consciousness as a big time player. This is Master P, and we salute his double album, MP Da Last Don.
Since '91, Percy "Master P" Miller has been a fixture in southern hip-hop. His pre-major label distribution albums of Get Away Clean, Mama's Bad Boy, and The Ghetto's Tryin' To Kill Me were fixtures within the underground and made people talk more and more about him, as well as his TRU click (brothers C-Murder and Silkk Tha Shocker, Mia X, King George, the late Big Ed, and others). When he struck a distribution deal with Priority Records, it slowly meant going all the way up. First up was the cult classic, 99 Ways To Die, which had him slightly cleaning up the production, yet keeping it undoubtedly street. Miller was finding his niche.
However, in '96, he dropped his breakout album, Ice Cream Man, and it became his calling card. Delivering the anthem "Bout It Bout It II" (the sequel to the hard as nails original "I'm Bout It, Bout It" from the TRU album, True), the title track, "No More Tears", and the UGK-assisted "Break 'Em Off Something". Followers of No Limit knew this album was about to put him on a higher level, and things were about to change. With the first taste of gold for the label (it would later go platinum years later), his next solo album would come in the form of '97's Ghetto D, in which he officially became a star. the album went triple platinum and solidified him as a legit somebody in the game, helping to place the south among the elite of hip-hop.
With the ever growing success of No Limit Records (a few artists went gold without so much as a single or video from their albums), The head of No Limit delivered his seventh album, MP Da Last Don. Following up the runaway success of Ghetto D was going to be hard, but Miller had it under control. With his singles of "Make 'Em Say Ughh II" , "Goodbye To My Homies", and the highly infectious club hit "Hot Boys & Girls", Master P was in line to this becoming yet another huge success, and it was. The double album sold quadruple platinum units, and became his biggest selling album. Most double albums are not the most consistent, but this one definitely was. Guests such as Bone Thugs N Harmony, UGK and the rest of his No Limit Soldiers (this includes a newly signed Snoop at this time) greatly contributed to this effort and only elevated the stature of No Limit even more.
From this point, P didn't quite achieve this level of success or acclaim as subsequent albums such as Ghetto Postage, Game Face, and Only God Can Judge Me didn't measure up to his prior projects. At this time, No Limit was going through a transition period that wasn't easy, as the other New Orleans click, Cash Money Records, were starting to take over the New Orleans scene. Coupled with the death of TRU original Big Ed, the incarcerations of Mac and C-Murder, and more and more artists leaving the label, Master P was almost an island to himself. However, this isn't a woe-is-me piece. This is a salute to how strong No Limit Records was in the mid to late nineties, and MP Da Last Don was at the front of the charge for the label. Defining albums such as the I'm Bout It soundtrack, Unlady Like, Charge It 2 Da Game, Life Or Death, and Life Insurance are all projects that are easily identified as some of the best efforts No Limit put out, but it was the commander-in-chief that brought the label into prominence, and MP Da Last Don was the shining example of their influence not just in the south, but hip-hop as a whole. With that, let's toast to Master P's MP Da Last Don and its twentieth year of dopeness.
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