DJ Equipment Reviews

Three 6 Mafia get into cooking at Cookin’ ain’t easy

Three 6 Mafia is one hip hop group that knows (or tries) to capitalize on their current status and image. Let’s see how that works, shall we? Started all the way in 1991 by the three original members: DJ Paul (or Paul Beauregard), Juicy J (Jordan Houston) and Lord Infamous (Ricky Dunigan), Three 6 Mafia has been shifting gears a lot over the course of their musical career. Switching from 3 to 6 members (which they say gave the name for the band), now they’re back down to only two, the original DJ Paul and Juicy J.

Also, as time went by, Three 6 Mafia also changed their style and looks, going from a gritty, menacing and dark sound into a more mainstream type of music. But don’t get me wrong, these guys are famous indeed, and they even made history by being the first black music group to win the Oscar Academy Award for the Best Song, for their single It’s Hard Out There For A Pimp from the Hustle & Flow soundtrack. Tell me that’s not worth a mention in the history books.

Also, Three 6 Mafia also were the first hip hop group to ever perform at the same ceremony, given that they won the award in the first place. The Oscar only served to pull Three 6 Mafia higher into the music industry, and they started making appearances on all kinds of shows and on television, the most noteworthy being Adventures in Hollywood, on MTV. Besides, Three 6 Mafia’s music and sounds have been used in many other places and by many other artists, like Justin Timberlake, or in the soundtrack of the 2006 Rocky Balboa movie or even as an entry track for one of WWE’s (wrestling, if you’re not into that sort of thing) characters into the arena.

As with many other hip hop groups, conflict and public disputes were central to Three 6 Mafia’s media hype, and here’s a little bit of what they had to go through over the years:

• the satanic imagery controversy, started of course, by their name, as well as some of the lyrics and sounds they used to have in the beginning
• this is however denied by the group, Juicy J’s father actually being a preacher (I don’t know how much that counts for but…)
• a dispute with Bone from Thugs’N'Harmony, when he referred to Memphis, the home town of Three 6 Mafia as a "bunk ass town". This led to multiple artists becoming disgruntled and even striking back in one way or the other
• another legal dispute with Crunchy Black, a previous member of Three 6 Mafia, who claims half the songs on the Most Known Unknown album of the group are his and that he was not payed for anything

If that’s not enough for you, Three 6 Mafia will now host a cooking TV show called Cookin’ Ain’t Easy. Although with no set launch date, the show will consist of Juicy J and DJ Paul preparing a meal for different people who will be guests. This is somewhere halfway between comedy and actual cooking information (as in recipes and all that) and it’s meant to be entertaining as well. While it all looks good on paper, we’d have to wait for this one to call it, but if anything, you don’t see hip hop bands in the kitchen too often, so that may be a nice diversion.

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