By The Hip Hop Writer
Hip Hop Vibe Staff Writer
As of late, Jermaine Dupri has been all over the hip hop media for the first time since at least 2006 in promotion of So So Def’s twentieth anniversary. Time has flown by and Jermaine Dupri has lived the ups and downs that come with the life he has chosen. Along with Bow Wow, who joined the label in the later years, Jermaine Dupri enjoyed these ups with Chicago femcee, Da Brat.
In the mid-to-late 1990s, Da Brat was one of the biggest rappers in the game. With Lil’ Kim, Eve, and Foxy Brown also making major moves, Da Brat was a part of the femcee movement of the 1990s. Da Brat experienced minor successes in the early 2000s. When LisaRaye emerged as a breakout star, the world learned Da Brat was her half sister.
Da Brat overcame hard times, being sent to prison, but has been out for well over a year. Being freed from prison has Da Brat back in time to celebrate with Jermaine Dupri and the rest of So So Def’s roster over the past twenty years. Recently, Da Brat talked to AllHipHop.com about her time with So So Def, over the years.
Read Dat Brat’s statement below:
“I feel like the people that loved me from the beginning, still love me,” she told AHH. “If you a Brat fan, you a Brat fan. Same thing with So So Def, if you a So So Def fan, no matter J.D. do or what anybody from So So Def do, you gon’ be down with it. That’s what’s so great about our fans, our following, they stay down no matter what we going through.”
She also recalled what it was like to meet Dupri for the first time.
“When I first came to Atlanta and J.D. came to pick me up from the first time. He came to pick me up and getting in a convertible all white BMW convertible for the first time, made my mouth drop,” she says. “Then, we went to his house and his house was like… Neverland. (Laughter) Big movie screens, TV’s, big studio, me being from the West side of Chicago, I had never seen nothing like that. Aw, man… It’s so many great memories. It’s too many to just pinpoint just one. Like the time I did [the single] ‘Give it to You,’ all those cameos in my video. Them folks didn’t know me, they knew So So Def. They knew J.D., he was able to make all those calls, I mean, they knew ‘Funkdafied,’ which blew up for me and then everybody wanted to come and participate. It was cool as hell. I had Diddy, I had Biggie, I had T-Boz, I had Mary. Keith Murray. Some of everybody.”
