After years spent putting in work behind stars like Juvenile and 50 Cent, G-Unit’s mouth of the South finally gets a solo shot at rap success. It’s Young Buck time. Let him shine.

It’s a humid Los Angeles day in June 2001. The kind of day where sweat drips uncomfortably down your back and your clothes stick to your skin. As the video crew scurries around the set of Juvenile’s “Set It Off” shoot, the newest signee of the New Orleans rapper’s fledgling UTP Records hides from the scorching sun under a large white tent. Quiet and reserved, 20-year-old Young Buck is a spectator, patiently waiting until he’s needed.

“I wouldn’t mind having a couple of platinum albums under my belt one day,” says the shy aspiring rap star in his heavy Southern drawl. He leans back in a folding chair, in a weed-induced haze. His slit eyes dart back and forth between the sights on set and the tape recorder gripped tightly in his right hand. “I want whoever I am with at the time to be successful, so we can enjoy it together. So I can share it and have fun with it. With everybody having the same, everybody doing it, not just one person.”

Fast-forward to June 2004, an LA evening almost three years to the day from when Buck sat back and watched Juvie film his video. Things have changed for the Nashville rapper. No longer a benchwarmer on an underdeveloped label, he’s now a main focus of 50 Cent’s mighty, Interscope-funded G-Unit Records.

Having just finished a photo shoot that’ll put him and fellow G-Unit soldier Lloyd Banks on the cover of XXL, the crew’s Southern rep is in the parking lot of Smashbox Studios, winding down under the fading Culver City sky. As music blares from a parked van filled with security and crew, Buck does a little two-step—a blunt in one hand, thousands upon thousands of dollars worth of jewelry swinging from his neck. 

“106, baby!” Buck shouts. “My song’s requested on Power 106 already, and I just gave it to radio!” He’s talking about “Let Me In,” the first single off his solo debut, Straight Outta Ca$hville. Since being plucked out of semi-obscurity 18 months ago by rap’s current King of New York, Buck has made a name for himself through his dark, menacing street rhymes and a vicious Tennessee twang. With the Dirty Dirty hot right now and G-Unit even hotter, the new mouth of the South is primed and ready to take the rap world by storm.

But his rims weren’t always spinning like that diamond-encrusted G-Unit piece he wears so faithfully. Letdowns and disappointments have been aplenty for a dude who spent the better part of a decade trying to trade the hustle game for rap fame.

“My story is a story of paying dues, for real,” Buck says, steering his black Escalade down a Nashville road on a late night this past March. He passes the house at 1713 Seifried Street, where he spent most of his childhood. He drives through Tiffany’s Car Wash, the spot where, at age 13, he sold his first crack rock. There are the James Casey Homes (a.k.a. South 8), where his mother moved the family after losing her job as a social worker.

“We had no money and my father was never really around,” says Buck, who was born David Brown, March 15, 1981. “It was me and my little sister, and my mom had custody of her sister’s kids ’cause her sister was a crack fiend—in and out the penitentiary. There wasn’t no fuckin’ income, and I was too young to try to be the man of the house. But I stepped my game up quick. I felt like, Let me make some money and get out the way, so my mama could do for all these other kids in the house.

“We started moving so much in the streets I felt like I couldn’t be at my mama’s house and jeopardize her or myself,” says Buck, who moved into an apartment with his partners when he was 14. “We was getting money so quick that if you spent a day or two at your mom’s, that might cost you 10 dope fiends. It was all about the hustle.”

Such grim realities were everyday fare for Buck. And he doesn’t flinch when he says that his own father, a longtime addict, was one of his first customers. “I knew he was gonna get drugs somewhere,” he says. “So I was like, Fuck it, I’ll sell it to him, I’d rather get his money than have someone else get it. I don’t look at it like I was feeding into his problem, because by the time I was selling to him he was a fiend already.

“I was corrupted, you could say, by then. My mama’s my heart and the strongest thing I’ve ever seen. But she couldn’t teach me how to be a man. She seen that I was fuckin’ whylin’ and realized, ‘I’ma let this nigga go learn his own way. Pray to God that nothing happens to him.’”

In the mid-’90s, local rap scenes were starting to bubble throughout the Dirty South. Buck had played around with rhyming in the school cafeteria and knew he had a knack for it. An older kid from the neighborhood named Boogie signed with Relativity Records, and he taught Buck what bars were and how to build a song. “I didn’t know anything except that I liked to rap, to express myself and see the response,” says Buck of what was then just a hobby. “Boogie let me go into the studio and record a project called No Face No Case. That was the first time I heard myself recorded and I knew I was into it. From then when we was hustlin’, rap was always a part of me. I was always somehow trying to make it happen.”