“It’s good to be competitive, not just with the new rappers but the ones who’ve been around as long as I have,” he said. and a beat by Mike Will Made It.īut if Ludacris feels the heat of issuing an album on the heels of well-received new releases from the likes of Drake and Kendrick Lamar, he seems to also be competing with his own past success. He smartly tapped some of that talent for Ludaversal on tracks like “Come and See Me,” featuring Mississippi rapper Big K.R.I.T. Luda’s five years away from the rap game has seen a whole new crop of second-wave trap MCs and producers rising out of the South to take over the airwaves and Internet, where next-gen hip-hop lives. I was listening to the fans by mixing the old Luda with the new Luda in perfect balance.“ “That’s why I called it Ludaversal-it’s kind of like, welcome to my world. “I put more into this album,” he explained. Elsewhere he pens a melancholy ode to his late alcoholic father, who died in 2007, and drops a Viagra-themed skit about an erection that just won’t quit. On tracks like “Charge It To The Rap Game” and “Grass Is Always Greener,” Ludacris exorcises his own moody frustrations with fame, success, the media, and celebrity. Once the king of boisterous ATL party rap, the Ludacris of Ludaversal is on the offensive, seemingly hyperaware of having to prove himself after taking a Hollywood hiatus from a rap landscape that’s changed drastically since he last left it. The false stories and being misquoted in magazinesGot a nigga wanting to go and load a couple magazinesHead to your office and shoot up the whole fucking staffPost that on your website and burn while i fucking laugh And he’s definitely furious, rapping on the track “Charge It To The Rap Game”: On Ludaversal, Ludacris gets personal as he proves he’s still a machine gun on the mic, weaving his lightning-fast signature flow in and out of a collection of wide-ranging tracks. Got married while waging a very public custody battle with the mother of his second child. Ran into Presidential hopeful Jeb Bush while getting props from the state of Georgia for his youth charity. He released singles and a mixtape here and there, with mixed results. “But it wasn’t enough of a window to release it then, so it kind of all just happened.”Ī lot of life happened during that five-year period between albums. “I was working on the album before this film and after, and of course there was a break when production got shut down,” Ludacris said of the timing. The marketing stars aligned this week as Ludaversal finally debuted on March 31, days before Furious 7 finally made it to theaters. “But when we saw the finished product we thought they did it the right way, with such grace and class.” “I think we were all a little skeptical about moving on,” he said. Four months later, they picked up and moved forward to complete the film. The tragic 2013 death of Luda’s longtime Fast & Furious co-star Paul Walker in particular sent the franchise’s cast, filmmakers, and studio reeling with grief.
We’re sitting in the Los Angeles sunshine outside a trailer set up for Furious 7, his fourth Fast & Furious movie to date and his third in five years. “At this stage in my life, after coming out with seven consecutive albums, living some life and going through some issues, my vision got larger but my circle got smaller,” said Ludacris. Now after half a decade without a new release, Luda’s finally back with a new album, Ludaversal, and a role in action juggernaut Furious 7-two projects long in the making that mark a new introspective era for the rapper, actor, and philanthropist. If recording careers are measured in time spent away from the charts, it’s been an eternal five-year hiatus for Ludacris, Dirty South rap royalty who’d never missed more than two years between any of the studio albums that followed his 1999 debut, Incognegro, which he released at the tender age of 22.