That’s where I saw a whole lot of problems and where I really learned the streets,” he says. At 15 years old, he was living in public housing in Riverside – a neighborhood walking-distance from the Mississippi – and it was there that he began to have his first adult feelings and experiences. Although he was still a boy, he projected a rugged maturity. ”įor Wright, who recorded the album’s eight songs in a single day, Memphis Massacre was a kind of rap bar mitzvah.
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“They laughed at me when I cracked it open, but I told them I was serious and I needed to do some songs… I distributed Memphis Massacre by way of taking a backpack to school and selling them.
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“I just went ahead and took a piggy bank full of nickels, dimes, quarters and pennies to Lyrical Dope and Herbert Young,” he says. When Wright decided to record his official debut, he broke the bank. “It was one or two of the songs from Memphis Massacre and quite a few songs that have gotten away from me, that I don’t have access to,” Wright says, his voice heavy with nostalgia and regret. As for the music, nothing remains to be described here.
Titled Still Not Quite Human, its cover featured a black-and-white silhouette of Wright being arrested. Though 1991’s Memphis Massacre is widely believed to be his earliest effort, he’d recorded a tape a year or so earlier. Inspired by the early stirrings of the Memphis rap scene, the young Wright got to work, making music under short-lived aliases MC Robot, MC Electronic and the Independent Rapper. I was right there to see a whole lot of it.” “Whenever they’d have a big star coming into town, Disco Hound would let me in the club without anybody knowing… able to check out things when Memphis was really, really hot… when Memphis was becoming its own, at a time where a lot of things were on the rise, when we were building our identity. He lived right across the street from me for years and he would let me tag along,” recalls Wright, who was in middle school at the time. I just knew that he would dress up and ride a limo all the time. “Disco Hound – luckily for me – was my neighbor. That all changed when Spanish Fly – along with local DJs Soni D, Ray the Jay and Disco Hound – drew up a blueprint for Memphis rap filled with blunt-force 808 bass, lyrics about drug dealing and samples of the Showboys’ classic “Drag Rap.” They didn’t want to hear that shit, because you gonna get cut off the radio talking about ‘pushing rocks on the block,’ or ‘suck a motherfucker’s dick’ and all that shit.” They dancing to Dominatrix, they dancing to ‘Set It Off,’ ‘Jam on It….’ They ain’t dancing to. Describing the scene, local favorite DJ Spanish Fly told RBMA’s Noz that the older generation weren’t “gettin’ buck in there. Adults – who owned, frequented and DJed at the city’s clubs – were in thrall to electro, but all the kids were obsessed with rap. The mid-to late 1980s was a period of musical transition in Memphis. As a child, he says, he was always “chasing music.” Then he found Disco Hound. While his contemporaries drank in the Delta’s rich musical heritage, he developed a truly unquenchable thirst. “It’s a deaf church, the preacher’s deaf, the choir’s deaf, they still do songs – they just do it in sign language.”įor the young Tommy Wright III, signing in unison in a deaf Baptist church wasn’t enough. “They sang in sign language and sort of performed in the church choir,” explains Wright, battling a sore throat with a mug of hot water fortified with honey and lemon. Both are deaf, yet have always been musical – or, more specifically, rhythmic. Lewis-Ivie was a postal worker and Wright was employed by Southern Metal and Plastic. welcomed their only child into the world. On May 6, 1976, Erma Lewis-Ivie and Tommy Wright Jr.
Between 19, he recorded five solo tapes and CDs, two more with the group Ten Wanted Men, and produced a number of albums and EPs for his own Street Smart Records, including Riverside Click’s Runnin In Da Wind, Niggaz of Destruction’s self-titled debut and the soundtrack for an as-yet-unreleased documentary, Behind Closed Doors. Among the many young Memphis rappers of the 1990s, Wright cut an especially gifted, ambitious and prolific figure. Wright is now 42 and white hairs are creeping into his thin beard, but for gangster rap fans of a certain stripe, his legend is more potent than ever. Though it’s sweltering hot, and the air is thick with humidity and Mississippi River mosquitos, his perm is impeccable. On the table in front of him lies a pile of crumpled napkins, each sacrificed so that his T-shirt – which reads “FLY” in shiny silver letters – and his pre-distressed denim shorts remain pristine. Tommy Wright III is wearing white and eating barbecue.
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