When it was almost showtime, a friend took out Boosie’s suitcase, and Boosie ritualistically, mechanistically put on piece after piece of jewelry. He fumed about his record label and told me about the time an Arkansas local was shot dead while he was onstage next to Boosie at a show. He kept the lights off and the shades drawn, and he cussed out his friend for bringing him the wrong McDonald’s order. He did push-ups and idly watched Time-Life infomercials and smoked terrifyingly strong weed. In the hours that he was waiting for a show promoter to send a car and pick him up, Boosie paced his hotel room like a panther. He accepted the guy’s gift and then kicked him out of the hotel room. A guy who looked like T-Pain recognized Boosie in the elevator and offered to bring him some weed. When I got down to Orlando and met Boosie, he was in a dark mood because someone had fucked up his hotel reservations. He wasn’t a fun guy he was an avenging angel. In the South, he was a street-rap hero, a fiery voice that spoke of violence and oppression and the chaotic possibilities of day-to-day life when you’re a person living without security. Immersing myself in his mixtapes, and then flying down to meet him, I learned that those party-rap songs, great as they were, only represented a tiny shard of what he did. The idea was something like: “This guy is fun!” Those songs and their videos had given those guys, and me, the wrong idea about Boosie. Boosie had a bunch of hits at the time - tightly-coiled, exultant club-rap bangers like “Zoom” and “Wipe Me Down” and “Independent” - and the editors’ idea was that I should do a “most entertaining rapper in the game” feature about him. Back in 2007, the now-defunct booty magazine King sent me down to Orlando to profile the Baton Rouge rapper Lil Boosie.