He has rejected major label deals as high as $12m, although he maintains that he is open to options. But now you don’t.”ĭolph releases music on his own label, Paper Route Empire. “The game was set up to where you damn near needed a record label. “P talked his shit into existence,” Dolph says. In songs, he shouts out self-made millionaires such as No Limit Records founder Master P, whose reality rap and entrepreneurial spirit thrived during the late 90s. “To me, that is timeless music.”īy 2014, Dolph was touring nightclubs in smaller cities such as Pensacola, Florida, earning up to $72,000 (£53,000) a week. “I’d rather motivate somebody all day long,” he says. Like Atlanta rapper Jeezy, Dolph isn’t trying to be clever.
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As he says on In My System, from last year’s mixtape Rich Crack Baby, “I clocked in when I was 12 and never clocked out”. “It can be at a spot, it can be in the trap, it can be in the car driving – we just fucking around.” Today he raps, with supreme confidence, about the hunger that gnawed at him and how he now shops at Saks Fifth Avenue. My whole thing is about giving these folks the real.”ĭolph has been releasing mixtapes since 2008, when he and his friends used to freestyle together. I ain’t never really had no dad, just the street’s ways, and I’m giving game that their dad was supposed to be giving them, on these tapes and lyrics. “I told my grandma a long time ago that I was going to take my mom and dad out the hood. “I’ve just always wanted the money,” he continues. We were in the fourth, fifth and sixth grades, seeing this living hell. But we wanted to go past where the action is. Of course everyone’s grandmamas and parents were like, don’t walk up past that corner. “Even when leaving school, you either had to go up past the two stores and the corner, where everything is going on, or walk up this long ass boring street up the hill to go home. Back then there was slick beefing – all the Castalia kids would go over to Magnolia. “There were two hoods, Magnolia and Castalia I went to Magnolia Elementary. “Hustling – you’ve been seeing it for so long that you start to partake in it,” Dolph says. From his vantage point, just south of the tourist attractions downtown, he only saw one way how. As the oldest Thornton boy, all Dolph wanted was to provide for his family. Because his parents were addicted to crack, one of his grandmothers cared for his sisters in Chicago, while another watched over Dolph and his brothers in Memphis. Memphis is where Dolph, born Adolph Thornton Jr, learned to be self-sufficient. Dolph has been based in the city for a few years now, but his heart is still in Memphis, whose contributions to trap music often get overlooked, despite Three 6 Mafia winning an Oscar for their 2006 track Hard Out Here for a Pimp. Inside Atlanta’s Street Execs Studios, Dolph (without a sling this time, with just a few pinky ring baubles) lounges with his crew to watch the Saints-Falcons football game. That release also showed that, after getting shot in broad daylight in September, reportedly due to a simmering beef with another Memphis rapper, nothing will stop Dolph from getting back to work. His new album, Thinking Out Loud, became his highest charting yet when it broke the top 20 in October. “I got shot in my arm,” he says, “but OK, let me style on you bitches right quick.”įor someone who had never thought of music as a viable career choice (“I’m from Memphis, you know I thought about pimping,” he rapped on 2017’s On the River), Dolph has every right to boast: five of his past six releases, all from 2016 onward, made the Billboard album chart. But for this self-portrait, shared with his 2.5 million followers, a hospital-issue sling wouldn’t do. Older Instagrams show Dolph wearing bandages at a Los Angeles hospital, then an arm sling to visit a jeweller. On his right arm is a custom Gucci sling with red trim. He throws his left leg over one of the chair’s golden arms.
I n an Instagram post from November, Young Dolph, a rare indie success story in US rap, reclines on a throne.