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Trick Daddy and Trina are setting Miami's hip hop scene on fire with their raunchy, street-smart style. Get the full story behind Trina's rise to fame and learn what makes Trick Daddy happy.
Heads turn as Trina saunters into the room wearing a red belly-baring halter, tight-ass jeans, zebra-print mules going click clack, and Versace shades perched atop her perfectly coiffed hair. Before her bountiful booty slides into a booth at Tony Roma's in the Palmetto section of Miami, two middle-aged black men approach. "So when you coming out with something?" one of them asks, panting and drooling. It's been this way ever since 1998, when Katrina Taylor, 23, blipped onto rap's radar screen with a verse on Trick Daddy's "Nann Nigga" that would make even Lil' Kim blush. Thoroughly unfazed, she makes polite chitchat with the admirer before sending him on his way. Then suddenly he's back, having noticed the tape recorder. "Just so you know," he says, pointing at the object of his lust, "she's the baddest bitch."
How serendipitous! Trina thinks so, too. She even titled her first single and debut solo album Da Baddest Bitch. It's a moniker she wears like a badge. "When a woman uses that word," she says, while digging into a slab of baby back ribs, "it's like empowerment. A bitch is a strong woman who's not going to take no shit - like a diva. It means control."
Funny thing is, even though Trina has the look and demeanor of a woman born to be in the spotlight, her rap career was something of a fluke. She knows Trick from Miami's Liberty City neighborhood, where they both grew up (he in the projects and she in a single-family home nearby) and wrote rhymes as a hobby. "I just did the song for him as a favor because he needed a girl," she says with a shrug.
"She always had a smart little mouth," says Ted Lucas, 28, CEO of Miami's Slip-n-Slide Records. He should know: He's known Trina and Trick since childhood. "She was always able to cuss your ass out."
As fate would have it, "Nann Nigga" blew up, due in large part to the infamous lines that Trina wrote in one day. Before long, the young woman who had been studying for her real estate license was doing concert dates with Miami's freakiest thug. "The first show, it had to be at least 2,000 people there," she says. "I was so scared and shaking. But I just did it. And that was when the song had just come out and people were going crazy, so we had to back it up and do it again. I was like, 'Oh my God.' " After that, it was on. "At the shows, I was getting so much support from the audience. I was like, 'This is nothing. I could tear this shit up.' " But when Slip-n-Slide came calling with a solo offer, it was do-or-die time for real. "I was hiding from them, not answering the phone. I had a real estate job lined up! I put them off for at least two months. Then I said, 'F**k it,' and signed. Then I took it serious."
With all the wannabe rappers willing to sacrifice their firstborn for a deal, it's hard to imagine a woman running from that kind of opportunity. But Trina's always been something of a ghetto superstar. "I grew up feeling like I was the shit," she says in a tone so casual it sounds less like bragging than a statement of fact. She was the popular girl in high school who always had niggas open.
"You could call her Miss Miami," says Lucas. "There ain't a person in Miami that don't know Trina, and this was before the music. She was the most beautiful girl in the hood." The enormous chunk of ice on her ring finger is a testament to her popularity with the boys. "It was a gift," she says coyly. "I'm not married or engaged. I'm just happy. I get all kinds of gifts - lots of diamonds."
Though her explicit lyrics will undoubtedly lead most to believe Trina is a stone-cold freak, most of the stories told on Da Baddest Bitch are borrowed from her wild-child youth. They're the things Trina experienced and tales she heard while running the streets with her girls, sneaking into clubs and shaking her designer-clad ass when Mama wanted her home. "Everything that I'm talking about is me, but in the past," says Trina. "Now my life is more stable."
For a brief period back in '97, honey even tricked bank as a stripper at Miami's World Famous Rolexxx Exotic Night Club. Naturally, the designer fanatic used Versace as her stage name. "I didn't really do it for money," she says cautiously, as she hasn't discussed this publicly until now. "I did it because I was so fascinated with myself and knew I could intimidate men with my body. I was making $1,000 a week, but I said, 'This is not a life for me. I'm better than this.' I don't regret doing it, but I got caught up in the hype because my friends was doing it. It was right before '98, and my New Year's resolution was that I wasn't gonna be caught in the strip club when the New Year gets here. And I wasn't."
Soon after she quit dancing, Trick invited her to kick that infamous verse. Although they've known each other since childhood, kept in touch when Trick was on lockdown, and spent a year and a half on the road together, the two don't roll in the same circles at home. It soon becomes very clear why...
On Ali Baba Avenue in Miami's Opalaka section, small rooms sitting right next to a commuter railroad track rent for $300 a month and look like run-down army barracks. They call this dead-end fortress the Tank. It's the kind of locale you see every night on Cops. It's where Maurice Young, 25, a.k.a. Trick Daddy, feels most comfortable.
Trick is on his way with a truckload of treats to barbecue with his soldiers, who reside at the Tank. That's the plan, but as Trick's soft-spoken manager, Tony, pulls up, no one looks festive. He scopes out the scene and returns with a grim look on his face. "Oh, this ain't good," he says. "Somebody got shot."
Tony pulls over to wait for Trick across the street where a young man can be seen lying in a pool of his own blood, grasping the leg that's been hit. Soon, there are police on the scene, two fire rescue trucks, and a helicopter circling overhead. Trick rolls up in a black Ford Excursion. Dressed in red and black track pants, a matching jersey, and Nikes, he approaches Tony's jeep, flashing a mouthful of gold slugs. It seems as if Trick Daddy is always in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Twenty minutes later, he's safely ensconced in his new home inside a Miami Lakes gated community. The house is a pagan shrine to the thug life. Visitors are greeted by an enormous poster of Tony Montana, the main character in Scarface and Trick's hero. His coffee table is piled high with rap and porno mags, and the glass wall unit displays an award from 102 Jamz (WJHM-FM) reading, "Most Skrate Up Ghetto Male."
Despite the gangsta decor, the comfortable home with a pool out back is a long way from Liberty City's "Pork-n-Beans projects," where Trick was raised with 11 brothers and sisters. By age 14, he was in juvenile lockup. "They accused me of being a drug trafficker," he says, seasoning food for the barbecue. "They sent me to prison for something I didn't do." He was released in 1992 after a few months, but he wasn't out for long. "I violated the same day I got out," says Trick. "It was crazy, man. The ghetto make it happen like that. Dawgs was going through something, and I just rolled up, you know how it be."
He was on the run for a minute ("You know when niggas be on the run, they don't really be runnin', they just be careful," says Trick), then served three years for attempted murder. The penal competition helped him sharpen his rhyming skills. "There's all types of talented mo'f**kers in prison, but they just fell short. I seen more talent there than anywhere. That's how we entertained each other."