New Orleans Rapper Tec-9 steps onto a helicopter to be flown to his lucrative gig. He’s been off work for two weeks but is about to embark on twenty-eight straight days of giving people what they need. “Mondays I cook anything I want. Tuesday is steak day. Wednesday I cook whatever I want. Thursday I cook what I want. Friday is seafood day. Saturday is steak day again,” says Tec, one half of the famous New Orleans gangsta bounce group U.N.L.V., “and Sunday is fried chicken day.”
Tec-9, a.k.a. Reginald Manuel, spends most of his time offshore, cooking for an oil rig’s crew — one of the few ways he could figure to make over $60,000 a year, enough to continue paying for whatever luxuries he got used to in the ’90s as a star on the fledgling Cash Money label.
“When I get jazzy with it I have a Mercedes R35, sitting on 22s,” says Tec. But today he meets me at the Burger King in his gimpy Ram 1500 work truck. He wants to take our hood history tour in my similarly shitty Ram truck. “My A/C is broken,” he tells me.
“So is mine,” I tell him.
“My transmission burnt too,” he says.
I don’t know what that means. But my truck runs fine, so I first follow him to his lil girl’s mama’s house around the corner. Tec pops into her small shotgun shack for a moment, then comes out and hops into my beater: “I only had one cold tea left. You want this cold beer?” He offers me a tall boy of Olde English 800. I have not had OE since college, and though it’s very presumptuous of him to think I’d drink malt liquor at all, much less during the daytime while driving, I thank him and crack it open.
Tec-9 has agreed to lead me on a tour of sites important to the career of his twenty-two-year-old rap group (now a duo) U.N.L.V. As teenagers in the early nineties, U.N.L.V. members Tec-9 and Lil Ya copped their name from their favorite college sports team, but then told the world it stood for “Uptown Niggas Livin Violent.”
“We started out as the Sporty MCs: Polo Pete and MC Food,” Tec laughs, flashing a bottom row of gold teeth.
“We was positive rappers then, we rapped about black situations, what crack cocaine and drugs do to you,” recalls Lil Ya (Yaphet Jones) via phone from Houston, where he’s lived with his kids since 2007, commuting often to New Orleans.
“A guy called Everlasting Hitman — deceased, rest in peace — he was one of the first people I knew who started doing gangsta rap in the bars,” Lil Ya continues. “Then everyone started doing it. We were better at it than any of those other guys, and the positive rap wasn’t poppin’ anymore. People didn’t want to hear that.”
Violence, too, was trendy in the Crescent City at the time and the Sporty MCs’ transformation into Uptown Niggas Livin Violent was inspired as much by New Orleans’s early ’90s crime stats. “We were the murder capital in 1994,” Lil Ya says, as if reminiscing about a championship season. The Sporty MC’s “black situations” were traded out for explicit lyrics like…
I got a bitch named Carrol
Fucked her in the ass with my double barrel
She enjoyed it a LOT
While I was fucking her with the barrel she was sucking the chrome of my glock
— “My 9” (1993) CLICK HERE to read the rest of the piece at Narratively…
Or listen to UNLV’s entire “Mac, Melph, Caliope” album on YouTube:
New Orleans: the Underground Guide 