ShareThisBy TERRY MORROW
Scripps Howard News Service
Tuesday, May 08, 2007
It's hard out here for Three 6 Mafia, too.
"We went from the underground to having cameras in our faces and people looking at everything we do," says Juicy J, who makes up the Mafia with DJ Paul. "I still pinch myself sometimes."
And now, they are the latest reality-show stars for MTV.
The rappers, who won a 2006 Academy Award for writing "It's Hard Out Here for a Pimp" (from the soundtrack of "Hustle & Flow"), are the focus of the lighthearted reality show "Adventures in HollyHood" (10 p.m. Thursdays, MTV).
The show chronicles their acclimation to Hollywood after living all their lives in Memphis.
The show breaks down a few ideas about the lives of successful rappers. Unlike the hardened image many of their peers evoke, the members of Three 6 Mafia would rather laugh about how a couple of Memphis guys don't fit into the Hollywood machine.
"When you get wrapped up in these parties and start saying 'who's this and who's that?,' then you start losing focus," Juicy J says.
"If you are going for your dreams, you have to keep focus. You got to keep rolling."
Three 6 Mafia has been around in one form or another since the mid-1990s. Members have come and gone over the years _ taking them from two to three to six and back to two members.
Juicy J and DJ Paul _ 31-year-old childhood buddies Jordan Houston and Paul Beauregard, respectively _ see themselves as just working stiffs from Tennessee.
"For us, a life of a rapper is the life of a businessman," Juicy J says. "Some rappers are workaholics, like we are.
"Some sit around and drink all day. To each his own. But we are here to work."
What the duo has learned since winning an Oscar is that the trophy opens doors, but doesn't make them players.
In Memphis, they were big fish in a small pond. But in Hollywood, they are fish out of water.
At their home in the Hollywood hills, Jennifer Love Hewitt is literally the girl next door.
They hang out with the likes of Johnny Knoxville and have producers wanting to work with them.
The two are also humbled in Hollywood, where not everyone knows their name. In one episode of their show, the two throw a neighborhood house party, but only one neighbor shows up: a gray-haired senior citizen who hasn't heard of them.
"You've got to laugh at yourself, not take everything so seriously," DJ Paul says. "You can't take this seriously all the time."
(Contact Terry Morrow of The Knoxville News Sentinel in Tennessee at www.knoxnews.com.)
