Photos by Miyako Bellizzi
Bubba Sparxxx and I are sitting at a picnic table down by the East River. As we speak, he smokes cigarettes (Newports) and chews gum (Mentos). It’s hot as fuck, and he says so much. He’s a stand-up guy, the type who shakes your hand real firm in that uniquely southern way, where men are raised to believe you can tell the character of a man by the quality of his handshake. At 37, his hair is cut short, gelled, and flecked with a touch of grey. He’s more compact than he was in his pop heyday, having slimmed down from the size of an offensive lineman to a sturdy fullback. He lumbers rather than walks, as if he’s still unsure of how to use this new body he’s found himself in. Dressed in a black V-neck T-shirt, bright chinos, and camouflage running shoes, he looks like a man who has both literally and metaphorically shed the vestigial shell of his younger, more hedonistic self.
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In the music industry, timing is everything. Hit too late, and you get written off as a copycat. Hit too soon, and listeners don’t understand you. Bubba Sparxxx had the bad luck to do both at once. He was the first white rapper to hit in the wake of Eminem’s colossal success, so many wrote him off as simply a pale imitation of a superior product. But there was more to him than that—he and producer Timbaland were trying to fuse modern country and rap into a whole new style of music. By the time they’d nailed the formula with Bubba’s second album Deliverance, the public’s attention had shifted to crunk, and nobody had time for him. He abandoned his sound and found a smash hit in the form of “Ms. New Booty,” the now-ubiquitous, Ying Yang Twins-assisted ode to all things ass. His second career as an unlikely snap music superstar was derailed by an addiction that sent him spiraling off the deep end into unproductivity. But now, he’s back, with a new album and a new urge to create.
Looking back on the past few couple of decades in popular music, Bubba Sparxxx is the turning point of the term “country rap”—what was once used to describe certain tunes by the likes of UGK, 8Ball & MJG, Outkast, Goodie Mob, etc., has now become a term to describe a very specific subset of rap-influenced country artists who are pitched and marketed to an audience that’s traditionally bought country music. Think guys like The Lacs, Lenny Cooper, and the former professional golfer-turned-rapper Colt Ford, who owns Average Joe’s Entertainment, the label that pushes many of these artists. If you haven’t heard of these guys, it’s fine. They’ve achieved massive popularity by catering to an audience that already existed: Southerners who grew up pushing trucks with lift kits while blasting Southern hip-hop, people who, if they’d known to look out for him, would have fucking loved Bubba Sparxxx. And now, Bubba is ready to reclaim what he started. In the past two years he’s released two albums—one on Average Joe’s—and is readying two more. He’s wiser now, resigned to the fact that to some he’ll always be confused for Paul Wall, known only as the “Ms. New Booty” guy to others, and recognized as an innovator by a select few. “I think the people who are supposed to know, know,” he tells me.
Bubba Sparxxx grew up in LaGrange, Georgia, a town of about 30,000 nestled near the Alabama border. LaGrange, like many small southern towns, started as a mill village—he grew up on McCosh Mill Road, which dead-ended into West Point Lake, where the old mill was. The lake, he says, “Is renowned as the most hell-raisingest party place around. People rode around, had parties, threw bonfires.” LaGrange was a diverse place, both racially and musically. “I knew black people who listened to country music, and I knew rednecks who drove around in jacked-up trucks who played Tupac and Outkast,” Bubba remembers. He grew up on a farm and fell in love with hip-hop at an early age, inspired by acts such as 2 Live Crew, Beastie Boys, and Too $hort. He began rhyming at the age of 14. “I had a knack for making words rhyme; it was kind of like putting a puzzle together,” he says. Still, he held his aspirations of rap stardom close to the chest, not rapping in front of others for years. “LaGrange isn’t a place where dreaming was encouraged,” Bubba tells me.
After high school, Bubba moved to Athens, Georgia, where his best friend had a football scholarship at the University of Georgia, and he began seriously pursuing his dreams. This was in the mid-to-late 90s. when the concept of a white rapper was still a novelty; a white Southern rapper doubly so. Bubba was grinding in a world where Eminem hadn’t yet become the biggest rapper in the universe, and the only other white rappers were toiling in the underground or slinging rhymes under the guise of rap-rock. “I had this complex,” Bubba says, “Because I’d heard the Dungeon Family guys didn’t think that white people should be a part of hip-hop.” He recalls a chance meeting with the Dungeon Fam’s Rico Wade at a Cool Breeze concert in the late 90s. “I was like, ‘I’m gonna prove you wrong. I’m gonna represent Georgia as a white boy, and I’m gonna do it the right way.’ He looked at me like I was crazy when I said it. He said, ‘Well, go on and do it then!’”
The stars seemed to be aligning for Bubba very quickly. In 1999, he released an independent version of his debut record Dark Days, Bright Nights that garnered enough buzz to get him signed to Interscope. From there, he was whisked into recording sessions with Organized Noize and Swizz Beatz for an official re-release of Dark Days. After those sessions failed to yield a single, Interscope label head Jimmy Iovine introduced Bubba to superproducer Timbaland, who quickly signed the rapper to his Beat Club imprint.
In the summer of 2001, the universe was introduced to Bubba Sparxxx in the form of “Ugly,” his debut single. Its video was like an episode of Dukes of Hazzard, as directed by David Lynch. The clip featured such arresting imagery as the chubby rapper spitting in a mud pit as men wrestled pigs behind him, a beauty pageant for leathery, middle-aged women, a gaunt gentleman covered in shaving cream taking a razor to his armpits, a man rubbing live rats on his chest, and an elementary school-aged girl grinning wide to reveal a plug of chewing tobacco wedged in her jaws. It succeeded in establishing Bubba Sparxxx as a rapper unlike anything the world had seen before: a white, self-proclaimed redneck who, with his deep baritone and sturdy flow, could wrestle even the wildest beat to the ground. He had the look, the sound, and, most importantly, the push of a major label back when that meant something.
Now a pop star in the making, Bubba’s life was no longer his own. “It seemed almost immediate that I was on TRL,” he says. “Interscope, the number one label in music, had pushed their biggest buttons behind Bubba Sparxxx in the summer and fall of 2001. They spent millions of dollars making sure my name and face was everywhere. I remember being swarmed right by the TGI Friday’s in Times Square. It was shocking.”
But despite the momentum of “Ugly” and the initial push of Interscope, the re-release of Dark Days, Bright Nights failed to hit. It was impossible to place Bubba in a box, and in retrospect that might have been a problem. “Ugly” was a novelty and a party-starter, but Dark Days’ best songs featured countrified battle-raps. He’d rap ferociously about drugs and sex on one song, only to show a warmer side on the next, discussing family and the social issues associated with poverty. Coming from the same guy who had a dude rubbing rats on his nipples in his music video, this was confusing. “People had taken it as a joke,” Bubba says. “I’m not saying we didn’t do some things for entertainment, but I wanted people to understand what life is really like in rural areas.”
This became Bubba’s mission statement for Deliverance, his second album. He and Timbaland settled on a sound that was informed by bluegrass and country as much as it was by hip-hop. “We decided to go all the way in on the country shit,” Bubba says. “Let’s make the craziest shit anyone’s ever heard.”
Listening today, Deliverance still sounds years ahead of its time. “Comin’ Round” featured a sample from the bluegrass group Yonder Mountain String Band beefed up by Timbaland’s bubbly synths. “She Tried” would be a full-fledged folk song if not for Bubba’s raps. “Warrant” is built around a Billy Preston-esque blues piano and skittering drums, and “New South” and “My Tone” were earnest rap-rock records. “Hootenanny,” meanwhile, featured a freshly-grown Justin Timberlake on the hook. Bubba lodged his second hit with the album’s title track and its O Brother Where Art Thou?-inspired video. Though Sparxxx yet again pleased critics, the album stalled out at 400,000 copies sold. “Today,” Bubba says, “400,000 sold is a classic. Back then, it got you fired.”
It’s hard to say why Bubba’s first two albums sold poorly. Surely, the disconnect between the public’s perception of his music and what it actually was like played a part. Though his albums were flush with humanity, nuance, and disarming depth, he was perceived by many as a novelty, the rap equivalent of a juggling bear wearing a suit. “I was definitely the first person for whom the term ‘hick-hop’ was used,” he says.
Behind the scenes, Bubba was slowly unraveling. Never one to shy away from partying, Bubba developed an addiction to prescription pain medications. “I’d started taking them socially. Then I was in a snowmobile accident in Canada and broke my shoulder and was prescribed them. That sent me over the deep end.
I was young and immature,” Bubba says. “I let Timbaland down in a lot of ways. He asked me to do certain things in order to maintain a working relationship, and in the depths of my addiction I couldn’t do that.”
After getting dropped from Interscope, Bubba called upon his Dungeon Family ties and became the first artist signed to Big Boi’s Purple Ribbon imprint. He needed a hit, and he needed one badly. “I had accumulated so much stuff,” he says. “I had a mortgage, a lot of cars, a lot of people depending on me.” He turned to Mr. Collipark, the hitmaker behind some of his fellow ATLiens Ying Yang Twins’ biggest hits. With the Twins’ help, Bubba created “Ms. New Booty,” which became his biggest song ever. When Bubba first heard the completed version, he remembers saying, “Oh my god. This is a smash.” Despite its success, the album it was attached to, The Charm, sold poorly.
Today, Bubba views “Ms. New Booty” as a double-edged sword, calling it “The hit I needed, but not the hit I wanted.” It allowed him to sustain his career long enough to pay his bills, but as he puts it, “If you had let me know that was the last opportunity I would have to be on a major label and speak to the masses, I would not have wanted last statement to have been, ‘I found you, Ms. New Booty.’”
By this point, Bubba’s addiction had caught up to him. “I knew I needed to change the way I was living,” he says, “or I was going to die.” He checked himself into rehab, leaving hundreds of thousands of dollars in potential touring money on the table.
After his first stint in rehab, Bubba relocated to Tampa, Florida, in order to get away from the party scene that was his Atlanta home. His sobriety was short lived, however—he jokes, “They didn’t tell me they have more strip clubs in Tampa than they do Atlanta”—and he relapsed within nine months. From there, Bubba lapsed into a cycle of on-and-off-again drug use, resulting in a chasm of unproductivity. “I was either using to the point where I couldn’t be productive, or I was more focused on staying clean than I was on being creative.” Amid tensions with his label, he headed back to rehab again.
In May of 2009, Bubba relapsed while in rehab, ending in his arrest at a Hooters in Clearwater, Florida, for felony possession of a medication called Tranxene, a benzodiazepine used to treat anxiety, seizures, and alcohol withdrawal. The arrest was “Pretty public,” he says. “I was on the11 o’clock news, TMZ.” Though the charges were dropped—“For some reason, that didn’t make TMZ,” he says—the damage had been done. “I was doing what I shouldn’t have been doing, so I look at it like I deserved to get in trouble,” he says with resignation.
That August, Bubba made the decision to be clean for good. He’d made some major changes to his life. He was now living on a farm in Georgia, and he hadn’t written a single rap in a year. “In my mind, I had quit,” he says.
Still, things have a funny way of working out sometimes. In the time Bubba had spent away from the mic, the internet hit the music industry like a bomb. Artists no longer had to rely on the traditional outlets of radio and TV to be heard, and album sales—never Bubba’s strong suit—plummeted. Meanwhile, the worlds of country and rap—which have always had more to do with each other than either side would like to admit—reached an uneasy truce, and a scene of rednecked rappers coalesced, pushing a brand of country-rap that draws inspiration from U.G.K. and 2 Live Crew as enthusiastically as it does from George Jones and Big & Rich. Funnily enough, it sounds like the logical endpoint to what Bubba Sparxxx and Timbaland started with Deliverance.
Nearly a year and a half after he’d stopped making music, a chance meeting with a neighbor who owned a studio got him rapping again. “To say I was working the kinks out and knocking the dust off is a pretty big understatement. I was just so happy to be back,” he says. “I felt like a piece of my heart was returned to me.”
The culmination of his rebuilding efforts came in the form of Pain Management, Bubba’s 2013 record for Average Joes, Colt Ford’s label (the pair have known each other since Bubba’s days in Athens). The record fully embraced the newly-cohered country rap scene. His newest effort, Made on McCosh Mill Road, finds him operating at the peak of his rap prowess, as if he never lost a step between Deliverance and now. He’s excited: He’s readying two more records, and has entered the rotation as an in-demand Nashville songwriter. “I’m plugged into the scene there,” he says. “My influence and expertise is welcomed.” He’s confident in his new career. “In the next year, I will write a number-one country record. Write that down right now.”
His daily routine in Nashville goes something like this: wake up, meet with two other songwriters, knock out a track, have a beer, and go home. “It’s much more structured and laid back in comparison to Atlanta,” he says. “In Atlanta, everyone’s turnt up all the time. In Nashville, people kick back and have a conversation. It definitely fits more of who I need to be from a mental and spiritual standpoint.”
And really, that’s what it’s about for Bubba Sparxxx at this point. If you listen to his new work, his music is less concerned with asserting his status as an anomaly in the rap world, instead painting vivid pictures of life in the South. “I’m on this process of personal discovery, trying to figure out who I am, what kind of man I am, and what kind of man I need to be,” he tells me. “I can’t lose perspective and get caught up in this façade of bullshit. My name is Andy Mathis, and my job is Bubba Sparxxx.”
Follow Drew on Twitter – @drewmillard
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