Yet it retains the silk and funk that marked his earlier music, which is heavily indebted to the West Coast, where he spent the crucial early years of his career. His breakthrough to national audiences, its sound is a close precursor to the one that would soon become No Limit’s signature: big and bombastic but with plenty of negative space, whining synths, and ad-libs as architecture. Master P’s fifth album, the languid, swaggering Ice Cream Man, was released 25 years ago this month. It was one of the more intriguing ventures of its time, creatively significant to rap music and almost perfectly representative of a media landscape that was reshuffling rapidly as it approached an unforeseen breaking point. It was always ready to grow-from music into movies, from phone sex to sports management and, inevitably, to real estate. The New Orleans native’s No Limit Records was a family business that was also voracious the way they teach you to be in business school. These are the stories Master P tells about himself, on his records and on TV, in the biopics he commissions and in the magazine spreads he poses for gamely. ‘60 Songs That Explain the ’90s’: Master P, No Limit, and the Rise of Southern Rap The 20 Best Southern Rap Albums Ever The 1996 Rap Yearbook But at a certain point, with the Soundscan numbers and gold-plated tanks as supporting evidence, you’re forced to admit that something truly out of the ordinary has happened.

Taken individually, these are the sort of moments on which entire lives hinge as a whole, they become a web of parables that strain credibility. The grandmother who makes the hero recite King’s “I Have a Dream” speech until it’s memorized and tells him there will be “no limit” to his success, then strikes the fear of God in him when she starts planning outfits for his funeral.

The chance encounters with Michael Jackson’s lawyer, with Tupac. The championship basketball game marred by threats of violence. You are asked to believe a parade of tidy metaphors, an unbroken string of meaningful coincidences: The gun that jams at a life-altering juncture. The 1996 Rap Yearbook, a recurring series from The Ringer, will explore the landmark releases and moments from a quarter-century ago that redefined how we think of the genre. No year in hip-hop history sticks out quite like 1996: It marked the height of the East Coast–West Coast feud, the debut of several artists who would rule the next few decades, and the last moment before battle lines between “mainstream” and “underground” were fully drawn.

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