Yelawolf: Shady’s Deadliest Catch

Not all rappers were hustlers or correctional officers prior to striking platinum in the music business. In this Rhyme & Reason exclusive, Eminem’s latest addition to the Shady Records roster - Alabama rapper Yelawolf - details his vocational past as a deep sea fisherman in the pernicious Bering Sea, risking life and limb for the promise of a major payday.  
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I was in Berkley, California when I made a life decision not to pursue skateboarding anymore and that I wanted to try and do music. That was in December of 2000 and within a week I was in Seattle. I took a Greyhound bus out there to get some money to buy a studio. I was told I could make $20,000 in a month on a deep sea fishing trawler, so I went out there and lived on the streets for a couple of weeks until I got on a boat.

I didn’t know there were tones of kids out there just like me trying to do the same shit. I thought I would just go out there and hop on a boat, but it’s not like that. I got denied over and over again. It’s not easy to get on, but I had my mind set on twenty stacks.

Deep sea fishing is rumored to be the deadliest job in the world; you’ve got seas that’ll crash and knock your boat over, the cold, the wet, and you can fall out of the boat or get hammered down by the equipment.

Part of what makes it so dangerous is not only all the risk of death that you have out at sea, but all the risk of injury and not being able to get help soon enough – like if you get a bad cut and you have to wait for a chopper to get out there. You’re so far out and with no real immediate help. I’m not sure how far out we were, all I know is that we left Seattle and we ended up somewhere by Russia in the Bering Sea. Way the fuck out there in the Bering Strait!

I once saw a dude get his arm broken by a halibut. He jumped on a halibut fish trying to be funny and it bucked him into this piece of fuckin’ iron and it just snapped his arm. But sleep deprivation is probably the biggest injury everybody suffers. Twenty-hour days, seven days a week – it makes you delusional and pissed off. That shit is almost inhumane. It gets so crazy that you actually start dreaming that you’re working. I used to work all day and then go to sleep and dream I was still working. I would dream so hard about work that I would be sweating and exhausted when I woke up. It never stopped.

The seas were fucking ugly in the Bering up by Russia. One time there was an earthquake that put this big swell on us and ran us into another ship. It put a hole in our boat and stopped the sump pump from working. We almost sank. The engineer was out there literally underwater, swimming, trying to unclog the sump pump so that our boat didn’t go down.

But I never feared for my life. I don’t want to die but I’ve never been afraid of the edge. Sometimes I used to go out at night and stand on the back of the boat when no one was around just to fuck with my own head – to get a sense of how expendable I was.

You can’t be scared of death. God forbid, I could’ve gone out there and did what I did [and died], but what’s to say that a car’s not going to come and take me out? You just never know. The simplest things can take your life and you can live through all the dangerous things.

Deep sea fishing will make a man out of you. You go out there thinking you’re tough and it separates the men from the boys and the little bitches. I did pretty good. I never got sick and I moved up from packing to working on the deck, which says a lot for someone’s first time out. All the other kids got fucked up.

However, I only came home with a thousand dollars. It was bullshit – a bad captain, fucked-up crew, and an all-round bunch of greedy whores out there trying to fish. What I took away from that experience is it makes you a stronger person, it makes you grow up. It made me become Yelawolf.

 It was like a vision quest, for real. I didn’t get no financial gain from it, so I had to figure out what it was all for. And I think it was a lot of karma for all the dirty shit that I did when I was young. I just went out there and paid my dues.

Rap ain’t work. None of this [music] shit is work. Work is using your hands, digging ditches, blue-collar factory jobs. This ain’t work. This is a privilege.

As told to Dominic Di Francesco.