Words: Chris Yuscavage
Photo: Estevan Oriol
It’s one week before he’s scheduled to fly to Detroit to appear in his first music video—alongside 50 Cent, Eminem, and Lloyd Banks for “You Don’t Know,” the first single off Shady Records’ The Re-Up compilation—and Cashis isn’t pulling any punches. “Five years ago, it was impossible to imagine this music thing working out,” he says while phoning in from the Orange County, California townhouse that he shares with his nine children (his tenth is on the way). “I’ve done some shit in my life I’m gonna have to repent for one day, so I thought I’d either be doing a life sentence or shot up a million times by now.”
Now 26, Ramone “Cashis” Johnson, grew on the South Side of Chicago, watching his father, brothers, uncles and cousins run the streets. “My uncle was a fucking legend out there,” he says. “It was easy for me growing up, everybody respected my family.” At only 17, he dropped out of high school and linked up with the Gangster Disciple Nation before his grandmother sent him to Orange County to live with his mother in early 1997. There, Cash dropped out of high school again two months later. “I was done listening at that point. I used to smash on people and talk a lot of shit. I was so bogish.”
But while he was more interested in hitting fools in the mouth than hitting the books, school did help Cashis musically. On his first day in the OC, he met Rikanatti, a local MC/producer who now supplies many of Cashis’ beats. The pair teamed up with rappers Monique Johnson—the mother of Cash’s first child Miana—and Austin “H-Bone” Wade to form the Renegadez and released the locally successful albums Reneggedon (2000) and Watch Closely (2002). Cash’s slightly oft-kilter flow and raw approach to recording songs exhibits a natural aggression that slices through the roughest of Rikanatti productions. He’s untamed and surprisingly charismatic in a world full of pseudo-gangsters and studio busters. Around the same time, the ruthless rapper ran into several problems with the law—most notably, a robbery charge in 2000 that landed him a year-long bid in county jail. “The cops pulled my mom over one day and basically told her they were going to kill me if she didn’t send me the fuck back where I came from,” he says. “She stressed to me about getting my life together.”
Music was his answer. Through their lawyer Theo Sedlmayr, Cashis and Rikanatti arranged a meeting with Shady Records President Paul Rosenberg in 2004. And after another year of recording independently, Shady’s director of A&R Dart Parker inked Cash to a solo deal, delegating the currently-incarcerated Rikanatti to the production side of things. Since then, he’s been holed up in the studio with Eminem working on his as-yet-untitled debut, due out in early ’07. “How many other people get to record in Eminem’s house?” he asks. “I’m standing on his shoulders and he’s letting me see further than anyone else can right now.” And from where he’s standing, his new five-year plan looks a whole lot better than his last one.
