T.I.

• 1. Introduction

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  T.I. became a worldwide star under a name that, by his own account, almost nobody had ever used for him in real life. The Atlanta rapper, born Clifford Joseph Harris Jr., said as much to MTV News in October 2015. "It's kinda awkward to be famous for a name that you've never been called before in your life," he told the interviewer. He added a blunt test for strangers: "If you want me to know that you don't know me, call me T.I."

  By then he had won Grammy Awards, starred in Hollywood films, and built a record label. He had also gone to prison and feuded with fellow rappers.

  How did a childhood nickname get squeezed out by a record company? How did an album that sold poorly turn into a career? What did the title "king of the South" cost the man who claimed it? And why was he planning to name his final album Kill the King?

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• 2. Becoming T.I.

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  On the 25th of September 1980, Clifford Joseph Harris Jr. was born in Atlanta, Georgia, the son of Clifford "Buddy" Harris Sr. and Violeta Morgan. His grandparents raised him in the Center Hill neighborhood, just off Bankhead Highway, and he also lived in Bankhead. His father lived in New York City, and the boy often traveled there to visit. Buddy later developed Alzheimer's disease and died of it in 2002. The boy started rapping at age eight. His nickname, Tip, came from his paternal great-grandfather. For a time he also went by Rubber Band Man, a nod to the custom of wearing rubber bands on the wrist to signal wealth in drugs or money.

  In 1996, a local rapper named Big Kuntry King became his friend, and the pair sold mixtapes out of the trunk of their car. A record executive named Kawan "KP" Prather noticed Tip and signed him to Ghet-O-Vision Entertainment. In 1999 he moved to LaFace Records, a subsidiary of Arista, and that is where the trouble with his name began.

  Arista already had an artist called Q-Tip. Marketing staff told the young rapper that two Tips in one building would confuse people, and he gave way out of respect for Q-Tip's reputation. Then came the harder question of what to call himself. He said his project sat waiting while everyone searched for an answer. KP suggested T.I. Tip objected that one of his own records spelled it T-I-P, so a letter was still missing. When he admitted he had no better idea, KP ended the discussion. "Well, that's what we going with, man," T.I. remembered him saying.

  The first album under the new name, I'm Serious, arrived in October 2001. Its title single, featuring the Jamaican reggae artist Beenie Man, had come out on the 26th of June 2001 and got little airplay. It never charted. The album brought together guests such as Jazze Pha, Too Short, Lil Jon and Pastor Troy, with production from the Neptunes, DJ Toomp and Madvac. Pharrell Williams of the Neptunes called T.I. "the Jay-Z of the South." Even so, the record peaked at number 98 and sold 163,000 copies in the United States. Critics complained that many tracks sounded alike and a few were blatant rip-offs. One review said: "T.I. claims to be the king of the South, but fails to show and prove." Arista dropped him.

  T.I. responded by forming Grand Hustle Entertainment and releasing mixtapes with help from DJ Drama. In mid-2003 he turned up on "Never Scared," a hit by his fellow Atlanta rapper and former label-mate Bone Crusher. It became his first Billboard Hot 100 entry. Major labels took notice again, and he struck a joint venture with Atlantic Records.

  Trap Muzik arrived on the 19th of August 2003 and debuted at number four, selling 109,000 copies in its first week. Its singles included "24s," "Be Easy," "Rubberband Man" and "Let's Get Away." Kanye West, David Banner, Jazze Pha and DJ Toomp were among the producers. Reviewers called it a major step up from his debut. In 2012, Complex named it one of the classic albums of the previous decade. In February 2013, the site allhiphop.com ranked it fifth among the best southern hip-hop albums of all time.

  Urban Legend followed in November 2004. It debuted at number seven with 193,000 copies sold in its first week. Its lead single, "Bring Em Out," produced by Swizz Beatz, reached number nine on the Hot 100 in 2005 and became his first top ten hit. "U Don't Know Me" climbed to number twenty-three. Meanwhile, his guest verse on Destiny's Child's "Soldier," alongside Lil Wayne, had peaked at number three, higher than any single under his own name so far.

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• 3. Kings and Alter Egos

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  In September 2005, T.I. joined his group Pimp $quad Click, with Big Kuntry King, Mac Boney, C-Rod and AK, for its debut album 25 to Life. It peaked at number ten on the Billboard 200. The group had already put out several self-released mixtapes, and the album showed that the crew around him could sell records too.

  In late March 2006, his fourth album, King, opened at number one with 522,000 copies sold in its first week. Its lead single, "What You Know," became a hit and also promoted ATL, the film T.I. starred in, which arrived alongside the album. The song won the Grammy Award for Best Rap Solo Performance, and the album earned a nomination for Best Rap Album. That same year, he teamed with Justin Timberlake on "My Love," a worldwide hit. It won the Grammy for Best Rap/Sung Collaboration at the 49th Grammy Awards. He also appeared on newly signed Young Dro's "Shoulder Lean," which reached the top ten of the Hot 100.

  On the 3rd of July 2007, he released T.I. vs. T.I.P. The title staged a contest between T.I. and T.I.P., his troublesome alter ego. The album sold 468,000 copies and debuted at number one, his second chart-topper in a row. Guests included Jay-Z, Busta Rhymes, Wyclef Jean, Nelly and Eminem. Missing from the credits were DJ Toomp and the Neptunes, his longtime collaborators.

  In 2008, T.I. was under house arrest, and he used that time to write lyrics down on paper for his sixth album. That was a break from habit, since he had memorized his lyrics ever since I'm Serious. A representative said he wanted to "take more time to really put something down." The album title points to those pages.

  The lead single, "Whatever You Like," came out in July 2008 and leapt from number 71 to number one on the Billboard Hot 100. It was his first solo chart-topper. Paper Trail followed in September 2008, debuting at number one with 568,000 copies sold, and it earned a gold certification from the RIAA in its first week. Then "Live Your Life," featuring Rihanna, jumped from number 80 to number one, replacing "Whatever You Like." That made him the first rapper to occupy the top two positions while one of his songs replaced another at number one.

  The album's other singles kept pace. "Swagga Like Us," with Kanye West, Jay-Z and Lil Wayne, peaked at number five and won a Grammy at the 51st ceremony for Best Rap Performance by a Duo or Group. "Dead and Gone," with Justin Timberlake, held at number two for five weeks.

  The video for "Dead and Gone" shows the grave of Philant Johnson, a close friend and member of T.I.'s entourage. Johnson was killed in 2006 in a shooting after a post-concert party at a Cincinnati club. On the 21st of November 2008, T.I. testified at the murder trial. He dedicated several songs to Johnson, beginning with the single version of "Live in the Sky."

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• 4. Prison and Return

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  On the 26th of March 2010, T.I. left a halfway house, where he had finished serving a sentence for weapons possession. His first public outing was an Atlanta benefit in support of his fiancée Tameka "Tiny" Cottle's Alzheimer's research fundraiser, "For the Love of Our Fathers." "I am very well, very happy to be seen," he said after joining her onstage. On the 13th of May, he appeared on Larry King Live to discuss his time in prison on federal gun charges.

  He went back to work quickly. "I'm Back" peaked at number 44 on the Hot 100, and he guested on Diddy-Dirty Money's "Hello Good Morning," which reached number 27. On the 30th of July 2010, he married Tiny, a member of Xscape, in Miami Beach, Florida.

  On the 1st of September 2010, T.I. and Tiny were arrested on drug charges. On the 15th of October 2010, he was sentenced to 11 months in prison for violating his probation. He scrapped King Uncaged as the title of his seventh album and renamed it No Mercy. On the day of his sentencing, he released its lead single, "Get Back Up," featuring Chris Brown.

  He began serving his sentence in November 2010, with a release date set for the 29th of September 2011. No Mercy arrived on the 7th of December 2010. It debuted at number four with more than 159,000 copies sold in its first week, and the RIAA certified it Gold. A second single, "That's All She Wrote," his second collaboration with Eminem, reached number eighteen.

  By August 2011, T.I. was out of prison. He signed a deal with VH1 for a reality show about readjusting to life as a free man. He also had a novel ready, Power & Beauty, set for October 2011. On the 18th of October, he promoted it on The Howard Stern Show and The View. A second novel, Trouble & Triumph, followed in 2012.

  His eighth album took the name Trouble Man, partly inspired by Marvin Gaye's 1972 song of the same name. He had been choosing between that title and Kill the King. The release date slipped from the 4th of September to the 18th of December 2012. The finished album, Trouble Man: Heavy Is the Head, was described by T.I. as "less apologetic than No Mercy." It debuted at number two with 179,000 copies sold in its first week. By the 2nd of September 2013, it had sold 502,000.

  He was already promising a follow-up, Trouble Man II: He Who Wears the Crown. He said he had recorded as many as 120 songs for it.

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• 5. Beyond the Booth

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  Grand Hustle Records, the label T.I. co-founded in 2003, became a launchpad for other artists. Travis Scott, B.o.B and Iggy Azalea all signed there. On the 1st of March 2012, T.I. announced that Azalea, Chipmunk and Trae Tha Truth had joined. He executive produced Azalea's debut EP, Glory, and appeared on its lead single, "Murda Bizness." He also executive produced B.o.B's debut album, The Adventures of Bobby Ray, in 2010, and B.G.'s Too Hood 2 Be Hollywood in 2009.

  A nickname started one planned collaboration. T.I. called B.o.B "the Martian," and a lyric that began "It's the man and the Martian" suggested an album title, The Man and the Martian.

  In 2005, T.I. executive produced the soundtrack to the film Hustle & Flow through Grand Hustle. In 2006, he launched Grand Hustle Films. In late 2007, he partnered with the production company 828 Entertainment on Life on Mars, a reality show about LaMar "MARS" Edwards of the production team 1500 or Nothin'. In 2009, he formed The Smash Factory production team with Lil' C and Mars. He also worked behind the scenes as a ghostwriter and assisting songwriter for Bow Wow, Diddy, Dr. Dre, Bun B and Keyshia Cole.

  His acting career began with ATL in 2006, a film loosely based on his Atlanta youth and a skating rink called Cascade. He played Rashad Swann, an orphaned 17-year-old high school senior. The film earned $11.5 million in its opening weekend, ranking third, and $21.2 million overall. In 2007, he played Stevie Lucas, nephew of the drug kingpin Frank Lucas, in American Gangster. Takers, released on the 27th of August 2010, cast him as Delonte "Ghost" Rivers and opened at number one with $20.5 million. Later roles included a criminal named Julian in Identity Thief in 2013 and a part in Get Hard in 2015, alongside Will Ferrell and Kevin Hart. He also co-starred in Marvel's Ant-Man and its sequel, Ant-Man and the Wasp, in 2018.

  Television followed. In 2009, MTV aired T.I.'s Road to Redemption, which followed the 45 days before his March sentencing and showed seven teenagers another path away from crime. The VH1 series T.I. & Tiny: The Family Hustle premiered on the 5th of December 2011, after its first full episodes leaked onto the internet. On the 19th of July 2018, BET premiered The Grand Hustle, in which 16 contestants competed for an executive job with a six-figure salary at his company. In 2019, he sat beside Chance the Rapper and Cardi B as a judge on Netflix's ten-part talent search Rhythm + Flow.

  His business interests were wide. Forbes ran its first Hip-Hop Cash Kings list in early 2007, and he appeared on it four times. He returned in 2015 with $6 million in earnings. He opened a nightclub called Club Crucial in Bankhead, with weekly events such as Monday night Open Mic Night and Celebrity Saturdays. In 2008, he launched the clothing line A.K.O.O., short for "A King Of Oneself." In June 2010, he became Global Creative Consultant of Rémy Martin Cognac. In February 2016, he joined the streaming service TIDAL as its nineteenth artist-owner. That June, he opened a strip club in Atlanta called V Live.

  Endorsements rose and fell with his legal troubles. Chevrolet signed him in 2007 to promote the Impala, but his federal gun arrest put that deal at risk. He lost an Axe body spray deal after his drug arrest.

  He also did community work. He helped with Hurricane Katrina relief, worked with troubled young people at the Paulding Detention Center, and funded scholarships for single-parent families at Boys and Girls Clubs. Club Crucial hosted a giveaway of 200 bicycles for neighborhood children. In June 2005, the Lisa "Left Eye" Lopes Foundation and Atlanta's V-103 gave him the Lisa Lopes Award, though his community service that year was court ordered.

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• 6. Rivals and Fights

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  On the 24th of June 2007, at the Sunset Tower Hotel in West Hollywood, T.I. attacked Chaka Zulu, the manager of Ludacris. The scene was a luncheon hosted by Kevin Liles of Warner Music Group. According to witnesses, T.I. punched Zulu in the face and choked him before a brief melee broke out.

  The trouble started when T.I. watched a video by I-20, a rapper signed to Ludacris's Disturbing tha Peace. A man in the video wore a shirt reading "Trap House" while being beaten, and T.I. mistook the logo as a reference to his own Trap Muzik. Then came a track called "Stomp," by the G-Unit rapper Young Buck, who had invited both T.I. and Ludacris to appear. T.I.'s verse included the line "Me gettin' beat down? / That's ludicrous." Young Buck read that as a snub. Ludacris recorded his own verse, and T.I.'s label wanted it changed. Ludacris refused, and The Game replaced T.I. on the album version.

  At the 2007 BET Awards, accepting Best Hip-Hop Artist, T.I. apologized, saying: "they say it's a fine line between brilliance and insanity." It was an apparent reference to T.I.P. Cameras showed Ludacris smiling in the audience while the crowd stood and applauded. The two later recorded together twice, on "Wish You Would" from Ludacris's Theater of the Mind and on "On Top of the World" from Paper Trail.

  In 2004, while T.I. was in custody, the Houston rapper Lil Flip took issue with T.I.'s "king of the South" claims. On the 26th of October 2004, T.I. told HipHopDX that he had heard comments about Flip's lyrical ability for a long time but had stayed quiet. He said he "wasn't raised like that." According to AllHipHop, the two sides later met in Flip's neighborhood, the Cloverland section of Houston. The report said a fight broke out and one of T.I.'s bodyguards started shooting. T.I. said on a Houston radio station that he had a tape of the encounter, but James Prince of Rap-a-Lot stopped him from releasing it. Prince then sat the two rappers down and ended the dispute. The Houston Press covered the feud, and so did the 2005 rap documentary Beef 3.

  In 2008, T.I. clashed with the Atlanta rapper Shawty Lo. Shawty Lo's track "Dunn Dunn" appeared to question T.I.'s roots in Bankhead. T.I. answered with "What Up, What's Haapnin," and shot its video in Bowen Homes, the housing project where Shawty Lo lived. At the November 2008 Dirty Awards, the entourages of both artists clashed, and police used pepper spray and cleared the audience. The feud ended publicly on the 7th of March 2009, when the two stood on stage together at Club Crucial for T.I.'s farewell concert. T.I. then told MTV the media had exaggerated the quarrel, and he insisted it was never a beef.

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• 7. Free Agent Years

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  In January 2013, reports said T.I. had closed out a ten-year deal with Atlantic Records the month before. TMZ reported that he was shopping a $75 million proposal for three albums, with a share of publishing, touring, merchandise, film and television rights, corporate endorsements, and the exclusive signing of every Grand Hustle artist. Jay-Z was reported to want him at Roc Nation. Dr. Dre was thought to have proposed an Interscope deal over dinner at Katana. Sony reportedly offered $50 million.

  On the 26th of March 2013, Robin Thicke's "Blurred Lines," featuring T.I. and Pharrell, arrived and quickly became a worldwide hit. It reached number one on the Hot 100, T.I.'s fourth number one single there, and also topped the charts in the United Kingdom and Germany. Starting on the 5th of July 2013, he co-headlined the America's Most Wanted Tour with Lil Wayne, which ran through the 1st of September.

  On the 22nd of November 2013, he announced a deal with Columbia Records covering only his ninth album. He credited Pharrell Williams with influencing the move and asked him to executive produce. Working with Pharrell changed the shape of the project, and T.I. said he would postpone the Trouble Man II title. By the 16th of December 2013, he had decided to call the album Paperwork. "About the Money," featuring Young Thug, arrived on the 3rd of June 2014. "No Mediocre," produced by DJ Mustard with a guest verse by Iggy Azalea, reached number 33 and went platinum.

  On the 20th of August 2014, T.I. released "New National Anthem," featuring Skylar Grey. It came one day after he published an online essay about Ferguson, Missouri, following the fatal police shooting of Michael Brown. Its lyrics deal with racism and injustice. Paperwork came out on the 21st of October 2014 and debuted at number two with 80,000 copies in its first week. It earned an average Metacritic score of 69 from ten reviews.

  In 2015, he formed the short-lived collective Bankroll Mafia with Young Thug, Shad da God and others. On the 11th of September 2015, he unexpectedly released the five-song EP Da' Nic through Empire Distribution and his King Inc. imprint, his first independent release. A week later, on the 18th of September, he announced his exit from Columbia. He described himself as "a rogue artist" free to put music out as quickly as he liked. During this period he went back to calling himself Tip.

  On the 22nd of February 2016, he announced that Jay-Z's Roc Nation would distribute his tenth album, The Dime Trap. The Bankroll Mafia album arrived on the 22nd of April 2016. On the 26th of May 2016, four people were shot before T.I. took the stage at Irving Plaza in New York City. One of them died later at a hospital. Less than two months later, he announced a new project with a very different purpose.

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• 8. Protest and Farewell

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  On the 22nd of July 2016, speaking on Hot 97's Ebro in the Morning, T.I. announced an EP called Us or Else. He said it would support the Black Lives Matter movement and speak plainly about how race relations in America reached their tense present. The first single, "We Will Not," arrived on the 6th of August 2016 as a response to police brutality after the deaths of Philando Castile and Alton Sterling. "War Zone" followed on the 31st of August, exclusively on TIDAL.

  Us or Else came out on the 23rd of September 2016, again exclusively on TIDAL, from Grand Hustle and Roc Nation. It was his first project under Roc Nation and reached number 175 on the Billboard 200. On the 16th of December 2016, he released Us or Else: Letter to the System with no warning. Guests included Quavo, Meek Mill, Big K.R.I.T. and Killer Mike.

  In February 2017, T.I. told the radio show The Breakfast Club that he planned to retire after three more solo albums. The first would be like Trap Muzik, the second about love as it relates to a dope boy, and the last would be called Kill the King. His reasoning came from his own title. "Ever since my first album, I've put the title of 'King of the South' on me and to make yourself the king is to make you a target. And in chess, the object is to kill the king."

  In May 2017, he told XXL that several collaborative albums might still happen. Among them were Dope Boy Academy with Jeezy, Sophisticated Excellence with Young Dro, and The Lady Killers with Trey Songz.

  In October 2018, after a long delay, he released his tenth album, Dime Trap, on Epic Records. On the 16th of October 2020, he released The L.I.B.R.A., his first album not issued by a major label. It peaked at number 18 on the Billboard 200. On the 9th of June 2021, he announced on social media that Kill the King, his final album, was in the works. On the 10th of May 2024, he released the single "LLOGCLAY" with YoungBoy Never Broke Again.

  On the 22nd of February 2026, he released a one-minute preview called "War" amid a public feud with the rapper 50 Cent. Two diss tracks, "Right One" and "What Bully," followed within two days. Kill the King is scheduled for release in 2026. In 2017, T.I. framed the ending himself: "Will they kill him or will he ride into the sunset happily ever after?"

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