IT WAS ALL A DREAM

It was the Fourth of July 2004, and Raheem the Dream was clinging on for dear life. The pioneering Southern rapper and Tight 2 Def Records founder had suffered a double brain aneurysm and had been confined to an Atlanta hospital bed for 90 days. “I had to learn how to walk, breathe and learn my son’s and my siblings’ names,” recalls the loquacious ATL music pioneer, who was the first local star to take his city’s 808 bass-heavy, strip club-ready sound to the mainstream in the late ’80s. “After waking up from my coma, the only person I recognized was my mom.”

Today, in his mid-50s, Micaiah Raheem can look back at the entire dark, painful ordeal with a can-you-believe-this-shit smile. He marvels at the irony of brokering a $2 million major label record deal for platinum “White Tee” Dirty South crew Dem Franchize Boyz, one of the biggest coups of his career, just a week before he nearly died.

Raheem the Dream is walking, talking Southern rap history and can go on for days about Atlanta’s early hip-hop scene, which included such immortal figures as Mo-Jo, Shy D, Kilo Ali and DJ Smurf (later known to millions as Grammy-nominated producer Mr. Collipark). The son of a club owner released his self-titled debut single in 1986, during a time when Atlanta radio stations only played hip-hop after 6 pm and rarely played local rappers, if at all. Yet Raheem soon became the ATL’s first rap artist to garner regular radio rotation at home, paving the way for the multiplatinum breakthroughs of Jermaine Dupri and his kiddie hip-hop duo Kris Kross, TLC, Outkast and Goodie Mob.

And while he did not reach their towering mainstream fame, Raheem the Dream embraced his underdog status as the King of Freaknik. His sweat-inducing club anthems like “I Wanna Love You,” “Freak No ’Mo,” “The Most Beautiful Girl” and “Toot That Booty” became the soundtrack for Atlanta’s annual legendary (and at times infamous) spring- break gathering. But his legacy goes far deeper.

“Raheem the Dream was the first bass dude to put on his business hat and say, ‘I’m about to go national with this shit,’” Soulja Boy and Ying Yang Twins studio wizard Mr. Collipark told the Red Bull Music Academy in a 2017 feature on Atlanta’s storied hip-hop chitlin’ circuit, specifically praising Raheem’s out-of-nowhere 1999 crossover breakthrough with “Left, Right, Left” rapper Drama.

Indeed, when you are celebrated for barging in the door for Atlanta’s hip-hop takeover and jumpstarting the careers of everybody from DJ Toomp, D.G. Yola and Young Dro to the aforementioned Dem Franchize Boyz and multiplatinum singer-songwriter The-Dream, you have a story to tell.

Is it true that you started rapping after hearing Jimmy Spicer’s groundbreaking 1980 song “Adventures of Super Rhyme”?

Oh, my God! The first time I heard “Adventures of Super Rhyme” it was mind-blowing. I’m listening to this song and it’s a story about a superhero that’s like Superman, but his name is Super Rhyme. It was a 15-minute song! You couldn’t get any radio airplay on that one.

But you still needed to see someone from your city creating hip-hop. Can you speak to how Mo-Jo, Atlanta’s first MC to receive local radio airplay, helped you envision rap as an actual career?

What blew my mind was, we would come home and Mo-Jo would get played on WAOK-AM around 6 o’clock every day. So I’m thinking this guy goes to Washington High School. He’s from Atlanta. My sister was telling me that, during summer school, he would come outside during lunch breaks and rap to the whole school.

And this was all happening at a time in the early ’80s when hip-hop was still viewed as a novelty.

It was still new. But what also made me want to become a rapper was that my dad owned a club on the corner across from the school Mo-Jo attended. Mo-Jo would throw parties at his place and pull 500 kids to the club, and he and my dad would split the door. So I asked them how much they charged. And they told me $5 a person. Do the math. This dude was in high school getting about $1,250 in one night and he’s rapping? I said, “That’s what I’m going to do!”

It’s kind of wild hearing one of the pioneers of Atlanta 808 bass rhyming like Run-DMC on your 1986 debut, “Raheem the Dream.”

But that was the sound. Run-DMC, Whodini, LL COOL J, Doug E. Fresh, the Fat Boys, the Beastie Boys… they had radio on lock. Myself and my DJ back then, the world-famous DJ Toomp, were getting some airplay on V-103, but it was only on Friday nights between 10 and 12 midnight because they didn’t play local Atlanta hip-hop artists during the day. They were only playing New York rappers.

What was it like hearing your song on local radio beyond the rap shows for the first time?

Here’s what changed everything: August 3, 1986. We went to KISS 104, which was a new station that had just moved into town. Myself and King J rolled up to the station and dropped our records off. When we got in the car, by five o’clock, all of Atlanta was getting off work, and the DJ said, “These guys just came by the studio. They said they’re from Atlanta. We are going to give them a try. Brand-new single called ‘Raheem the Dream’”!

That had to be exhilarating.

We almost crashed the car [laughs].

By ’88, Atlanta began drifting away from the East Coast style and started incorporating the more fast-paced Miami bass music sound made popular by Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell and the 2 Live Crew. That influence is obvious on some of your early club classics like “Work That Body” and “If You Ain’t Got No Money.”

We all had to move that route because bass music gave Atlanta our own signature sound once MC Shy D, who was signed to Luke, dropped. It was also a bonus that to break our records we had 41 strip clubs in Atlanta. The strip clubs became our radio station.

Let’s jump into the early ’90s. LaFace Records was beginning its classic run. You had just established RTD Records, garnering a reputation as the King of Freaknik. And Jermaine Dupri discovers Kris Kross, whose massive commercial breakthrough, “Jump,” would set the foundation for his So So Def Records. Looking back, were you aware that Atlanta was kicking off a new hip-hop and R&B renaissance?

It felt like the whole world’s eyes were on Atlanta. We all were starting to believe, Oh, something is actually happening.

How hard was it to navigate the ’90s Atlanta explosion as an independent artist?

We had around 60 mom-and-pop record stores. I would ride around with my music in the trunk. You had so many stores in different parts of town that it would take you three or four days to hit all 50-60 stores. I had my own distribution inside of my apartment. I would have 10,000 cassettes and CDs up against my wall. I would walk out every day with 1000 and come back home with none.

Do you recall the first record that took you beyond Atlanta?

My first national breakout hit was “The Most Beautiful Girl.”

I’m shocked that Prince didn’t sue you for that “The Beautiful Ones” interpolation…

[Laughs] I know! But Prince really dug independent artists. Now if I were on a major, he probably would have went after those bad boys. But I knew “The Most Beautiful Girl” was big when we started to reach Alabama, Chattanooga, Tennessee, and North and South Carolina. I was getting calls from Dallas, Texas. When we started skipping states it was like “Uh, oh…”

One of the more interesting turns in your career is your transformation into a respected talent broker within the hip-hop world in the late ’90s and early ’00s. How were you able to make your label Tight 2 Def into a thriving training ground for future hit makers like Drama, Young Dro, The-Dream and producer Shawty Redd?

What’s in common about the artists you named is each act I discovered released their very first professional record on Tight 2 Def. They all went national and got major deals through my label.

Your mentoring of Drama is the stuff of music industry legend, orchestrating his seismic 1999 debut single, “Left, Right, Left.” Did you have any idea that he was going to become one of the catalysts for Atlanta’s dominant 2000s hip-hop run?

I knew Drama had something special the first time I met him at a birthday party. He walked up to me and said, “I’m a rapper… I’m 17.” I said, “Spit a little something for me.” And Drama did a beat on his chest, which was better than a drum machine. I’m like, Oh, God! And Drama was flowing like crazy. He did about four or five songs for me. I was like, let me get your number right now.

There was no messing around…

None. I called Drama at 11 am the next day, picked him up and took him over to Twin Productions house, and that’s where I met Shawty Redd, who was just 15 at the time. Redd heard Drama rap and started making a beat right then and there. They did “Left, Right, Left” in the living room. I came back around five hours later and they had six songs done.

I remember when “Left, Right, Left” dropped. No one could explain the massive SoundScan numbers it was pulling each week. The music industry was in shock.

What blew my mind was I was selling “Left, Right, Left” through Mike Walker’s Southern Music Distribution. The volume was too much for me to handle to press up that many records and keep up with the demand. But Mike had a pressing plant. We were selling 10,000 units a week independently in 1999 on SoundScan before we got him his deal with a major.

Those are insane numbers for an independent label.

And we didn’t even have a video out [laughs].

Before Lil Jon went on to reshape the sound of southern hip-hop in the 2000s, he was an A&R at So So Def. Were you surprised when he became a go-to super producer after working with him on your 1999 track, “If U Gone Buck”?

I was not surprised at all. I only touch people that I have a great feeling about. I felt the same way about Lil Juan as I did Jon. He rapped so fire, I asked him if I could change his rap name. I told him, “Man, you are Dro. You ain’t the regular weed. You that hydro.” That’s how Juan became Young Dro. And then I added Fabo [future member of the multi-platinum group D4L] and put him on the Tight IV Life Training Camp album.

You also discovered a young vocalist who would go on to become Grammy-winning singer-songwriter The-Dream.

I featured The-Dream on “The Most Beautiful Girl.” He sung on “I Wanna Freak You.” He sung on all of those hits for me on Tight IV Life. He was one of the hardest working guys out of a singing group I had signed. He asked if he could name himself after me. A few years later, The-Dream breaks out and [pens] “Umbrella” for Rihanna. I knew he was a good [vocalist], but I had no idea he was going to become this huge songwriter.

2004 was a rollercoaster period for you. A week after you orchestrated a major record deal for Dem Franchize Boyz you suffered a double brain aneurysm. What was it like going through such extreme highs and lows?

It was crazy. My radio DJ friend had hooked me up with Dem Franchize Boyz. He said, “Raheem, this ‘White Tee’ song is going to be a breakout single. If you can get them signed, I’ll start playing them.” We reached out to Universal. An A&R called me to offer them a deal. At that time we had fax machines, so I told him to fax me a figure. I thought the number was a joke. The offer was $25,000 for a single deal.

Dude was really trying to lowball you.

I know! I was making that in a day. I told him I was going to have to turn him down. About two hours later, the president of Universal called and apologized. He resent me an offer from his email. It was a four-five album deal and the first amount was $400,000; the next installment went up to $800,000 and then $1.2 million—hundreds of thousands more than the original offer.

And then you found yourself near death.

The doctor told me people usually don’t come back from a double aneurysm. Three months after I was released from the hospital I got a call from Lady B, who sung on my very first record, “Raheem the Dream.” She was managing D.G. Yola, who had a big record out in Atlanta called “Ain't Gon Let Up,” that they still play ’til this day. She needed a little help trying to get Yola to the next step. Keep in mind I had just re-learned how to walk and to talk. That’s why getting a $200,000 record deal for Yola let me know that God still had my back. I still knew what I was doing.

The hip-hop industry has finally started to acknowledge you as the godfather of Atlanta hip-hop. How gratifying is it to receive that level of praise knowing you and others set the stage for future Atlanta rap icons like Jeezy, Gucci Mane, Young Thug, Migos, Lil Baby and Latto?

I’m just happy that the game has evolved all the way around. Remember what we were talking about earlier, how the dominance on radio was all East Coast rap? We’ve turned that thing all the way around all these decades later. It’s been mad love for Atlanta hip-hop, R&B and Atlanta producers. That makes me just glow that I was a part of that. The road that the Lil Babys and the Lattos are riding on, we poured the concrete.