Fiend

During the height of No Limit Records’ dominance in the final years of the 1990s, New Orleans rapper Fiend appeared on several of the label’s chart entries and added verses to Master P’s raw single “Make Em Say Ugh.” Although his association with the imprint proved brief, Fiend’s 1998 solo project There’s One in Every Family moved more than a million copies, securing his place in Southern rap history and launching a career that stretched across subsequent decades.

Born Richard Jones in New Orleans’ 17th ward, he endured the early death of his brother, an event that colored his perspective with lasting darkness. He later turned to rap and joined Big Boy Records, then also home to Mystikal. That label issued his first charting track, “Baddest Muthafucka Alive,” and the 1995 debut album Won’t Be Denied, which contained the follow-up single “All I See.” Those recordings prompted Master P to bring him aboard No Limit and place him on the 1997 soundtrack for I’m Bout It with the cut “Don’t Mess Around.” The same year Fiend delivered his best-known contribution, appearing on “Make Em Say Ugh” and its widely aired MTV video. He continued to feature on additional No Limit projects while readying his own 1998 release, There’s One in Every Family. Strong sales followed, yet the set yielded no major singles, a pattern repeated by its 1999 successor, Street Life. As the decade closed and No Limit’s commercial peak faded, Fiend departed to launch his own imprint, Fiend Entertainment.

Under that banner he issued Can I Burn? in 2000, packaged with a documentary that appeared on VHS, and the 2003 sequel Can I Burn? 2. A short-lived deal with Ruff Ryders produced no album. Throughout the 2000s he maintained a steady release schedule, culminating in the 2007 retrospective Mr. Whomp Whomp: The Best of Fiend. In 2011 he aligned with Curren$y’s Jet Life Entertainment, contributing to various mixtapes and joint tracks. His next studio album, Still Cookin’, arrived in 2018 via X-Ray Records, an offshoot of Cleopatra Records.