Pursuit of Happiness: Mannie Fresh Finds Serenity in Spare Car Parts

In the era of the extremely online, Mannie Fresh finds solace being extremely off of it. Phoning in for our conversation on a moderate March evening, the rap legend makes it clear that doom scrolling isn’t part of his daily itinerary. 

“If I'm not promoting business or DJing, I just outright avoid it,” he tells Okayplayer. “There’s too much negativity.” And to his point — Mannie’s got better things to do. 

After emerging as the defining sound of Cash Money Records, Mannie has continued producing and DJing while aging gracefully into his status as a hip-hop elder statesman. Most recently, he’s landed production on his longtime comrade Juvenile’s new album, Boiling Point. Since last fall, the two have also held down Still 400, a podcast where they keep it all the way a bean about their experiences in the music industry. 

He’s doing a lot, but he still makes time to do things for himself, too. For the latest edition of Okayplayer’s Pursuit of Happiness, Mannie Fresh explains the role of the DJ in community care, as well as the role repairing cars plays in his own mental health.

Mannie Fresh: A DJ knows the importance of what's going on right now. Especially if you’re DJing in the hood. My dad used to DJ every day and every night. I used to pick up his equipment and I used to hook it up and then have to pick it up later on, then go to school the next day. I actually hung around one day and saw my dad play. That’s when I saw what a DJ does. Their job is to take you away from the world. If you're a good DJ, you take people away from every f****d up thing in the world, and, for that moment when they're with you, they forget about all the world's problems. 

Restoring cars has also been a big thing for me forever. I do that when I’m having a bad day. The hunt for parts is therapy for me. It started with me and my dad working on cars. In the neighborhood I grew up in, that was a big thing. All of us love Chevys. Whether you were a drug dealer or you were a regular guy, you had a clean ass Chevy and you still grew up working on them. My dad would pick up stuff from here and there, bring it home, restore it, and we'd work on it, flip it and sell it, and move to something else. 

When I’m repairing a car, sometimes it's just taking it all in. I might park something outside and look at it over and over again, figure out what interior I need or what exterior I need, or what kind of wheels I need and what I want the motor to be. I'm gonna remember all of that in my head, but I know what I want it to look like now that I got the vision. Now I'm on a hunt to find all of this stuff. I look at broken-down cars damn-near like broken art. I'm gonna look at every angle, every side, every shape, everything, and figure out how can I get it back to what I want it to be. 

Physically, I’m a vitamin freak, and I wanna know like everything is all right with me. I go to the doctor. I don't play if something hurts me. I ain't one of them dudes that try to figure it out on my own. I’ve got too many friends I've lost. I go to New York and I’ll [call one of my friends] then you just like, “Damn, dude, phone ain't ringing.” And then somebody's family gotta tell you he passed away. And they were young and it could have been if they went to the doctor. 

There's a lot of things I could do better, but I'm traveling more than I ever traveled, and I'm blessed to know that [after all this time] I'm still, I'm still running.