T.I. And Tiny: The Family Hustle – Episode 3 – A Spaghetti Junction Of Emotion

No Tweefing!

T.I. and Tiny aren’t the only members of the family with serious hustle. This week, we meet Zonnique (Nique-Nique), their oldest daughter whose music career is taking off, and fortunately, her parents are eager to help her career in any way they can. Tiny is the manager and producer of Zonnique’s group, the OMG Girlz, and given her own musical career, she’s perfectly suited for the job. That leaves T.I. in a position to act as a consultant, if you will. T.I. advises Zonnique on matters of this epidemic of Tweefing (“Beefing on Twitter…I just made it up,” he says) and tells her not to do it.

In return, she advises T.I. to accept an invitation from Taylor Swift to join her on stage during her Atlanta show.

T.I.’s not sure if he should accept because, as he puts it “T.I. is so HMPH! and Taylor Swift is so hmph! I don’t want to weird people out.” Nique-Nique (it’s okay if I call her that, right?) tells him it won’t be weird, it will be good, and since she’s sixteen and just the demographic he’s worried about, he takes her advice.

The next part of this episode belongs to seven-year-old King, and it should also be subtitled “Look out, because I’m going to steal this child.” T.I. takes the family to dinner and has a chat with King who thinks he might be white because he’s light-skinned. T.I. assures him he is a black man, and King’s response, because he is hilarious and amazing, is “I know I’m black, but can I have a white woman?” to which T.I. says “Yes, you can have a white woman.” “Yay!” King responds. nonchalantly trying to chew gum despite his lack of teeth. This kid is killlling me with cuteness.

For the rest of the episode, T.I. worries about how to handle 16-year-old girls, both as an artist who’s about to perform for 20,000 of them and a dad to one of them. First, he worries about his image, saying “As a ‘gangsta rap’ artist, to find yourself on stage with ‘Americas’s sweetheart,’ for some people that could be career suicide.” But he also doesn’t want to be responsible for the corruption of young minds either.

But he’s also worried that he’s going to show his age, saying “As a dinosaur in this industry, to have the leader of such a young audience consider me to even come out there is flattering.”

When T.I. and Tiny meet Taylor, she is, as you’d expect, adorable and gracious and just as excited to work with him as he is to work with her, because she’s big time and professional and, hello, Taylor Swift.

Of course, there are big differences backstage at Taylor’s concert compared to what he’s used to.

“There’s so many differences between a Taylor Swift concert backstage and a hip hop concert backstage,” Tip says. We can use our imaginations to figure out what, besides the theft of cologne, he’s talking about. (That Nelly, always a bad influence.)

The show goes amazingly well, but there’s no time to celebrate because T.I. goes into Dad mode to head over to Zonnique’s show on the Scream Tour.

On his way to see his daughter, T.I. and Tiny call her but she’s too busy talking to a boy named Rock to talk to her parents. She’s all “Lemme hit you back,” and T.I. is like “Oh no you don’t,” and he calls her to interrogate her about what boys she’s been talking to. T.I. might just have connected to the teenage masses, but he’s still an over-protective father in his own sweet way.

After lamenting his lack of gun possession, he makes a surprise visit onstage at the OMG Girlz show and once again, the crowd flips out for him. However, the night is not about him, he’s a proud papa watching his daughter and nieces perform together, and he’s proud of Tiny for being a great manager to them. “I looked at them like, wow, there’s no stopping us now,” Tiny said after watching her girls perform. And she’s thrilled to see him surprise the girls onstage.

“Seeing my babies performing, it is a feeling inside that I cannot put into words…there’s a lot of feelings going on, it’s like a spaghetti junction of emotion,” he says

For us too, watching this family is more heartwarming than we bargained for.