![]() ![]() Die-cut posters at the top of every light post in the area announce Rick Ross and his album Port Of Miami, Coming Soon. It’s still hours before Ross is due to hit the Springfest stage, but we’re over by Bayfront because he wants to show us his promotional presence and buoy it with a spontaneous drive-thru appearance for the milling crowds. At one point the DJ instructed him, “Now say, We’re gonna finish it out with my song ‘Hustlin’,’ the hottest record in Miami.” Ross squared up to the mic and said, “We’re gonna finish it out with my song ‘Hustlin’,’ the biggest record in the country.” ![]() When we had initially met up with him earlier in the day, he was doing drops for a local Clear Channel radio station, Beat 103.5. Ross has never had a licensed record for sale, but he’s been given one of the night’s prime slots for a simple reason. It’s Miami Springfest weekend, and although we’re headed for South Beach, Ross takes a detour to ride by Bayfront Park, where a huge radio-sponsored concert featuring Lil Wayne, Bun B, Three 6, Paul Wall, Young Jeezy, Mike Jones, Juelz Santana and everyone else who’s recently sold between 500 thousand and two million copies of an album is already getting underway. “The express pass is for weed smokers,” he says with frustration. On one car ride towards the Beach, Ross is five sixths of the way through a strawberry Phillie, playing his new mixtape loud as fuck, when we have to stop in the cash lane at a toll booth. With traffic and pit stops, it can take damn near an hour to get from one to the other, so it’s not a coincidence that his favorite place to smoke a blunt seems to be behind the wheel. Meet up with Ross in Carol City and he’ll probably put you in his Rolls Royce Phantom (he drives it himself) to go cruise “the Beach” for a while meet Ross in South Beach, and after an hour or two he’s ready to switch back to Carol City. It may seem like a hokey concept, but ever since the song “Hustlin’” took over airwaves and mixtapes across the country, this “two Miamis” Miami has been Ross’s real-life routine whenever he’s not working his big hit on long radio promo tours. ![]() The rest of the video takes place in the parking lots of a catchall ghetto department store called Carolmart, and a massive, windowless concrete bunker of an establishment called Club Rollexx. Ross swaps out the super-clean BMW mentioned in the song for a souped-up Chevy and heads towards the city’s infamous Carol City neighborhood. Then, as the swelling organs, snappy snare roll explosion and woozy, manipulated “everyday I’m huss-a-lin” chant of Ross’s single take over, he drives a white 745 Beemer past the cruise liners docked at the Port of Miami, until the camera lens suddenly switches to sepia and gives the video a sun-scorched hood griminess. The clip’s introduction starts out on Collins Ave, with generic Cuban cha-cha muzak soundtracking women in string bikinis as they walk the famously upscale South Beach strip. All the while he honed his musical talent, overcoming setback after setback until a song called “Hustlin’” changed his life forever.įrom the making of “Hustlin’” to his first major label deal with Def Jam, to the controversy surrounding his past as a correctional officer and the numerous health scares, arrests and feuds he had to transcend along the way, Hurricanes is a revealing portrait of one of the biggest stars in the rap game, and an intimate look at the birth of an artist.The concept for the video of Rick Ross’s menacing breakout hit “Hustlin’” is not subtle-it goes like this: there are two sides to Miami. Still, in the midst of the chaos and danger that surrounded him, Ross flourished, first as a standout high school football player and then as a dope boy in Carol City’s notorious Matchbox housing projects. In the aftermath of the 1980 race riots and the Mariel boatlift, Ross came of age at the height of the city’s crack epidemic, when home invasions and execution-style killings were commonplace. Now, for the first time, Ross offers a vivid, dramatic and unexpectedly candid account of his early childhood, his tumultuous adolescence and his dramatic ascendancy in the world of hip-hop.īorn William Leonard Roberts II, Ross grew up “across the bridge,” in a Miami at odds with the glitzy beaches, nightclubs and yachts of South Beach. Rick Ross is an indomitable presence in the music industry, but few people know his full story. The highly anticipated memoir from hip-hop icon Rick Ross chronicles his coming of age amid Miami’s crack epidemic, his star-studded controversies and his unstoppable rise to fame.
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