In first post-prison on-camera interview, founding Hot Boys member tells MTV News that Lil Wayne's success is 'not a surprise.'
By Maurice Bobb with reporting by James "FLX" Smith
Turk
Photo: MTV News
It's only been two weeks since Turk was released from Forrest City Prison in Arkansas, and the founding member of the Hot Boys is already putting in work with members of his former Cash Money Records crew.
"It's in the air right now that we working," Turk told MTV News in New Orleans. "Mack Maine just sent me a song to get on with him and Baby, you know what I'm saying? So we 'bout to get it in. Then I'mma send them something, so they can get on something for me."
The rapper, born Tab Virgil Jr., served eight years, eight months and 16 days of his 14-year sentence due to a plea deal in his second-degree murder case. But even while the Young & Thuggin' MC was serving time, Turk heard about how thoroughly his friend, multiplatinum rapper Lil Wayne, changed the rap game as a solo artist with his Billboard-charting Carter albums and as CEO of YMCMB, featuring flagship artists Drake and Nicki Minaj.
"To see Lil Wayne, Baby, the whole Cash Money doin' they thing, it's not a surprise to me, because I know how Cash Money rock," Turk told MTV News. "They get it in, you know what I'm saying? That's what we all come from. We come from that. We come from doing a whole album in a week. Mannie Fresh get in the studio, we all get in the studio ... 'What you got? Let me hear something.' Then bam! He put the beat, we put the rap and there it go. So when I was hearing Lil Wayne was doing all these mixtapes, doing all these features, people in jail and people on the phone when I'm callin' home be like, 'Yo, man, your dog doin' this and this and that,' it wasn't no surprise to me. I don't know why it was a surprise to the world. But I always knew that Wayne was gonna be how he is, 'cause he was focused."
Now that he's returned to the familiar confines of NOLA and successfully shaken his drug habits and cleared his head of negativity, Turk is more focused now too.
"I believe that everything happened in God's timing," Turk told MTV News. "I been gone for eight years, eight months, 16 days, and I express that because it's a miracle for a person to go through almost a decade and be in his right frame of mind and not be institutionalized, not gone crazy like people be thinking. I'm sitting here on MTV News and giving it to 'em like I'm giving it to 'em. To be able to think like a man and just get back into what he came from. And my situation, as far as drugs heroin, cocaine at an early age, that took my focus away. So for me to be clear-minded now and thinking the way I think, I'm 'bout to do the same thing that Lil Wayne and Baby and Cash Money doing."
It's not official that Turk will be rejoining the Cash Money Records family again, but he is currently in the studio working on new music and an autobiography tentatively titled The AutoThugography of Turk. Turk was involved in a 2004 shooting of a Tennessee police officer and convicted in 2005 on various federal charges.
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