Twista

You can call him the fastest MC in hip-hop history, the man with the flawless flow or simply the Chi-Town legend. Twista’s earned all his accolades and can breathe one huge sigh of relief with 2004 behind him. After year’s of building one of rap’s most loyal street following and accumulating immeasurable respect among his peers in the music industry, Twista finally was rewarded with the mainstream recognition and over two million sales of his seventh album—the classic—Kamikaze.

“It was the best thing in the world, like waiting to get you first sexual experience,” Twista said about his fame. “Just think, you a artist and you come out when Das EFX and Tupac and them was coming out. You coming out when Cypress Hill was coming out. You’re watching them all have success. You rappin’ for all this time, never getting that success, never being recognized to the point where you feel you’re respected or getting that type of money you feel you deserve. Then you hit the 30 mark, it’s getting late in life, you be like ‘is it going to crack?’ Then in ’04, it happens bigger than you ever expected. The success of Kamikaze was the biggest blessing, biggest relief you can feel.”

With the weight of the world off his shoulders, Twista didn’t exactly take the time to breathe easy and kick back and relax. He focused on capitalizing off of his momentum and headed back in the lab for his next LP, The Day After.

“I called it The Day After, thinking about Kamikaze,” he explained. “I bumrushed the industry and did what I had to do and I didn’t die. I got up out the rubbish and kept going so everything that’s happened now is the day after.

“This was really the most stress free album I ever worked on cause it was after the success,” Twista added. “It’s a struggle on the way up even after a little success, you still you trying to prove yourself, get respect for the city, and you’re trying to go platinum.”

With legendary status solidified and his feet firmly planted at the top of the game, Twista felt so comfortable with his song making acumen, he experimented like never before with different flows and song making approaches on The Day After.

“The whole time rapping throughout my career period,” he described, “I wrote every rhyme. This album, I had the confidence to write songs and go ahead and do songs right off the top of the dome. I call it exploring the different levels of creativity. Sometimes you may want to get intricate with your song construction and write the words down. I found out that though sometimes I want to flow more natural and come off the head. The experimentation raises your confidence and swagger.”

With what he describes as his mojo turned up full blast, Twista has completed yet another magnum opuses that eclipsed his previous masterpieces sonically, lyrically and stylistically. The Windy City word blazer worked with the music’s elite such as Academy Award winner Jamie Foxx, Snoopp Dogg, Mariah Carey, the Neptunes, Trey Songz, Kanye West, Scott Storch and his crew, the Speedknot Mobstaz, among others.

“Heartbeat” doesn’t sound dissimilar to any Twista you’ve ever heard before. The beat is distinct slow gangsta creep and the impassioned line gunman has slow vehement flow that sounds like his voice was screwed and chopped. As the track progresses, so does the line gunmen’s aggression and the pace of his delivery.

Twista does have plenty of songs dedicated to the ladies however. There’s the playful “A.E.I.O.U.,” one of two tracks produced by the Neptunes, which features Jaime Foxx twisting the syllables like never before where Twista answers the advances of a female who claims to be just as potent in bed as he is.

“Lavish” is an inspirational anthem where Twista and Pharrell Williams talk about the wealth they’ve accumulated, but deliver the message that you too can make your dreams come to fruition if you put your mind to it.

Twista can definitely speak from experience. Growing up on the Westside of Chicago, better known as “K-Town,” Twista has been rapping since age 12, and like many kids from his enviornment he had to overcome more in his adolescent formative years than most people endure their entire lives. He felt the allure of drug pushing, the gangs, pimping, but ultimately it was his true love of music that would win out.

Like his hometown contemporaries, Twista gained his first fan following in the streets by dissecting Windy City hood legends with a style no one has very been able to define of successful copy.

At age 18 he signed his first record deal under the moniker Tung Twista and released his first LP in 1991, setting a precedent for clarity and speed in a rap delivery. It wasn’t until six years later with the release of his Atlantic/ Big Beat debut Adrenaline Rush and its subsequent follow up, Mobstability with the Speedknot Mobstaz, that one of Chi-Town’s finest established himself as a legend in the making with a penchant for making classic hits.

Seemingly, Twista seemed destined to have his name cemented with the rising greats of the era like Jay-Z, DMX and Big Pun, however record label strife led Twista to take his talent back to its origins—the streets, where he would release three independent albums and sell over 150,000 copies with his only push being the word of mouth from his loyalists.

In the months since Twista has been working on The Day After, he’s kept one of the highest profiles out of any rapper. He’s made guest appearances on blockbuster number one LPs such as Mariah Carey’s The Emancipation of Mimi and R. Kelly’s TP3 Reloaded as well as release the heart touching remix of “Hope” on the “Coach Carter” soundtrack.

In 2006, Twista and the Mobstaz are dropping their next LP, Mobsta Elite.

But that’s next year. Let’s not lose focus of the event that is upon us. With the release of The Day After, Twista is elevating his steadfast grind as a rapper and planting another building block on his already strong foundation of music.