HipHopWired.com: Tell us where you’re from originally.
Marcellus Juvann: I was born in Cleveland, and moved to Texas when I was 13 or 14-years old. I lived close to the Beltway 8. I went to high school out in Cyrpress. I moved to Orlando to attend Full Sail and I’ve been here ever since. The people I’ve met here have been very beneficial to my music career. I’m building my team out here, but I still go back and forth between here and Houston.
HHW: We’ve heard a lot of different styles out of Cleveland, from Bone to Kid Cudi to King Chip [Chip Tha Ripper]. What was your experience like there? What did you find yourself gravitating to?
MJ: Cleveland was like, it was slower compared to living in the South. It’s a big city, but it has more of a small town feel, especially compared to Texas. The weather and music was different. Musically, we were more into the New York stuff like Dipset. We listened to Bone obviously. But there was actually big Houston influence in Cleveland. I grew up listening to Chip Tha Ripper and he would come back talking about Slabs and H-Town stuff.
HHW: How was Houston when you got there?
MJ: Man, the women were 10 times badder {laughs}. Weather is nice year round. I remember starting high school and it was a culture shock. There were 900 people in my school in Cleveland, but in Houston I had 3,000-4,000 people at school. Plus there were all these different cultures. In Cleveland it was just black and white people. I go there after the big H-Town music explosion though. When I got there the only thing popping there was Lil Wayne when he was just introducing Drake and Nicki Minaj.
HHW: How did you wind up getting into music?
MJ: I always loved music. I grew up in a family of music lovers. None of them did music, but they loved music. My family was more on the hustling side though. They knew how to get money a lot of different ways. But when I told them I was going to start making music, they thought I was crazy. Especially my mother. She was actually more supportive of me playing basketball and trying to go to college off of that. But I think I was around 14 when I started taking it serious beyond just freestyling. I wanted to learn how to write and structure songs.
