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A Year of Lil Wayne: Gudda Gudda Escaped Hurricane Katrina by Hotwiring an 18-Wheeler

There's more to the Sqad Up story than you realized.
Kyle Kramer

Day 108: "Meet The Sqad" feat. Gudda Gudda and Kidd Kidd – SQ1 , 2002

The Sqad Up period of Lil Wayne's career is interesting for a number of reasons, but one of them that has been apparent to me as I've explored SQ1 this week is that there is very little historical record of it. Sure, people remember it, and, yes, you can still find the music itself easily, but the Lil Wayne story as it's consistently written usually elides most of the period between the Hot Boys and Tha Carter II. As far as firsthand accounts of the period, there are probably magazine articles about it (and I intend to keep searching), but it falls in a dead period for online information. Many of the sites that were around at the time have gone dead or been redesigned in ways that have left the archives lost to history. And not much information was online in the first place.

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As it is, the only interview with Sqad Up that I can find on the internet didn't occur at a time when the group might have offered context for the SQ tapes, unfortunately. Instead, it's from 2006, after Lil Wayne had left the group and instead Lil Flip had sort of taken up his mantle as the most famous person involved in Sqad Up (they clarify the group was not actually on his label in the interview). Talking with AllHipHop.com, they suggest there is "no bad blood" with Wayne. Along with that, they tell an amazing story about the impact that Hurricane Katrina had on the group. Here it is, in full:

AllHipHop.com: The world watched as the Katrina disaster unfolded before our eyes. How did it affect Sqad Up?

Supa: The hardest part for us was that Gudda was missing for three days… we had people calling us talking about. We saw Gudda on top of a roof on CNN…” I was telling everybody to calm down because I knew my boy wasn'’t going to let no water kill him.

Gudda: I sent my kids off to Houston before the hurricane came through, but me and three of my little goons stayed there thinking it wasn’'t going to be nothing. We fell asleep in a two-story apartment and when we woke up the next morning, we was in eight feet of water. So we tried to figure out what our next move would be, and after the second day, I huddled my peoples up, said a prayer, and we hopped in that water and went for it. I don’t want to speak on what exactly we did but out of the negative came a positive because we stole food for people that were starving on the interstate, and got water for the elderly. When we finally got to dry land, they tried to send us to the Super Dome, but people were getting killed in there, so we wasn'’t trying to go up in their especially ‘cause I’m a local celebrity, and I didn'’t want to risk my career. So we ended up hot-wiring an 18 wheeler, and after three long ass days, we finally made it to Houston.

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Once we all got up in Houston it was actually better for the group because we were together compared to when we was back home and everybody would be doing their own thang, and you end up having some n***as hustling, and getting locked up. With us in Houston, we got to focus on our music and our careers.

Yes, Gudda Gudda, the guy who rapped "them bullets in your ass like a ferris wheel" on today's song selection, escaped flooded New Orleans by hotwiring an 18-wheeler. If you didn't already believe the man was a legend when he rapped about his hundred trash bags of weed, you should now.

Photo by Rene Schwietzke via Flickr

Follow Kyle Kramer on Twitter.

Tagged:Hip-HopRaplil wayneGudda GuddaKidd KiddSqad UpSQ1Meet the SqadMusicNoisey
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