The moment Big KRIT almost quit rap: “Buy some food or pay this phone bill?”
Whether a fan of his music or merely a spectator to the hip-hop game, it’s hard to imagine Big KRIT as anything but a heavyweight within the scene.
The Mississippi-born rapper and record producer, whose stage name is a backronym for King Remembered in Time, has released albums that have seen critical and commercial success, collaborating with the likes of Lil Wayne, 2 Chainz and Asap Ferg, and has been hailed as a likely successor of the Southern rap genre.
And yet, in a tale as old as time, the successful artist was once the starving artist, or almost starving and potentially difficult to get in touch with. “Beats weren’t selling, that was a point where people were like, ‘Yo, let me rap on the beat and if it takes off I’ll come back and give you some bread’,” KRIT said in an interview with The Breakfast Club radio show.
“Everybody would find somebody to mix their records. The quality of music was changing because you could get your hands on a programme and mix it with ease. So I was damn near out of a job at that point. I remember I was like, ‘I’m either gonna buy some food or pay this cell phone bill…’,” he recalled of the difficult time.
The interview, conducted in 2014, was part of KRIT’s Cadillactica album launch campaign, which debuted at number five on the Billboard 200, and featured appearances from the likes of Wiz Khalifa, E-40, Rico Love, Devin the Dude, Aasp Ferg, and Lupe Fiasco, amongst others. One can only imagine how relieved, if not well-deservedly smug he must have felt sticking to his guns and pursuing his vision of music-making.
The sophomore effort received high praise from critics, who highlighted both the production and lyricism as well as the collaborations across the album, but perhaps KRIT’s most notable collaborator isn’t a peer within the genre, but a giant within music of legendary status.
KRIT’s debut album, Live from the Underground, featured an appearance from blues legend BB King on the penultimate track, ‘Praying Man’. Speaking in the same interview on how he managed to get King on his first-ever studio album, an experience the rapper described upon the latter’s death as “surreal”, he explained that it was a matter of right place, right time.
“It happened to be someone named Jason who was a part of BB’s camp that was familiar with my music,” KRIT said, “He was like, ‘Yo, I’ll play BB the record and then we going to see what he thinks about it’. And it just went from there… I just wanted to bridge a gap in music in some sort of way, and so even if nothing else happens in the rest of my career, I can look back to that moment and be like, ‘I did something that hasn’t happened before’.”
KRIT naturally didn’t need to worry about the rest of his career; after announcing on Twitter that he had parted ways with Def Jam Records in 2016, he released his third studio album, 4ever Is A Mighty Long Time, his first independent release under his Multi Alumni label. The record debuted at number seven on the Billboard 200, and he has since released two following albums to much public and critical fanfare, never having to choose between making his art or having a meal.