The Plot Against Hip Hop (7 page)
Back in the early ’90s, an enterprising New York City detective began connecting the dots between hip hop artists, their criminal associates, and ongoing investigations involving drug possession and trafficking, carrying unlicensed guns, and various assaults. The detective wasn’t simpleminded about the rap/crime relationship. Just because they rapped about crime didn’t make them criminals. What was interesting to the detective was the fact that so many MCs, by the nature of their upbringing and celebrity, were either targets of crime or employed ex-offenders.
Few other legal businesses in this country were as open to employing young black men with criminal records as hip hop. They worked as roadies, party promoters, bouncers, security, record producers, managers, and label heads.
There was no question that hip hop was a vehicle for so many young black folks to move away from a criminal lifestyle. But not all these men and women were able to cut their old ties so easily. In fact, some used hip hop not for transformation, but camouflage. The mobility of MCs and their entourages, especially on tour buses, allowed for the interstate transport of all kinds of lucrative merchandise (marijuana, cigarettes, automatic weapons), while others used this burgeoning business as a way to launder money. The question of how much the MCs knew about these activities, and whether they profited from them, varied from performer to performer. Obviously, the bigger the star, the more likely they jettisoned their hoodiest friends and separated themselves from any possible criminality. But if you were a youngster on the way up or a vet on the decline, well, you might get down.
But the truth was that creating rap records didn’t automatically make you a tough guy. Many MCs were moving targets, prey for stick-up kids and extortionists. It wasn’t unusual for an MC to be robbed of jewelry and cash at a nightclub, or to have their home burglarized when they were on tour.
The complex web of affiliations and transactions was catnip to a smart cop. Knowing this world could lead to high-profile collars and promotions. So the NYPD detective developed a dossier on New York’s most important hip hop figures, complete with arrest records, various places of business and residence, car registrations and license plate numbers, known associates with criminal records and label affiliations.
This dossier was one-stop shopping for NYPD whenever an MC had a run-in with the law (which happened often). By the time that original detective retired, the dossier had taken on a life of its own. It was passed along and other detectives took on the mantle of hip hop cop. Back when Jay-Z was still Bed-Stuy do-or-die rugged, and was accused in December 1999 of stabbing a dude for bootlegging his records, there was a hip hop cop on the scene. When Sean Combs, Jennifer Lopez, and Shyne were implicated in a nightclub shooting in that same fateful month, a hip hop cop interrogated the suspects (and helped build the case against Shyne). When Jam Master Jay was murdered in 2002, there was a hip hop cop outside the funeral taking down license plate numbers.
Police departments in Miami and Atlanta, cities that both attracted New York MCs and had their own dynamic local scenes, consulted with the Big Apple’s hip hop cops and developed their databases. And databases is what they were. From binders and paper, the NYPD dossier evolved into an ever-growing digital guide to the places where street culture and street crime shook hands. For many, the existence of such intelligence gathering was
the
plot against hip hop. It was racial profiling at its most blatant and generated many an outraged article in the hip hop press.
Fly Ty suggested that D reach out to the latest incarnation of NYPD’s hip hop cop, and D did it reluctantly. Nash was based out of a Midtown Manhattan precinct and had inherited the job of updating the database, so he kept himself abreast of any and all hip hop–related developments—from who hung out at Jay-Z’s 40/40 Club to who visited Lil Wayne during his stay at Rikers Island on a gun possession charge.
Back around 2000 Nash had been doing a lot of work as a bouncer and approached D about work, but had gotten the brush-off because D had never quite trusted the guy. Because of the murder of his brothers and the resulting relationship with Fly Ty, D had spent a lot of time around cops and had developed his “Letter C” theory of policemen. Some were like calluses in that they’d built numbing scabs on their souls to protect them from feeling too much; some had become cynics, men and women who saw the dark side of every human interaction; some were just so cautious that they moved through the city desperate not to do anything dramatic as they glided quietly toward their pension; the crazy ones reveled in sticking their noses in every dirty gutter of the city; the courageous ones were a strong minority who managed to stay straight and righteous, no matter how deeply the job made them bend.
A great policeman, like his main man Fly Ty, managed to balance all these C words, manifesting the best aspects of each of the qualities as he moved through the city’s many worlds. Too much of any single C word and a policeman got as warped as the values of the criminals pursued. In D’s opinion, Nash was as curved as the edges of a college sophomore’s Frisbee. Way too calloused, cynical, and corrupt to be protecting anything but his own self-interest.
D couldn’t deny that Nash was a survivor. He was in his early forties, on the force nearly twenty years, and headed toward some lucrative gig doing corporate security if he kept his nose clean for another year or so.
“So,” Nash said with a smile, “a conspiracy? You talking about the Illuminati. That’s everybody’s favorite hip hop conspiracy theory.”
“You don’t think there’s anything to it, do you?”
“Ignorant folks love the idea that an all-seeing, all-knowing cabal of motherfuckers gathered for annual meetings to move them around like chess pieces. They love it. Gives them a good damn excuse for the shit storm that’s their life. Besides, how’s a bunch of seventeenth-century motherfuckers gonna organize a bunch of twenty-first century niggas to do anything? Can you see a man in a white wig convincing Jay-Z to dump Dame Dash?”
They both shared a laugh at that.
“You can only prove and disprove
theories
until you get ahold of those two kids who stabbed your friend. That’s hard enough—red bandannas, white T-shirts, baggy jeans, colorful sneakers. That’ll get you a nice long list of suspects.”
“I hear you. But will you at least keep your eye out for connections? Dwayne’s book was definitely about hip hop. It definitely had something to do with revealing old secrets. Maybe secrets someone in hip hop might not want out. It’s right up your alley.”
“D, I do a lot of things. I don’t have much time for pro-bono side projects.”
“Listen, all I want you to do is to ask some people questions about what Dwayne might have talked to them about. That’s all.”
“Okay,” he said quietly. “I’ll think about it. Thanks for the dosa.”
After Nash left, D wondered if the meeting had been a good idea. Maybe the hip hop cop was Illuminati himself.
D
rarely ventured to the Boogie Down these days. He’d catch a Yankee game once or twice a year, but that was basically it. The Bronx, ground zero for one of the biggest global cultural movements of the late twentieth century, was essentially a nonfactor in the making and selling of hip hop in the twenty-first century. There were no major venues there; none of its natives, except Fat Joe, had any serious place on the charts.
Nowadays the Bronx was an old-school preserve where the hip hop past was honored, celebrated, and, to some degree, embalmed, its mummified remains a symbol of another city, revered and vilified and now long dead. Under Mayor Bloomberg there had been much-needed economic development and a huge upswing in affordable housing. The big empty, abandoned blocks of the ’70s that were once a symbol of the city’s defeat had been filled in by dedicated residents and smart city planners. The South Bronx was no longer Fort Apache and the Bronx was no longer burning, but the spirit of street-corner innovation that was the borough’s legacy was no longer its heartbeat.
D was mulling this over as he sat in the lobby of the Bronx Saint’s Nursing Home, a well-maintained institution in the borough’s upscale Riverdale neighborhood. He was gazing up at a wall of framed pictures of BX landmarks—the Grand Concourse, the county courthouse, the original Yankee Stadium—as he waited to speak with a record business legend. A middle-aged Latino nurse, round and dressed in a nondescript cream-colored uniform, came out and led him down a long hallway and then out into a large, lovely garden overlooking the Hudson River. Sunning himself there in a wheelchair was a man in his late seventies who D had known for a couple of decades, and who’d also been a fixture in the R&B world decades before D was born.
Edgecombe Lenox sat with the sun shining on his full head of gray hair, Ray-Ban shades protecting his light brown eyes, a
North Carolina
powder-blue and white knit sweater, and matching slacks and leather slippers, with thin light blue socks. There was a diamond in one earlobe and a glittering blue-face Rolex on his right wrist. Though his tall, lanky frame was stuck in a wheelchair following two strokes, Edge (as he preferred to be called) still had plenty of style.
“Youngblood,” he said as D approached, “how’s it hangin’?”
“Low,” D replied, and then added, “but not as low as yours.”
“Never that,” Edge said with a laugh, and leaned up to receive D’s hug.
D had met Edge through Dwayne Robinson years ago, when he was first setting up D Security and looking for contacts. Edge, who back then was a vice president for urban promotion at Universal Records, had hooked him up with a security gig for a record release party and they’d soon established a solid business relationship/friendship.
Edge had been a key inspiration/subject/source for
The Relentless Beat
, because the man’s career pretty much spanned post–World War II music history. He’d been a sand dancer outside juke joints in his native Macon, Georgia, recorded doo-wop songs with buddies in Harlem after he’d escaped the Jim Crow South, rocked microphones from Virginia to Boston during the soulful ’60s, and became a talent manager/label owner before being recruited as an executive for black/urban music when major corporations made their move into the scene in the ’70s.
For the next twenty years or so Edge played ring-around-the-record-labels, moving from Capitol to Epic to RCA to MCA, until he finally ran out of jobs as hip hop altered the landscape in the ’90s.
Unlike most R&B–bred heads, Edge wasn’t immediately disdainful of this new movement. Having lived through jump blues, cool jazz, rock and roll, R&B, rock, soul, free jazz, funk, and disco, he wasn’t intimidated by change. “Our music changes because our people are chameleons,” Edge told D several years back. “We change our slang. We change our threads. We change what we think is cool and what we think is corny. And all that ends up in our dance, and our dance responds to our music.”
If Dwayne had been D’s adopted older brother, Edge had been his kinda grandfather, and the two men shared the same feeling of loss. So D told him everything he knew, from the tape to Truegod to the Bloods.
“I remember Jimmy Sawyer,” Edge said thoughtfully. “He ran that marketing company.”
“Can I talk to him?”
“Oh, he’s long dead. Too much coke, too little sleep. Bane of that ’80s generation. Me? I did a line or two but I stuck with weed and bourbon. It’s why I’m still here.”
“What about D talking about a ‘remix’ and Truegod talking about a government conspiracy?”
“Well, a dying man could be talking about anything. I don’t put a lot of stock in that. It’s the
Citizen Kane
theory of life.”
“What’s that?”
“It’s a movie. At the beginning of the movie Kane dies and says a word—something about roses. They spend the whole movie trying to figure out what the words mean. Every damn body ever since is always trying to figure out what a dying man’s last words mean. But me, I’ve seen several men die and not once did their last words make a damn bit of sense.”
D sat there next to the old man feeling silly, until Edge cleared his throat.
“But let me say this: you can never go wrong suspecting that the government is involved in some plot to mess over black people. There’s a long history, you know.”
“I’ve read some stuff online,” D responded, “but a lot of it sounds crazy.”
“Well, I don’t know what you read but this stuff is real, youngblood. You know about the Tuskegee experiment? They even made a movie of it.”
“Some medical shit, right?”
“For years they shot up a gang of brothers with gonorrhea and syphilis to see what the fuck would happen. Like that was gonna be some surprise. And the U.S. government paid for the whole damn thing.”
“That’s foul.”
“You know the government put mikes under Dr. King’s bed. Hoover listened to that shit for fun,” Edge explained.
“He got off listening to Dr. King sleeping?”
“Damn, you kids don’t know shit about your history. King had a lot of female admirers and things happened.”
“You telling me that Dr. King was crushing some groupies and the FBI was listening in? That’s scandalous shit.”
“He was a man just like you and me. When they make heroes out of plywood, not flesh, these things won’t happen. But King made human mistakes; the government was all about harming a black leader. You know what COINTELPRO was?”
“I do. But that was way back in the ’60s.”
“The government has set up stings on black politicians—congressmen and mayors and activists of all kinds—in just the last few years.”
“Didn’t they catch some fool with bricks of cash in his refrigerator? Some politician from Louisiana?”
“Well, you do read more than the
Source
. He was set up by your tax dollars.”
“So an anti–hip hop conspiracy is not impossible?”
“Possible. It’s definitely possible. Get ten black people in a room talking about anything that might get them power or influence, I guarantee you one’s a government agent and two want to be.”
