Master P’s Theater

The land of dreams.

That’s what Louis Armstrong called the festive and mystical New Orleans in his 1938 version of Spencer Williams’ anthem “Basin Street Blues.”

The Crescent City is a rich musical locale whose tough streets have spawned musicians from Jelly Roll Morton to Armstrong himself, paving the way for what some consider the only truly American musical art forms--the blues and jazz.

With the likes of Fats Domino and the Meters, among others, the city was also a cradle for rock ‘n’ roll and funk--thus serving as a crossroads where all these great forms of American popular music intersect.

It’s fitting, then, that New Orleans has now become fertile ground for another wildly popular and controversial form, gangsta rap--and that one of the most successful members of the genre was born and raised there: Master P.

Master who?

Never heard of the Ice Cream Man? That’s the nickname of the founder and CEO of No Limit Records, which boasts six albums on the latest Billboard Top 200 chart --including Mia-X’s “Unlady Like,” Tru’s double CD “Tru 2 Da Game” and Master P’s fourth solo album, “Ghetto D,” which entered the chart last week at No. 1.

On top of all this, Master P, 27, wrote, directed and stars in “I’m Bout It--The Movie,” a $1-million, self-financed feature about a drug dealer trying to go legit in a web of crooked cops and rivals that is the fastest-selling music video of the summer. Estimated sales to date for the straight-to-video project: more than 200,000.

While the mainstream press and the rap world at large have been slow to acknowledge Master P’s presence, his phenomenal numbers now make the sound emerging from the Mouth of the South impossible to ignore.

“Master P is a runaway slave, a rap Nat Turner,” says Reginald C. Dennis, editor-in-chief of XXL magazine, a New York-based hip-hop publication. “He built his company from the ground up and learned all the nicks and knacks of the business. He can talk about rap from a retail standpoint because he owned a retail store. He can talk about it from an artist’s standpoint because he is one.”

In some ways, the Master P/No Limit Records story is typical of a grass-roots art form like hip-hop, where a fatherless young man who was surrounded by hustlers in his rough neighborhood can start a record label on a shoestring budget, then build enough of following with tales of his troubled past to attract a multimillion pact with a national distributor.

What’s rare about No Limit’s deal with its distributor, Priority Records, however, is that Master P has been able to keep his company completely independent. He has retained ownership of everything from his master recordings to his studio. Priority merely distributes and manufactures whatever albums he decides to release.

It’s a formula that has made Percy Miller a very rich young man, and given Priority a nice presence in terms of total market share.

“If you have something you control, you’re the one writing the checks,” Master P says, leaning back in a chair in a Priority Records office suite high above Sunset Boulevard.

The sunlight makes the pink diamonds in his heart-shaped pinkie ring sparkle brightly. When he smiles you can see an M and a P in the middle of the upper bridge of his gold-capped teeth.

“Owning my own company was important, because instead of being signed to a label and maybe at best making 15% of the money, now I make 100%--giving away 15% for distribution if I choose to,” he says. “See, this way I could sell only 100,000 records and make more money per album than some famous [expletive] who doesn’t own [expletive] and sold 2 million albums.”

Master P is on such a roll in the record business that he can’t stop the buzz that surrounds him. During an hourlong interview, his beeper goes off 15 times.

“I’ve never seen a more dedicated worker,” says Priority Records’ Dave Weiner, who first became aware of Master P in 1994 when the rapper was moving thousands of copies of his debut album, “The Ghetto’s Tryin’ to Kill Me,” out of the trunk of his car.

“He works almost 22 hours a day, seven days a week,” continues Weiner, the label’s director of distribution. “He’ll do three states in one day--a morning meeting in Louisiana, moving to Texas by midafternoon and on to Los Angeles by the early evening. I wouldn’t believe it if I didn’t see it myself.”

Supervising artists in the studio, going to marketing sessions, setting up publicity campaigns and directing music videos are only a few of the things that Master P does by himself.

“P’s just an all around good guy trying to go down in history as one of the most important black music figures in the business,” Weiner says. “But music is just the start for this guy.”

To hear Master P tell it, he wasn’t born just into a bad situation, but at the bottom of it. Coming up hard in New Orleans’ Calliope housing project, where he lived with his mother and three younger brothers, he experienced random violence, hunger and perpetual dreams of a better life.

“I come from a family of poor people,” P explains. “If I was to visit a relative’s house in Chicago, they’re living in the projects. Same in L.A. or anywhere else. I wanted to make a change ‘cause somebody in the family had to make something so we all have something to fall back on.”

While hip-hop was his first love, Master P didn’t think at first that music was how he would make his fortune. A gifted point guard, he played for the University of Houston in 1988, but a knee injury while in college ended any aspirations of basketball stardom.

Soon he was back in the projects, running the streets with his younger brother Kevin, making decent money by apparently illegal means--if his movie is as autobiographical as he says it is.

He declines to confirm that he actually sold drugs, but P does say that he became paranoid during that period. Wary of armed rivals and police, he wanted to change his lifestyle. The feeling intensified after Kevin was murdered by a drug addict.

When P--who moved to Richmond, Calif., with his mother--received $10,000 in a malpractice settlement following the death of his grandfather, he used the money to open the No Limit record store in Richmond in 1990. Two years later, he started his label.

Once he released his own underground shocker “The Ghetto’s Tryin’ to Kill Me” in 1992, his problem was no longer selling records, but keeping up with the demand. He estimates that he sold 120,000 copies of the first album and a few hundred thousand copies of his second before signing with Priority.

“I’d fly to the retailers directly, often cutting them a better price,” Master P says nonchalantly. “But I soon realized at that rate that it would take me 10 years to sell a million records, so if it meant giving up 15% of the business to make millions more, that’s what I had to do.”

But he made sure in the deal that he retained control over No Limit’s affairs--and he prides himself on his close relationship with his artists.

Mr. Serv-On (Corey Smith), one of the hottest rappers on No Limit, not only views Master P as the man who signs his checks, but also as his mentor.

“I don’t have to make an appointment to see the president of my label,” Mr. Serv-On says in a separate interview. “He teaches you about the business himself. If you want to see how many sales you have, he’ll teach you how to interpret the sales reports. Everybody who signs with the label has to read [attorney Donald S. Passman’s book] ‘All You Need to Know About the Record Business,’ so you know your worth. He gives you the advantages so you can [become an executive] one day if you choose.”

Now that Master P has a major segment of the rap game locked down, he’s looking to real estate and other investments--such as a Foot Locker store in Baton Rouge, La.--to build an empire outside of music. No Limit rap retail stores and merchandising outlets are other possibilities, and he’s also writing and directing another movie, titled “I Got the Hook Up,” which will be shopped to distributors and, he hopes, theatrically released.

“I’m not in this game just to look successful,” he says emphatically. “If I don’t own the Rolls-Royce or the Mercedes or whatever it is I want, then I don’t want it. Just let me know what I need to get it, and I’ll work even harder, on my own, to get it and own it. I want to be an inspiration, ‘cause if I made it out of the ghetto, than anybody can.”