<http://schema.org/articleBody>
"FacebookPinterest\n\nOne night last fall, I flew back to Miami, my home, to demand satisfaction from Pitbull. I'd only just learned he was winding down an international tour with a homecoming of his own, a performance at the AmericanAirlines Arena downtown, so I'd made last-minute arrangements. I touched down and drove to the bayside complex, where I slotted myself at the end of a line of people that filled in the whorling tunnels under the AAA. At the front of the line was a black-curtained cube, a kind of collapsible greenroom wherein Pit, local-boy-cum-pop-superstar, was holding a meet and greet with several hundred fans.\n\n There was not another unattended dude down there. Not a single one. Pit was opening for Enrique Iglesias, and men were with wives or girlfriends or else absent entirely. Whole feminine boughs of family trees, though, from abuelita down to floret in stroller, were entering Pit's black box. The heels-to-flats ratio: three to one. An aide held up a sign explaining that this all was being recorded for a video, and that by our being here we had entered into contract with the artist. The line inched. I had a ways.\n\n A few months ago this very magazine named Pitbull one of the \"25 Least Influential People Alive.\" To me this was evidence of a lot of things, the least of them being a gross misapprehension of the current pop landscape. That one's easy to set right. A quick once-over of international singles sales at the end of January shows that among rappers, only Drake is as popular. But allow me to dig a little deeper. The list's reasoning went, \"Because who could be less influential than a guy whose music sounds like the aborted offspring of Nelly and Will.i.am.?\" The implication here seemed to be that Pitbull is this chimera of our newest and worst trends in music, culture, whatever. He's a dazzlingly shitty agglomeration of others' bad ideas, and his appeal is inexplicable, or in spite of himself, or a reflection of these dire times\u2014 maybe all of the above. This was a surface dismissal of an artist presumed to be all surface, the assumption being that what shines and shimmers must also be shallow.\n\n After a little more than an hour, my turn came. From the outside Pit's cube looked ten-by-ten, but inside, it was weirdly expansive, extra-dimensional, like. When I entered he was catering to the last of the fans, signing soccer jerseys, taking pictures, cascading Spanish thanks for coming all this way. He wore a black suit, black shoes, black shirt embossed with black stripes, blunted black aviators. About three years ago his wardrobe shifted from Cuban-flag-patterned jerseys and \"305\" fitteds, to fine linen suits tailored so as to bypass the imagination entirely. The walls were papered with identical ads for Voli, the low-cal vodka Pit has a stake in, featuring him holding both a full glass of the drink and the bottle itself, self-serving, above the phrase \"Everyone should have a Latin lover.\"\n\n This was not the Pitbull I wanted to meet, greet. I wanted the other Pit, young Pit, the Pit whose albums of the midaughts were made up of greasy banger odes to Miami rapped under a royal \"we.\" Back then nobody much knew Pit outside Miami, where he's been beloved for nearly a decade because of songs like \"305 Anthem\" and \"Defend Dade,\" songs I looped endlessly when I went upstate for college and began to self-actualize. I used to tell people, If you want to better picture where I'm coming from, listen to Pitbull. Hobbesian coke rap tends to project a skewed image, sure, but the Miami young Pit rapped about came closer to the reality of the place than anything before it. Nobody else had ever bothered to describe the landed part of the metropolis that stretches on low and vast like a usedcar lot, the one that shows up every year atop think-tank worst-of lists. The city where most Miamians are from.\n\n He's since traded in the title of Mr. 305 for Mr. Worldwide. You can watch him perform at the NBA All-Star Game and halftime on Thanksgiving. His official videos have been viewed more than a quarter-billion times. His number one single \"Give Me Everything,\" off his album Planet Pit, has been playing since last summer at the mall, the club, the gym\u2014 anyplace anyone is selling anything.\n\n Planet Pit is a super-producer showcase through which he's become the avatar of four-on-the-floor, oonce-oonce club rap, or hip-house. The beats are Euro-disco and the verses are divorced from the street or any other public space. They're set in places of business and are all about patronizing. (The first lines to \"Give Me Everything\": Me not working hard? / Yeah, right\u2014picture that with a Kodak / Or better yet, go to Times Square / Take a picture of me with a Kodak.)\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\nhis moniker because in dogfights, pit bulls are \"too stupid\n\nto lose\" (1998). \n\n Along with Kodak, Bud Light, and Voli, Pit endorses Dr Pepper and Zumba Fitness, which builds workout programs around his music. He also has equity in these dissolvable tongue squares called Sheets Energy Strips. Last year he made a reported $6 million this way, being hiphop's foremost shill. What his new songs sound like are the pages in a portfolio, or a really engaging PowerPoint presentation on synergistic potential. Planet Pit is something Pitbull could take to ConAgra and be like, \"This is what I can do for the Snack Pack brand.\"\n\nI'd returned that night for a long-desired and likely ill-advised reprisal. It was on behalf of all Miami that I was going to j'accuse Pitbull of not keeping it real.\n\n\n\nUp close, Pit is always moving in small ways, wavering, like something seen through heat shimmer. When he met some new fan, his eyes seemed not to look at, but around her. The most expressive part of his face was his left eyebrow, which arched and waggled, like a petted cat in the lap of a villain. He glad-handed a tall white guy, some ecutive. \"A pleasure, Richard,\" he said, and then he took off his sunglasses and went, \"which means you're a Dick, right?\" Surrounding him was what's referred to as Team Pit, his roundtable of managers, agents, and friends, and they all earnestly lost it.\n\n Pit scanned the laughing faces, mine included. Watching Pitbull run up on you the first time is both enticing and repellent. His smile is nicely imperfect, crowded and off-white, but it also looks as though he's already picked up on a vulnerability you weren't even aware of. Like, your fly's open, or you've somehow morphed into a henhouse. He and I shook hands firmly. He's very fair and surprisingly freckled. Under the wispy Vandyke his chin is weak, eroded. \"We're going to have some fucking fun,\" he told me. \"Other people have fun\u2014I have fucking fun.\" He mugged and threw his shoulders and then touched my collarbone and said, \"Don't worry, we'll get you some Miami mamis.\" I explained that, actually, I was from here, and I intimated that the Miami mamis, I've never been their favorite. He asked where I went to high school. Turns out he went there, too; might've even been in some of my older sister's classes. Hindsight being what it is, this makes perfect sense. What Pit has about him is what all the popular kids had. I don't just mean popular here as the regular pejorative. I mean also: to be popular in a huge Miami public school, you had to have mad cross-econocultural appeal. It's a good test market, actually. It produces a lot of agents\u2014financial, real estate, insurance, and otherwise. People who can code-switch.\n\n No shit? I asked.\n\n \"Church,\" he said. \"Back when it was that gang shit.\"\n\n We talked about the lunchtime fight club behind the ESOL hall\u2014still active, according to YouTube\u2014and the poor bastard who got stabbed to death behind the same. We darkened ourselves in the reflected beams of our cred. Then he reiterated the fucking fun, said to no one in particular, \"We got a Miami boy!\" and we homey hugged.\n\n He was performing where the Miami Heat play, but unlike the bandwagoneers of that team who don't show up till midway through the second quarter, his fans packed the arena before the set began. When the house lights cut off, Pit bounded down a uvular runway, his path hailed with roses. He danced a strange but catching dance wherein he stood stock-still and flared his arm intermittently, like fire from out an active oil well. There was also a crotch thrust involved, and I feel it pertinent here to mention: Dude's a batsman. YouTube a performance, assay that pantslode if you think me wrong.\n\n He was in the middle of his LMFAO remix, \"I'm from Miami, Bitch,\" when the music stopped and he stopped and he said, \"Before we get this party started, I gotta take a Sheet.\" He looked into the scoreboard camera and placed one on his tongue. When he got to \"Pause,\" the song he's sold to Zumba, he withdrew from the stage while three dancers did the fitness routine down the runway, a video on the big screen showing the rest of us how.\n\n He closed with \"Give Me Everything.\" The crotch thrusting was gyroscopic, and the upheld camera phones made a pointillist JumboTron all around him. \"Reviewers mistaken,\" I wrote in my notebook. \"Not performing like a non-person, a cruise director. Energy is overwhelming, as is charisma. Maybe because he's home?\"\n\n\n\n People are surprised you can be from the place. They come to visit, and to start new lives, because implicitly they believe Miami is their getaway from where real lives are lived. And in a way that's true. The city is all about disguising itself so as to make outsiders more amenable to giving it money, coming back. I came to understand this over the summer I spent working at a beach club. There was this Russian millionaire who always spread his towel in the same spot. One of my jobs was powdering that spot every few days with whiter sand from a bag. You know?\n\n \"It's the people who think they're talented, that their $#!% don't stink, who get left behind.\"\n\n The crew at the club was typically Miamian: a couple of Cubans; a Haitian; a Bahamian; me, the dweebish cracker; and Gary,* the manager, a gringo transplant from New Jersey, universally reviled. Gary was alien in a lot of ways. His face never once held sun, his gelled hair went flaccid before noontide. His jokes were about \"espeaking Americano\" and how if he left town, he'd have to entrust the flag to me. But the thing he did that proved just how wide was the gulf between us was to introduce Will Smith's \"Miami\" into the PA rotation. Christ alive, that song. \"Miami\" wasn't deceptive so much as deceived, just like the hungover dupes who, when finding out the drink guy was local, would tell me, \"I could never live here. It's fun and all, but I don't know how you survive it.\"\n\n In a supply room we had a radio we played our music on: Uncle Luke, Poison Clan, Trick Daddy, and, more than anything else that summer, Pitbull, his early albums and mixtapes. We'd come in, untuck our shirts, and rap along with Pit as though we were addressing the guests. Pre-teen Rene,](#footnote1) a joint flopping in the corner of his mouth as he folded towels, rhymed along with \"Welcome to Miami,\" Pit's rejoinder to Big Willie Style. Clifton,[ his whites soaked through after fixing HVACs with bare hands and Kreyol blasphemy, would \"Brrrrrrat!\" gunshots, his body cruciform, his finger pistols pointing north-south. My favorite song to go in on was \"Rock Bottom\":  So fuck that South Beach shit, yeah, that's what it is / Next time y'all come to the bottom make sure y'all come over the bridge. I'd gesticulate as do all white boys who are into hip-hop, like we're trying to describe the measure of something we've never seen.\n\n That's what about Pit won us over then, how easily we could picture him with us in that cinder-block hut, scraping scabs of rust off chaises, trashing the guests and Gary, together. Like myself and most everyone I grew up with, Pitbull is a first-generation Miamian. His mother came to the United States as part of Operaci&amp;amp;#xF3;n Pedro Pan, a program through which 14,000 Cuban children were sent to Miami in the early '60s by parents opposed to the Castro government. She grew up here, and one night met her husband, a country-boy guajiro, during her shift at a strip club. Their son, Armando Christian Perez, was born not long after in Miami in 1981.\n\n A year prior, Pit's father had brought over three boatloads of refugees during the Mariel boatlift. (Pit's third album was The Boatlift, which was preceded by El Mariel and M.I.A.M.I. [Money Is a Major Issue].) When his son was 3, he took him to bars in Little Havana, stood him on stools, and had him recite the poetry of Jos\u00E9 Mart&amp;amp;#xED; for money. He eventually became a small-time cocaine smuggler and estranged himself from his family when Pit was still young. While Pit's mother chased jobs cleaning houses, telemarketing, and managing Burger Kings, they bounced around the city until she kicked him out at 16 for selling coke. He started battlerapping around this time. During breaks in school, at lunch, at parties, he would rap against classmates and rival dealers, always a rebuttal about his blue eyes and white skin at the ready. He's quick to boast that he chose his handle because \"in dog fights, pit bulls are too stupid to lose.\" He made a name for himself and signed with the godfather of Miami bass, Luther Campbell (a.k.a. Uncle Luke). In 2001, they went on tour, Luke pitching him to every DJ he knew. \"This kid,\" Luke said then, \"he is Miami\u2014more so than me or anybody else.\"\n\n\n\n * Names have been changed.\n\n\n\n Some weeks after the concert, I met up with Pitbull in Las Vegas, where he'd gone for the Latin Grammys. Halfway through the ceremony, after having lost both awards he was up for, Pit, me, a young woman in a deep-cut black onesie, and six members of Team Pit vacated our seats and made for a chartered plane to fly back to Miami. Pit was due to perform the next night at the soft opening of the new Marlins stadium. Hustling across the casino floor, he slowed just enough to one-pump every offered hand as we headed to taxis.\n\n At the airfield he chatted up the baggage handler in Spanish, helped him rearrange some luggage in the hold before nudging him lightly and laughing as they parted. On his way to the cabin he peeked into the cockpit and asked the two pilots, \"Qu\u00E9 pasa, jefes?\" The guy slides between the levels of corporation as if lubed.\n\n I'd passed the hours before the Grammys standing in front of a hotel mirror trying to memorize a four-page inquiry I'd carefully mapped, all paths leading to: How are you not a sellout? Then I climbed into the empty tub and watched Kimbo Slice backyard knockouts.\n\n By takeoff, Pit had the candles lit and the flatware arranged, as it were. He was positioning people around him, pouring drinks or making sure that drinks were being poured, he being at the center of things, aloof but shining on everyone in turn. He said he wasn't upset about losing. \"Fuuuuuck no. My kids can't eat awards. I care about the public.\" He connected a portable speaker to his phone and played \"Niggas in Dade,\" Trick Daddy's freestyle over the Jay-Z/Kanye \"Niggas in Paris\" beat. \"Papo,\" he said, \"who's the only motherfucker who did they song in English?\" He tapped his head. \"For the wider audience.\"\n\n As Pit poured another round, I asked, Honestly, don't you hope that all these new fans, don't you hope they go back and listen to the early albums and the mixtapes? And he said, \"I think of fans like a barbershop. I want that debate. I want one guy to be, like, 'Pit, he ain't this, he ain't that,' and for another guy to be like\u2014\" here he shook his head and held up his index finger at arm's length\u2014\" 'Hold the fuck on, partner,' and then that first guy to be like, 'I ain't know he did that,' and some other guy be like, 'No, but did you hear this?' \"\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n Pit smirked at the young woman, who scowled as she got up to mix more Voli and lime. He cued up \"Get into the Groove,\" singing along to the And you can dance\u2026for inspiration part before he sashayed around, squeezing shoulders or dipping three fingers into his drink and spritzing dozing faces. A small, thin older guy who plays keys in Pit's band shimmied through the cabin repeating the word \"Sevilla.\" (Later, he told me about his escape from Cuba\u2014\"like hide-and-seek, only if they find you, they gonna kill you!\" He acted so grateful and deferent toward Pit that finally he had to comment on it: \"With us it's crabs in a bucket in reverse effect.\") Pit danced up and down the aisle freely, goofily, not like onstage, where for a pop star he dances as well as a kid who's watched a lot of kung fu movies does kung fu. It's the one chink in his \"Mr. Worldwide\" persona.\n\n \"Now, I know you gonna love this one, partner,\" he said, and while one hand alighted on my shoulder, the other filled a glass with a different flavored Voli, espresso vanilla. This seduction, Pit's peerless at it. He's never not hawking the Planet Pit Getaway\u2014drinks and energy tabs and dance hooks, all inclusive. He's banking on you buying into it, and goddamn if you don't want to. You might feel ickily reluctant at first, but in the end it's easier, and a lot more fun, if you just let go and bask in it. What Pit was doing was making me homesick.\n\nPit, I said, You were Uncle Luke's prot\u00E9g\u00E9. You had the whole city behind you. Via your pitiable heart the world could've intuited something of Miami's! And you literally traded it all away.\n\n He grabbed my glass, shook it to toll the one unmelted cube. The woman fetched another vodka.\n\n He calmly mentioned that he was the one who got the key to the city two and a half years ago. \"I was up there shaking hands with city fathers, man, you know? Me.\" Not young Pit, he meant. Mr. Worldwide, the rebrand. Miami, he reminded me, was built in the '80s on flight capital. It was sold and resold depending on the street price of coke, the exchange rate, who was in power where. Transfer payments, Pit said. Drug money and life savings; condominiums, vacations, and retirement homes. \"Shit's the same thing.\" Our economy was built on convincing people to bring and invest and squander the wealth they made elsewhere. \"So now of course, I can't just talk about the city,\" he said. \"Can't just be, 'Oh, this is how Miami actually is.' I have to give 'em the Miami they want. I have to get people to want to come down here and pay for it.\"\n\n Pit wanted me to understand: \"The first check I got from Luke, I rode my bike halfway across Miami to cash it. That shit bounced.\" (Uncle Luke disputes this.) He said his endorsement deals were his way of raising capital for his equity moves. \"People say I switched?\" Here he paused and for a moment I thought he was about to slough off the \"Mr. Worldwide\" facade. But instead he put two fingertips against my heart and tented both eyebrows as if to make room for his point. \"Maybe I outgrew you. I look at it as an evolution, and setting the path. I'm showing you where to go.\"\n\n The outstanding posse cut \"Bitch, I'm from Dade County\" rolled into the cabin. The woman rapped Trick's line Born, bred, and raised in get-money ways, while ecuting a few weighty chest thrusts. But Pit, I wanted to know, was this always the plan? \"Absolutely,\" he said. He explained how he used to be locked into a bad contract with the bankrupt TVT Records. He was fast becoming a hip-hop footnote when he took the label to court and extricated himself. Then in February 2009, he released the number one club hit \"I Know You Want Me (Calle Ocho).\" \"Two thousand nine was freedom, 2010 was invasion, 2011 was takeover, 2012 is grow wealth,\" he said, smiling while slipping back on his sunglasses. So the design then was to leave Miami behind?\n\n He unwrapped a Sheet while scrolling through music. He put on the latest single off Planet Pit, \"International Love,\" a relentlessly catchy dance number.\n\nFacebookPinterest\n\n \"I'm still giving you that Miami shit. The only question is if you're listening.\" Then he rapped the opening lines, and, yes, he was right, he'd packed in a bunch of allusions to the Trick Daddy song \"Boy\" before ending the verse, 305 til the death of me / Cremate my body, let the ocean have what's left of me. He said he was in talks to sell the song for an upcoming wireless campaign. \"So, to answer your question,\" he said, \"hell no, I can't leave Miami behind.\"\n\n He slid down in his seat and rubbed his face. \"Look, Pitbull is a product. Don't get it fucked up\u2014I'm a businessman. This industry is 90 percent business, 10 percent talent. It's the people who think they're talented, that their shit don't stink, who get left behind.\"\n\n It's not pleasant, realizing that in your youth you'd got got. That Pit had fashioned my backroom favorites according to what had been popular then, just as he'd contrived Planet Pit in the style of the you-only-live-once rap that's everywhere now. But I was no longer mad at the guy. I couldn't be. To hate on Pitbull means you recognize his artifice but assume he can't. It means believing what you're seeing isn't being wittingly shown to you.\n\n Pit excused himself to go around the cabin and chop the crotches of anyone sleeping. \"Ice picks!\" he shouted.\n\n The young woman rolled her eyes and finally spoke: \"He's an unbelievable asshole.\"\n\n \"I'm a Major Payne like Damon Wayans!\"\n\n Pit said, and cleaved another sac.\n\n Over the Gulf off Clearwater, I started demanding Sheets, which are gummy red squares that taste like codeine and burn as they dissolve. I put them in my Voli and made a rosy Pitbull Kool-Aid. I asked Pit to play \"Miami Clap,\" the title a euphemism for gunfire. I rapped along with Pit rapping along with himself. We squeezed our index fingers and emptied our imaginary AKs at angles just missing each other. I asked for \"Welcome to Miami,\" Rene's song, the one that first endeared Pit to the city almost ten years ago. In it he name-checks every cred-worthy neighborhood and drops pitch-perfect little realist details. When he got to the line about where I grew up, Pit pointed at me with both hands, sewing-machine quick, like he was going, \"It's all for you you you!\" I wanted to tip the man, or glowingly fill out a comment card.\n\n We began our descent.\n\n\n\n Last time I saw Pit was a few days before New Year's in his greenroom after a New York concert. He was doing what he does before a show, what he does during it, and what he will do forever after, probably: doggedly on his grind, he whispered in ears, kissed cheeks, goosed butts. I stood with the various flacks and pitchmen lined up against the walls waiting for him to get around to us. When he saw me he pressed against my heart three times, as if resuscitating, and said, \"305 till we die.\" Then he offered me a trucker cup full of Voli and told everyone within earshot, \"Me and Loco had some fucking fun the other month.\" I accepted it and agreed.\n\n Every so often he'd stop by to refill my glass before moving on to someone else. I thought of a plate spinner who'd spotted one wobbling.\n\n Sometime later, who could say when, good and drunk, we parted. He told me to look for his performance on Dick Clark's New Year's Eve show. And if I needed anything else\u2014absolutely anything to get the representation just right\u2014I could call anytime.\n\n Next morning, I got this. I'm sure I'm not the only one, and I don't care:\n\nWhy thy do loco it armando (pit) just want 2 say thank u papo and enjoy the new year miami style even though its colder then bitcccccch up here daleeeeee&amp;gt;\n\n Sent via PitBerry from T-Mobile\n\nThis is Kent Russell's first story for GQ."^^<http://www.w3.org/2001/XMLSchema#string>
<http://www.gq.com/story/pitbull-interview-profile-gq-april-2012>