Murda On Sight

The Truth is Still Out There

It's a well-known fact that America is perceived as the land of opportunity. Where every man has the right to life and the pursuit of happiness and the tools to achieve. But within America lies a place called Everyhood. A place where opportunities and the tools to achieve and create are far and few between. And in Everyhood, U.S.A., creative genius is born in the face of adversity. If you want to succeed here, you have to be hungrier than the hungriest.



M.O.S. is no stranger to this theory. "I'm from them streets, I knew I had to make it the best way I knew how," says 24-year-old M.O.S. (Money Over Sex). And with his unique hybrid style of Southern twang-meets Northern slang, this young buck is poised to make noise on both sides of the Mason-Dixon line. Coming up in the rough region of Durham, North Carolina was not an easy feat. Raised in a single-parent household, M.O.S. (born Leander Pickett) was your average rambunctious inner city black youth. But as he entered his teens, the bleak realities of the urban inner city experience began to set in, drastically altering his outlook on his future. "I never thought about college, I thought I was going to be in the dope game," he recalls. At the age of 16, M.O.S. reached a pivotal crossroads in his young life. He was expelled from Durham's public school system in the 11th grade for participating in a rather risqu act in the school bathroom with a female student. "I was always mischievous in school, but I guess that was the last straw for them," laughs M.O.S. Dually fed up with his shenanigans, his mother subsequently kicked him out of the household. After a short stint living with his Grandmother he decided to take his future into his own hands, dropping out of high school. All the while, the hip-hop bug he caught when he was younger was just beginning to show its symptoms. At the age of 18, he formed Hot Block with a neighborhood friend. Comprised of a collective of visual/ graphic artists, rappers and producers, Hot Block slowly became a force to be reckoned with in Durham. It wasn't long before they began pushing their mixtapes in the streets of the city, also producing television spots to promote their latest installments. "We really put the mixtape market on the map in Durham," says M.O.S. "People were feenin for our mixtapes." Suddenly, M.O.S. found his progress in the rap game impeded. He was arrested and incarcerated for a charge he believed he was certain to be acquitted for. But this was just the bump in the road he needed. It was incarceration that allowed M.O.S. the much needed time to reflect on his life, fine-tune his vision and make a crucial decision: the pen or the penitentiary. It was also while serving his sentence that he developed B.E.A.M. Team (Black Entrepreneurs About Money), a condensed collective of heavy spitters that would allow him to fully actualize his vision of becoming a heavyweight in the rap game. During his stint in prison, M.O.S. feverishly worked on tightening his pen game and flow. "I had a lot of solitary time to make sure my flow and lyrics were tight," he recalls. "I mean that literally. I was in the hole for a majority of that time, so that was the only thing I could do. So when I say I birthed my flow in the hole on the song Been So Long, that's serious."



Immediately upon his release, M.O.S. acted on his new lease on life and went full steam ahead with his vision. He began frequent trips to New York City to visit a close friend and subsequently found himself in the middle of impromptu ciphers and battles with local M.C.s. And though the No Limit and Cash Money factions had made their respective marks on hip-hop at large, M.O.S. knew he had to play his lyrical trump card hard in the ever-critical home of hip-hop. "New York looks at rap a little bit different than everybody else," remarks M.O.S. "They don't care where you from, they just wanna know one thing: Can you spit?" With that said, he quickly garnered a strong reputation for his uniquely tenacious pit bull flow and hard-hitting lyrics. "I've been up in the projects in Queens and the South Bronx battling the best of the best and I always got love from them." And though he returned to Durham and kept grinding with his rap hustle the best way he knew how, M.O.S. wasn't sure where else to steer his B.E.A.M Team ship. Enter Ski Beats.



The fellow Carolina beat architect with platinum plaques from such heavyweights under his belt as Foxy Brown, Lil' Kim, Jay-Z and 50 Cent touched down in North Carolina for a music conference in 2002 and was literally blown away. "When I saw him performing at the conference I was like Yo, that kid is crazy," recalls Ski Beats. "I had my people get in touch with his manager right then. A couple weeks later, we were in the studio." The two immediately formed a synergy that resulted in a strong collection of trunk rattling bangers and heat seekers that are formidable hits waiting in the wings. Ski was so convinced of M.O.S.'s skills that he decided to feature him on a song on his Now City album project scheduled for release on Elektra Records. Once the masters got back to Elektra, label execs in A&R immediately began campaigning for M.O.S.'s place aboard the roster. But unfortunately as the Elektra moniker dissolved into the larger AOL/ Time-Warner system, the disconnect forced M.O.S. to search for another home for M.O.S.'s solo career. Ski Beats is definitely sold on M.O.S.'s fresh approach and believes that he is quite possibly the sound of the New South. "He's real lyrical. But most of all, he owns his style. He got his own flow. He has this unusual twang. With a lot of rappers, you can tell a lot of the stuff they talk about is fake. But once you listen to M.O.S., you can tell every lyric is from life experience. That's the stamp of authenticity right there."