How did A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie get his rap name?
It is not especially unusual for rappers to operate under mouthy, elaborate stage names. Del the Funky Homosapien screams to mind right off the bat. But even by the usual standards, A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie is a particular mouthful. So how does a young New Yorker born with the name of Artist Julius Dubose come to refer to himself that way?
A Boogie was asked about that some years ago, during an interview with Newsweek in 2017. This was the same year that he first really started to make waves, releasing his debut album, The Bigger Artist, in September and generally beginning to generate a lot of mainstream attention. In fact, his growing popularity during this period is illustrated by the very fact of an outlet like Newsweek, known primarily as an establishment-adjacent American news magazine, deciding to run a feature on him.
In response to being asked where he got his lengthy stage name from, A Boogie told the magazine, “I used to watch [the movie] Paid in Full every day when I was like 12, 13, and then I started rapping and everybody would call me A Boogie [who is a character from the movie]. And then the hoodie came along because I was wearing hoodies all the time. [People] started saying A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie and it stuck.”
Set during the late ’80s, Paid In Full follows Ace, a young man in Harlem who, at first, toils along the straight and narrow, working at a dry cleaners. He eventually is seduced into taking up a life of drug-dealing, which, for a time, works well, and he rises swiftly through the ranks of the industry. Inevitably, things eventually begin to go wrong, and the horrors of the Harlem crack epidemic and drug-dealing ecosystem are depicted in gory detail.
The film wasn’t exactly a smash when it came out in 2002, with reviews being decidedly mixed and box office takings meager. But it eventually developed a real cult following, especially among hip-hop fans, who, perhaps, were initially drawn in by the fact that the movie had been produced by Roc-A-Fella’s film subsidiary. This, remember, was a time when the record label was at its most dominant.
A young Artist, Julius Dubose, was clearly one of those young rap fans who became obsessed with the movie, and, eventually, it came to gift him with his stage name. But in that same Newsweek interview, A Boogie did mention one other pseudonym that he considered taking up while he was developing his act, and it was quite a bit plainer.
“The only other rap name [I would have thought of] is Artist,” he said, “and that’s my real name. After a while, everybody will know me as Artist.” To be fair, it’s a solid name—but it does rather threaten to confuse algorithms and cataloguing attempts. A Boogie Wit Da Hoodie, while certainly unwieldy, does certainly leap out of a list of other artists.