as told to: Kevin Yuen
Side hustles are an art. To a rapper, it’s important to keep no more than one proverbial egg in each basket—from clothing lines to basketball teams to artificially flavored, fortified water. Willie D is no different, but instead of the showy hubris that usually plagues most hip hop-related business deals, the legendary Geto Boys member stays out of the spotlight, deftly making real world moves and snatching up land like a rap Alexander the Great. Three years ago, he even up and moved his wife and two kids, ages 8 and 12, overseas to Baku, Azerbaijan, a place so awesome it sounds made up. Willie is a busy guy—between running his music label, Relentless Music Ventures; managing his rap group Huntzville; arranging private jets for eccentric sports and entertainment figures as director of charter service Dream Flights Luxury Travel, and aspirations to promote boxing and begin acting (“I can do anything, drama, comedy…except cry like a little bitch”). Mass Appeal was lucky enough to snag a few minutes with the man, whose album No Time 2 Die comes out later this year.
PIMPIN’ ALL OVER THE WORLD
“Baku is a very historical city. There’re historians who say that it’s the real birthplace of Jesus. It’s very close to Iraq and Iran. So we’re between Russia and Iran, but it’s not the unrest that you have over in those other countries. You don’t have anyone trying to overthrow the government or militias or insurgent groups or all that dumb shit. We will eventually come back to the States, probably in another year or so. Shit, we may still move to Hawaii or Norway. We might go mix it up with Ethiopians; they have a high Ethiopian population in Norway. My thing is that the whole world is bigger than the United States. You don’t have to limit yourself to what’s happening out here.
LANDS END
“He who controls the land, controls the man. Land is the one resource in the world that recycles itself. People die, people get weary—they get tired of the land and they sell or get in a jam. You never run out of land, you never run out of residential property. I cannot talk about any real estate in Azerbaijan. I wouldn’t be a good businessman if I told you everything I got going on, because then I have people beating me to the punch; I got people looking at me too hard. When I went to Azerbaijan, I didn’t say, ‘Hey, I’m gonna go to Azerbaijan today and do some real estate.’ I just went down there and did what I did.
REAL (ESTATE) TALK
“I was asked by a magazine to [write a real estate column] and I turned it down. I’m not a regular real estate agent. Any real estate agent can tell you stuff that’s public knowledge—you can pick up a book and read. If I were to tell you all my secrets, I would create competition for myself. Read between the lines. Stuff that I know, my tactics, if I put them out there, that’s going to stop me from making money. That wouldn’t make too much sense. I’m not interested in talking about the regular stuff that everybody already know. If I do a real estate column, I want it to be the number one real estate column in the world. For me, it’s the same amount of energy to do something big as it is for something small. [If] I put my name on it, I put my integrity behind it, so I want to make sure everything goes well. If I promote a party at a school for first graders, I want them to say, ‘Man, that’s a bad party. I ain’t never been to a party that live!’”
