When 2 Chainz raps about his past as a hustler, he’s not exaggerating.
In his new memoir, The Voice in My Head Is God, out now, the rapper, 48, writes candidly of the years before he rose to fame in Atlanta’s bustling music scene. The Grammy winner (real name Tauheed Epps) was raised primarily by his mother while his father was in and out of prison.
“No matter what my pop said about my mom raising me, we never held it against him,” 2 Chainz recalled. “We were always too busy moving forward. We knew if we weren’t moving forward, nobody was coming to save us.”
While he was very young, 2 Chainz learned to fend for himself, selling drugs in middle school and entering juvenile detention when he was a teenager.
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“I started selling packs with my mom at a young age,” he wrote. “Yes, with my mom. I was young, but my maturity level was much older.”
Keep scrolling for more revelations from 2 Chainz’s memoir, The Voice in My Head Is God:
2 Chainz Witnessed Multiple Drug Busts as a Kid
2 Chainz recalled witnessing “three or four drug busts” when he was a child, with a “few” happening when he was “young.” The first one occurred “around Christmastime” while both of his parents were home. His mom and dad were both arrested, and his dog didn’t survive the encounter.
“I never saw my dog, but I knew he was dead, and my pops believed that the cops did it,” 2 Chainz wrote. “That devastated me more than all the chaos. Toom Toom was my dog. My motherf***ing dog, and my best friend.”
2 Chainz Started Selling Drugs in 7th Grade
2 Chainz began selling marijuana while he was in middle school. “My pops sold work, so I started selling packs with mom around 12,” he wrote. “Selling packs just seemed to be the family business, and it felt as natural as going to school.”
He continued dealing off and on through high school but eventually gave it up when he decided to pursue music full-time.
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Why 2 Chainz Doesn’t Regret High School Weed Arrest
2 Chainz’s career as a hustler caught up with him his senior year of high school when he got caught selling marijuana out of the school parking lot. He thought he’d gotten away with it, but later that morning, two cops came into his history class and accused him of dealing drugs. He denied it, but the officers had security camera footage that showed him wearing a jacket that had his product inside. When they retrieved it, they found weed in the pockets and took 2 Chainz to jail.
He ultimately spent about a week and a half in jail, missing the SAT — which he needed to ace in order to help get a basketball scholarship for college.
“I regretted everything until the day Alabama State’s basketball coach, John L. Williams, called out of the blue and said: ‘Listen, we heard what happened. Don’t worry. We’d love to have you down here. We got a full ride for you. Come visit next week and check us out.’”
2 Chainz took him up on the offer and liked what he saw, and he ultimately realized it was for the best that he didn’t attend one of the other schools that required his SAT score.
“That’s how I ended up in a place that would open up my social butterfly personality and my musical interests,” he recalled. “That’s where I would meet my wife, who would eventually become the mother of my three beautiful children. The cliché everything happens for a reason is real if you believe. It took everything happening for me to end up in Montgomery, Alabama. And now, looking back, I don’t regret any of it.”
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The Arrest That Sent 2 Chainz to Juvenile Detention
While 2 Chainz’s high school weed arrest ultimately didn’t cause him too many problems, another arrest during his teen years led to a more serious conviction. When he was 14, he experienced his third drug bust while living with his mom and her then-boyfriend. At the time, 2 Chainz was selling crack himself and soon realized he’d left “around 10 crack rock dimes in a napkin” inside a cup he left next to his bedside. The cops eventually found it and arrested him when he missed a court appearance (after not receiving the letter because he was staying with a friend following the bust).
“They came to get me out of school that day, in the 10th grade, and that’s when I went to juvenile detention,” he recalled, noting that his time in jail helped him improve his basketball skills, which eventually earned him a scholarship. “I became a hoop star in juve. Their Kobe Bryant.”
2 Chainz went on to say that these kinds of incidents affected his “family’s foundation” and meant he “needed to work through a lot” with his mom. “We still have a ways to go, but we’ll get there,” he added.
