Revenue Retrievin' Graveyard Shift

Synonymous with Bay Area rap, E-40 garnered a regional following, and eventually a national one, with his flamboyant raps, while his entrepreneurial spirit, embodied by his homegrown record label, Sick Wid' It Records, did much to cultivate a flourishing rap scene to the east of San Francisco Bay, in communities such as Oakland and his native Vallejo. Along with Too Short, Spice 1, and Ant Banks, E-40 was among the first Bay Area rappers to sign a major-label deal, penning a deal with Jive Records in 1994, after years of releasing music independently. Throughout the '90s and into the early 2000s, E-40 and his Sick Wid' It associates released a series of albums on Jive, and though they weren't big sellers nationally, they were well received regionally and proved highly influential, on not only the West Coast but also in the South, thanks in part to Master P, who began his No Limit Records empire in the Bay Area before relocating it to New Orleans. E-40's ties to the South became more direct in the mid-2000s, when, upon the expiration of his deal with Jive, he partnered with Atlanta rapper/producer Lil Jon and his BME Recordings label, in association with Warner Bros. The first album to be released as part of this partnership, My Ghetto Report Card, was E-40's most successful in years. E-40's career isn't well measured by chart hits and album sales, though, for he more or less remained an underground rapper, albeit one with a major-label contract, working almost exclusively with an inner circle of Bay Area rappers and producers. Concurrently, the Bay Area rap scene, with its so-called hyphy style, was growing in popularity nationally, and there was no bigger champion of the Bay and its style than E-40, whose innumerable guest features helped foster the scene and whose son, producer Droop-E, had grown to become one of hyphy's foremost practitioners. – All Music