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A lot of MCs decide they want to go pro in the rap game during a moment of blinding, burning urgency. It's the desire to get known now, to get what's yours and maybe even take a bit of someone else's. And when it strikes, you've got to get up and get going.
Unless you're Saigon. When inspiration struck him, he really couldn't get up or go anywhere. Because he was in prison for shooting a kid at a party.
It was the third time he'd been locked up for a shooting-related incident (when he was in eighth grade, he shot a guy who'd been spending time with his then-girlfriend, and about a year and a half later he shot two men outside a nightclub). He freely admits he was already heading down the path to self-ruination, until that one fateful night, in his jail cell, when inspiration struck. . "I was 16 years old, locked up with all these dudes who were urban legends in the 'hood. You get to meet these dudes and I'd be like, 'Damn your name rings so many bells in the 'hood,' " Saigon says. "But these dudes were like, 'Man, you think I care about that? I wanna go home.' This is what really changed my life, when I got around these dudes who I was trying to be like and they was like, 'Man, if I could do it all again I don't think I could care about a reputation.' "
It was then that Saigon — real name Brian Carenard — decided to make rapping his life. He'd been involved in breaking and DJing since he was 9, and got into the lyrical side of things a few years later. But it had never been more than a hobby; now he decided to make it his life. So he took the stage "professionally" for the first time during a prison talent show.
"There's these dudes onstage rapping, and they was good — real good — and I'm in the crowd and I say, 'These dudes is a'ight,' " Saigon laughs. "So somebody heard me and the say, 'Oh, you think you're better? ... Then get up here.' So I'm sitting there thinking of rhymes in my head and I'm like, 'What can I say? This is a prisoner crowd.'
"So there's this one song that I used to do, it ain't even a real song, it was called 'F Police.' So I'm like, 'Hmm, that's what I could do. That always got the party crunk,' " he continues. "So the curtains open and I'm like, 'Yeah, yeah, check it out to all my peoples in the house, let me hear you say "F police." ' It was pandemonium, dudes was jumpin' on their chairs and then I just see the curtains close. I'm like, 'What happened?' The next thing I know, police rushed me, strip searched me, threw me in a box, threw me in the hole. And I'm like, 'What did I do? I'm performing at a talent show.' "
Things weren't going much better for Saigon after he got out of prison. He'd made the rounds on the mixtape circuit and made plenty of fans with his street-weary, conscious rap. But he was having a hard time making it to the big leagues until a couple of chance meetings with a pair of producers: celebrity DJ Mark Ronson who started working on tracks with Saigon, and then with über-hitmaker Just Blaze, who took him under his wing.
Working with Blaze, he's already made a couple of classic cuts, including the linguistically charged "Letter P" and "Color Purple," which calls for an end to the Bloods/Crips gang feud. And with a long-awaited proper debut, Greatest Story Never Told, due later this year, Saigon is poised to truly make it huge.
But record sales are just numbers. And after doing hard time on (and off) the streets, Saigon would prefer to be known as a whole lot more than just the rap game's finest.
"I want to be known as somebody who was born in the '70s, saw the problems on the streets in the '80s, got caught up in those problems in the '90s, and in the 2000s, he started to make a solution to that problem," he says. "If there's problems out there, I'm gonna try to solve them all."
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