Curren$y

Shante Scott Franklin, better known by his stage name Currensy, is an American rapper. Born and raised in New Orleans, Louisiana, he signed with the local record labels Cash Money Records and Young Money Entertainment in the mid-2000s, but parted ways with both without any major releases.

New Orleans rapper Curren$y turned prolific output into a survival strategy after Cash Money and Young Money shelved him in the mid-2000s, channeling that rejection into the Jet Life imprint and a relentless mixtape grind that established him as hip-hop's most reliably ambitious independent operator. His partnership with producer The Alchemist yielded some of the decade's most hypnotic rap—layered, methodical, and stoned in the best sense—while his frequent collaborations with Wiz Khalifa cemented a shared sonic blueprint that made weed rap feel genuinely sophisticated rather than novelty. *Pilot Talk* and its sequel became blueprints for how to build a catalog without major label backing, each project arriving with the confidence of someone who'd already won by refusing to compromise.