Appropriately for someone who operated outside of conventional hip-hop circles, Master P (b. Percy Miller, c. 1970) didn't come from such traditional rap cities as New York or California. Master P was based in New Orleans, a city with a rich musical tradition that nevertheless had an underdeveloped hip-hop scene. It also had an unspoken violent side that affected Master P as a teenager. After his parents' divorce, he moved between the homes of his father's mother in New Orleans and his mother in Richmond, California. During his teens, he was on the outside of the drug and hustling cutlure, but he also pursued a love of basketball. He won a sports scholarship at the University of Houston, but he left the school and moved to Richmond, where he studied business at Oakland's Merritt Junio Oakland. His grandfather died and left him ten thousand dollars in the late '80s, which Master P invested in No Limit Records. Originally, No Limit was a store, not a label.

While working at No Limit, Master P learned that there was a rap audience who loved funky, street-level beats that the major labels weren't providing. Using this knowledge, he decided to turn No Limit into a record label in 1990. The following year, he had an underground hit with his first album, The Ghetto Is Tryin' to Kill Me. Shortly afterward, the compilation West Coast Bad Boyz, which featured rappers Rappin 4-Tay and E-40 before they were nationally known, was released and spent over half a year on the charts. These two albums were significant underground hits and confirmed what Master P suspected -- there was an audience for straight-ahead, unapologetic, funky hardcore rap. He soon moved No Limit to New Orleans and began concentrating on making records.

By the mid-'90s, No Limit had developed its own production team, Beats by the Pound (comprised of Craig B., KLC and Mo B. Dick), which worked on every one of the label's releases. And there were many releases, hitting a rate of nearly ten a year, all masterminded by Master P and Beats by the Pound. They crafted the sound, often stealing songs outright from contemporary hits. They designed album covers, which had the cheap, garishly colorful and tasteless look of straight-to-video exploitation films. And they worked fast, recording and releasing entire albums as quickly as two weeks.

Included in that production schedule were Master P's own albums. 99 Ways to Die was released in 1995, and Ice Cream Man appeared the following year. By the time Ghetto Dope was released in the late summer of 1997, Master P had turned No Limit into a mini-empire. He had no exposure on radio or MTV, but No Limit's records sold very well, and Tru -- a group he formed with his younger brothers Silkk the Shocker and C-Murder -- had Top Ten R&B hit albums. His success in the recording industry inspired him to make I'm Bout It, an autobiographical comedy-drama titled after Tru's breakthrough hit. Master P financed the production himself, and when he found no distributor, it went straight to video in the summer of 1997. His next film, I Got the Hook Up, appeared in theatres during the summer of 1998, concurrent with the release of his album MP Da Last Don.