Credit: Atlantic

Chicago rapper Twista’s career, while not as active today as it once was, is nonetheless impressively long-lasting.

For the better part of three decades beginning in the early 1990s, he was releasing music and rubbing shoulders with the very best of them, and he even managed to secure a place in The Guinness Book of World Records in ’92 as the world’s fastest rapper. While it’s fair to say he hasn’t been the very biggest rapper at any particular point in time, he’s always been in and around that territory. And, from his own perspective, there’s a particular track that is responsible for the success he has enjoyed.

One might predict that Twista would credit ‘Slow Jamz’, the song he made with Kanye West and Jamie Foxx, with launching his career and life to another level. It went to number one in the American singles charts following its 2003 release, picked up a Grammy nomination, and it also featured on not one album, but two. As well as appearing on Twista’s own fourth album, Kamikaze, it was also found on Kanye’s debut, The College Dropout, which is today considered to be an out-and-out classic. All of this is to say that the track received a lot of exposure during its heyday, and it certainly bolstered Twista’s career.

“It was a dope time period for me,” Twista told HipHopDX in 2024, during a conversation celebrating his album Kamikaze’s 20-year anniversary, “I had success before, but I don’t think I felt the type of success that I wanted doing music until I made records like ‘Slow Jamz’. I just remember it being surreal. I remember doing an in-store one time in the city and a line of people were just wrapped around the corner to come see me. It was crazy.”

But still, as important as ‘Slow Jamz’ was for him, Twista nonetheless claimed that it probably wasn’t the most crucial track of his career. That was ‘Po Pimp’, the 1996 Do Or Die song that he contributed a verse to. “It’s hard to say that [‘Slow Jamz’ changed his life] because I have a few more records that did the same thing,” he admitted, “I would say the ‘Po Pimp’ record also had a big impact on my life. […] I think that shift happened when I put the ‘Po Pimp’ record out with Do Or Die. That changed my life right there.”

‘Po Pimp’ ended up becoming one of the most popular tracks of 1996, which boosted both the careers of Chicago trio Do or Die and Twista, helping the former get signed to l Rap-a-Lot Records, while the latter also signed to Big Beat and Atlantic Records following the track’s release.

He put out his third album Adrenaline Rush with those labels, which laid the groundwork for his further success with follow-up Kamikaze, but it all started with ‘Po Pimp’.