Like many kids in the inner city his age, Lloyd Banks sought to escape the poverty and death of his environment. Early on he took to writing various musings-ghetto poetry, loose narratives; nothing quite structured, though he was influenced by rap gods like Big Daddy Kane and Slick Rick. High school didnt agree with Banks. I got kicked out of every school I went to, he confesses. He dropped out of high school before his 16th birthday. The freewriting he had been doing had morphed into full-fledged rhymes, but that was a secret. I never let nobody know I did it, he says. But he soon got his courage up. I started rhyming outside and everybody started telling me, You should shop your material. This is before I even got in the studio.

He appeared on local mixtapes becoming one of the neighborhoods best unsigned rappers.
His only competition was a childhood friend named Tony Yayo. One day, Tony, along with another childhood friend who rapped under the name 50 CENT, approached Banks with the idea of becoming a group. If Banks wanted to be down, he could be part of the crew that they were calling G UNIT. Banks was down.

2003 was the year when Lloyd was crowned the streets number one artist, appeared on the years top-selling record, and sold another two million-plus copies of an album with the G UNIT. But Lloyd Banks is unsatisfied. Hes so unsatisfied that he titled his G Unit/Interscope Records debut THE HUNGER FOR MORE. When I say, THE HUNGER FOR MORE, it could be referring to more success, says Banks. It could be more money. Or respect. More power. More understanding. All those things lead up to that hunger for more, because my more isnt everybody elses more. I feel like I made it already, because I got already what everybody on the corners of the neighborhood I grew up in is striving to get. God forbid anything happen to me, my family is straight. So anything that happens after this is just me progressing as a person. 

Lloyd Banks working twice as hard and still hungry.