“They told me I had five minutes beforeit was going to be broadcast,” Nitti recalls. “I wanted to call everyone I knewand tell them my song was going to be on the radio, but I was at Chuck E.Cheese with my daughter, so I didn’t have any time to do that. I figured I’djust sit back, then, and get some honest feedback on the record without skewingit by promoting it myself.”
The response was immediate. Listenerscalled in requesting the song, which the station soon added to its regularrotation, an improbable feat for a local single. “Bow” is now one of thestation’s most played tracks, the first genuine local rap hit in years.
A jubilant club cut with a lasciviouschorus (“I like her!/ I wanna wife her!/ I wanna take her home and pull anall-nighter!”) and an infectious, whistling synth hook, the song quickly showedlegs outside the city as well, finding airplay in Southern markets likeMississippi, North Carolina and Tennessee.
YouTube users have viewed the singlewell over 500,000 times, and now that Nitti has signed to the Universal Recordssatellite label Next Plateau, it’s on the brink of a larger, much moreaggressive national push.
“I knew I came up with a good record,and I knew it would have some sort of local success,” Nitti says of the song,which he wrote in a day on a whim. “But I didn’t predict the magnitude of it. Iwasn’t expecting it to go national. You always really dream about it and praythat one day this will happen to you, but now that it’s happened I’m trying todeal with it. It’s especially striking when you go out of town to perform. I’llbe in front of a crowd of people I’ve never seen in my life and don’t knowanything about me except for this one song, but their response will be sointense. I had a grown woman start crying in front of me, acting like I wasMichael Jackson or something. I’m still learning how to deal with thosesituations.”
That success comes with a bit of alocal burden. For most of the last decade, Milwaukeerappers have raced to become the first to put Milwaukee on the map. Nitti is an unlikelyand sometimes unwitting front-runner for that honor, averse to the internalpolitics of the rap scene.
“Everybody wants to be responsible forputting Milwaukeeon the map, but that means that everybody’s fighting with each other andbeefing with each other instead of supporting each other,” he says. “So I don’twant people to say Ray Nitti put Milwaukeeon the map. If you look at the globe, Milwaukeeis already on the mapwe were never not on the map. I look at myself as just asmall piece to a bigger puzzle at the end of the day.”
Nitti’s preference for cheerful dancemusic over beefing and braggadocio also makes him an odd candidate for theMilwaukee throne, but he explains, “It was never my image to be a street dude,and boast, ‘I’m in the streets, I got guns, you don’t wanna go to war with me’and all that.
“That’s not the type of person I am,”he says. “When times were hard I had to go to the streets to feed my family,but it was nothing I glorified. It was just to make sure my daughter hadPampers and the lights stayed on. It’s not a lifestyle I enjoyed.”
And there are, of course, otheradvantages to staying above the fray of street rap.
“Now every time I do a show it’s forall women, and what real dude doesn’t want to do a show for all women?” he sayswith a laugh. “The male audiences that I do get at my shows are there justbecause they appreciate the girls dancing to the song in the club. They’relike, ‘Oh Ray, thanks for making this song! I ain’t never had a girl dance onme like this before!’”
