Even when Fresh’s instrumentals feel lean and inexpensive – you can practically hear his fingertips pop off the electronic drum pads – they never sound weak.
Cash Money’s in-house producer Mannie Fresh handles the beats from front-to-back, his New Orleans bounce orchestration shuffling through his tightly packed soundscapes. He spits like a man who never met a consonant he trusted but with the control of a Formula One driver hitting corners at speed.Ĥ00 Degreez is as musical as it is ferocious. Juve’s rapping can be dense and complex, forceful with finesse, infinitely listenable. The album showcases an impossibly fantastic rapper – a behemoth with an elastic voice capable of bending his larynx in insane ways. If confidence can be injected into the blood then Juve hit a double dose. It doesn’t take a genius to see why Baby – who’d become better known as Birdman, Wayne’s father figure turned business nemesis – was willing to throw the dice on the man born Terius Gray. Bon Appetit.ĭropped in the spring of 1998, Juvenile’s third album crystallised the Cash Money sound and established the then-23-year-old as its first star. Place Juvenile in the roaster for 72 scintillating minutes, sauté the pop ‘n’ click patterns of Mannie Fresh, add in the spices of Big Tymers and Juve’s fellow Hot Boyz, allow Bryan “Baby” Williams and Ronald “Slim” Williams to stir the pit, and voilà – or as a teenage Lil Wayne spits at the end of Juve’s Back That Azz Up video, “wobble-dee, wobble-dee” – Cash Money Records plates up a New Orleans gumbo fit for a king. As it turned out, 400 Degreez is the temperature at which Southern rap percolates.
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