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  MEET THE PARENTS

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  You’re Killing Your Son. (2:16)

  Woo! Uhh, uhh / It’s “The Gift & the Curse”1 / Uhh, uhh yea / First they love me then they hate me then they love me again / … they love me again / Let’s take a trip down … I gotcha / Let’s take a trip down memory lane at the cemetery2 / Rain gray skies, seems at the end of every / young black life is this line, “Damn—him already? / Such a good kid,” got us pourin Henn’ already / Liquor to the curb for my niggaz up above / When it cracks through the pavement that’s my way of sendin love3 / So, give Big a hug, tell Aa-liyah I said hi / ‘Til the next time I see her, on the other side / He was just some thug that caught some slugs / And we loved him cause in him we saw some of us / He walked like ussss, talked like ussss / His back against the wall, nigga fought like us—damn4 / Poor Isis, that’s his momma name5 / Momma ain’t strong enough to raise no boy, what’s his father name? / Shorty never knew him, though he had his blood in him / Hot temper, momma said he act just like her husband6 / Daddy never fucked with him, so the streets raised him / Isis blamin herself, she wish she coulda saved him / Damn near impossible, only men can raise men / He was his own man, not even him can save him / He put his faith in, uh, thirty-eight in his waist / But when you live by the gun you die by the same fate / End up dead before thirty-eight and umm / That’s the life of us raised by winter, it’s a cold world7 / Old girl turned to coke, tried to smoke her pain away / Isis, life just ended on that rainy day / When she got the news her boy body could be viewed / down at the City Morgue, opened the drawer, saw him nude / Her addiction grew, prescription drugs, sipping brew / Angel dust, dipped in woo!8 / She slipped into her own fantasy world9 / Had herself pregnant by a different dude / But reality bites and this is her life / He wasn’t really her husband, though he called her wife / It was just this night when moon was full / And the stars were just right, and the dress was real tight10 / Had her soundin like Lisa Lisa11—I wonder if I take you home / will you still love me after this night? / Mike was the hardhead from the around the way / that she wanted all her life, shit she wanted all the hype / Used to hold on tight when he wheelied on the bike / He was a Willie all her life he wasn’t really the one to like / It was a dude named Sha who would really treat her right / He wanted to run to the country to escape the city life / But I-sis, like this, Broadway life12 / She loved the Gucci sneakers, the red green and whites / Hangin out the window when she first seen him fight / She was so turned on that she had to shower twice13 / How ironic, it would be some fight that / turned into a homicide that’ll alter their life / See Mike at thirty-two was still on the scene / Had a son fifteen that he never saw twice / Sure he saw him as an infant, but he disowned him like / “If that was my son, he would look much different. / See I’m light-skinnded and that baby there’s dark.” / So it’s momma’s baby; poppa’s maybe.14 / Mike was still crazy out there runnin the streets (fuck niggaz want?) / had his old reliable thirty-eight gun in his reach / It’s been fourteen years, him and Isis ain’t speak / He runnin around like life’s a peach, ’til one day / he approached this thug that had a mean mug / And it looked so familiar that he called him “Young Cuz”15 / Told him, get off the strip but the boy ain’t budge (fuck you) / Instead he pulled out a newer thirty-eight snub16 / He clearly had the drop but the boy just paused (hold up) / There was somethin in this man’s face he knew he seen before / It’s like lookin in the mirror seein hisself more mature / And he took it as a sign from the almighty Lord17 / You know what they say about he who hesitates in war / (What’s that?) He who hesitates is lost / He can’t explain what he saw before his picture went blank / The old man didn’t think he just followed his instinct18 / Six shots into his kin, out of the gun / Niggaz be a father, you’re killin your son / Six shots into his kin, out of the gun / Niggaz be a father, you killin your sons19 / Meet the parents …20

  WHERE I’M FROM

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  Where I’m From. (1:54)

  I’m from where the hammers rung,1 news cameras never come2 / You and your man hung in every verse in your rhyme / where the grams is slung, niggas vanish every summer3 / Where the blue vans would come, we throw the work in the can and run4 / Where the plans was to get funds and skate off the set5 / To achieve this goal quicker, sold all my weight wet6 / Faced with immeasurable odds still I gave straight bets / So I felt I’m owed something and you nothing, check / I’m from the other side with other guys don’t walk too much7 / And girls in the projects wouldn’t fuck us if we talked too much / So they ran up to Tompkins and sought them dudes to trust / I don’t know what the fuck they thought, those niggas is foul just like us8 / I’m from where the beef is inevitable,9 summertime’s unforgettable / Boosters in abundance, buy a half-price sweater new10 / Your word was everything, so everything you said you’d do / You did it, couldn’t talk about it if you ain’t lived it11 / I from where niggas pull your card, and argue all day about / Who’s the best MC, Biggie, Jay-Z, and Nas12/ Where the drugs czars evolve,13 and thugs are at odds / At each other’s throats for the love of foreign cars / Where cats catch cases, hoping the judge R-and-R’s14 / But most times find themselves locked up behind bars / I’m from where they ball and breed rhyme stars15 / I’m from Marcy son, just thought I’d remind y’all / Cough up a lung, where I’m from, Marcy son, ain’t nothing nice / Mentally been many places but I’m Brooklyn’s own16 / I’m from the place where the church is the flakiest17 / And niggas is praying to god so long that they atheist18 / Where you can’t put your vest away and say you’ll wear it tomorrow / ’Cause the day after we’ll be saying, damn I was just with him yesterday / I’m a block away from hell, not enough shots away from stray shells / An ounce away from a triple beam still using a handheld weight scale19 / You’re laughing, you know the place well / Where the liquor stores and the base dwell / And government, fuck government, niggas politic themselves20 / Where we call the cops the A-Team / Cause they hop out of vans and spray things / And life expectancy so low we making out wills at eighteen21 / Where how you get rid of guys who step out of line, your rep solidifies / So tell me when I rap you think I give a fuck who criticize?22 / If the shit is lies, god strike me / And I got a question, are you forgiving guys who live just like me? / We’ll never know23 / One day I pray to you and said if I ever blow, I’d let ’em know / Mistakes and exactly what takes place in the ghetto / Promise fulfilled, but still I feel my job ain’t done24 / Cough up a lung, where I’m from, Marcy son, ain’t nothing nice / I’m from where they cross over and clap boards25 / Lost Jehovah in place of rap lords, listen26 / I’m up the block, round the corner, and down the street / From where the pimps, prostitutes, and the drug lords meet / We make a million off of beats, cause our stories is deep27 / And fuck tomorrow, as long as the night before was sweet28 / Niggas get lost for weeks in the streets, twisted off leek29 / And no matter the weather, niggas know how to draw heat / Whether you’re four feet or Manute-size, it always starts out with / Three dice and shoot the five / Niggas thought they deuce was live, until I hit ’em with trips / And I reached down for their money, pa forget about this30 / This time around it’s platinum, like the shit on my wrist / And this Glock on my waist, y’all can’t do shit about this / Niggas will show you love, that’s how they fool thugs / Before you know it you’re lying in a pool of blood31

  I don’t remember exactly where I was in August 2005, but at the end of that month I was mostly in front of the television, like most other people, transfixed and upset by the story of Hurricane Katrina. Most Americans were horrified by what was happening down there, but I think for black people, we took it a little more personally. I’ve been to shantytowns in Angola that taught me that what we consider to be crushing poverty in the United S
tates has nothing to do with what we have materially—even in the projects, we’re rich compared to some people in other parts of the world. I met people in those shantytowns who lived in one-room houses with no running water who had to pay a neighbor to get water to go to the bathroom. Those kids in Angola played ball on a court surrounded by open sewage, and while they knew it was bad, they didn’t realize just how fucked up it was. It was shocking. And I know there are parts of the world even worse off than that.

  The worst thing about being poor in America isn’t the deprivation. In fact, I never associated Marcy with poverty when I was a kid. I just figured we lived in an apartment, that my brother and I shared a room and that we were close—whether we wanted to be or not—with our neighbors. It wasn’t until sixth grade, at P.S. 168, when my teacher took us on a field trip to her house that I realized we were poor. I have no idea what my teacher’s intentions were—whether she was trying to inspire us or if she actually thought visiting her Manhattan brownstone with her view of Central Park qualified as a school trip. But that’s when it registered to me that my family didn’t have as much. We definitely didn’t have the same refrigerator she had in her kitchen, one that had two levers on the outer door, one for water and the other for ice cubes. Poverty is relative.

  One of the reasons inequality gets so deep in this country is that everyone wants to be rich. That’s the American ideal. Poor people don’t like talking about poverty because even though they might live in the projects surrounded by other poor people and have, like, ten dollars in the bank, they don’t like to think of themselves as poor. It’s embarrassing. When you’re a kid, even in the projects, one kid will mercilessly snap on another kid over minor material differences, even though by the American standard, they’re both broke as shit.

  The burden of poverty isn’t just that you don’t always have the things you need, it’s the feeling of being embarrassed every day of your life, and you’d do anything to lift that burden. As kids we didn’t complain about being poor; we talked about how rich we were going to be and made moves to get the lifestyle we aspired to by any means we could. And as soon as we had a little money, we were eager to show it.

  I remember coming back home from doing work out of state with my boys in a caravan of Lexuses that we parked right in the middle of Marcy. I ran up to my mom’s apartment to get something and looked out the window and saw those three new Lexuses gleaming in the sun, and thought, “Man, we doin’ it.” In retrospect, yeah, that was kind of ignorant, but at the time I could just feel that stink and shame of being broke lifting off of me, and it felt beautiful. The sad shit is that you never really shake it all the way off, no matter how much money you get.

  SOME GET LEFT BEHIND, SOME GET CHOSEN

  I watched the coverage of the hurricane, but it was painful. Helicopters swooping over rooftops with people begging to be rescued—the helicopters would leave with a dramatic photo, but didn’t bother to pick up the person on the roof. George Bush doing his flyby and declaring that the head of FEMA was doing a heckuva job. The news media would show a man running down the street, arms piled high with diapers or bottles of water, and call him a looter, with no context for why he was doing what he was doing. I’m sure there were a few idiots stealing plasma TVs, but even that has a context—anger, trauma. It wasn’t like they were stealing TVs so they could go home and watch the game. I mean, where were they going to plug them shits in? As the days dragged on and the images got worse and worse—old ladies in wheelchairs dying in front of the Superdome—I kept thinking to myself, This can’t be happening in a wealthy country. Why isn’t anyone doing anything?

  Kanye caught a lot of heat for coming on that telethon and saying, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people,” but I backed him one hundred percent on it, if only because he was expressing a feeling that was bottled up in a lot of our hearts. It didn’t feel like Katrina was just a natural disaster that arbitrarily swept through a corner of the United States. Katrina felt like something that was happening to black people, specifically.

  I know all sorts of people in Louisiana and Mississippi got washed out, too, and saw their lives destroyed—but in America, we process that sort of thing as a tragedy. When it happens to black people, it feels like something else, like history rerunning its favorite loop. It wasn’t just me. People saw that Katrina shit, heard the newscasters describing the victims as “refugees” in their own country, waited in vain for the government to step in and rescue those people who were dying right in front of our eyes, and we took it personally. I got angry. But more than that, I just felt hurt. In moments like that, it all starts coming back to you: slavery, images of black people in suits and dresses getting beaten on the bridge to Selma, the whole ugly story you sometimes want to think is over. And then it’s back, like it never left. I felt hurt in a personal way for those people floating on cars and waving on the roofs of their shotgun houses, crying into the cameras for help, being left on their porches. Maybe I felt some sense of shame that we’d let this happen to our brothers and sisters. Eventually I hit the off button on the remote control. I went numb.

  SO I GOT RICH AND GAVE BACK, TO ME THAT’S THE WIN-WIN

  It’s crazy when people think that just because you have some money and white people start to like you that you transcend race. People try this shit all the time with successful black people, even with someone like me who was plenty black when I was on the corner. It’s like they’re trying to separate you from the pack—make you feel like you’re the good one. It’s the old house nigger–field nigger tactic.

  But even if you do get it into your head that somehow you’re exceptional, that you’ve created some distance between where you are and where you’re from, things like Hurricane Katrina snap you right out of it. I couldn’t forget that those were my kin out there in New Orleans, and that, forget the government, I was supposed to do something to help them. I got together with Puffy and we donated a million dollars to the relief effort, but we donated it to the Red Cross, which is barely different from donating to the government itself, the same government that failed those people the first time. Who knows how much of that money actually made it to the people on the ground?

  It also made me think of the bigger picture. New Orleans was fucked up before Katrina. This was not a secret. The shame and stigma of poverty means that we turn away from it, even those of us living through it, but turning away from it doesn’t make it disappear. Sooner or later it gets revealed, like it was in New Orleans. The work we have to do is deeper than just putting Band-Aids on the problems when they become full-blown disasters.

  To some degree charity is a racket in a capitalist system, a way of making our obligations to one another optional, and of keeping poor people feeling a sense of indebtedness to the rich, even if the rich spend every other day exploiting those same people. But here we are. Lyor Cohen, who I consider my mentor, once told me something that he was told by a rabbi about the eight degrees of giving in Judaism. The seventh degree is giving anonymously, so you don’t know who you’re giving to, and the person on the receiving end doesn’t know who gave. The value of that is that the person receiving doesn’t have to feel some kind of obligation to the giver and the person giving isn’t doing it with an ulterior motive. It’s a way of putting the giver and receiver on the same level. It’s a tough ideal to reach out for, but it does take away some of the patronizing and showboating that can go on with philanthropy in a capitalist system. The highest level of giving, the eighth, is giving in a way that makes the receiver self-sufficient.

  Of course, I do sometimes like to see where the money I give goes. When I went to Angola for the water project I was working on and got to see the new water pump and how it changed the lives of the people in that village, I wasn’t happy because I felt like I’d done something so great. I was happy to know that whatever money I’d given was actually being put to work and not just paying a seven-figure salary for the head of the Red Cross. And I did a documentary about it,
not to glorify myself, but to spread the word about the problem and the possible solutions.

  That’s what I tried to do with my Katrina donations, and with my work for Haiti in the aftermath of their earthquake and with other causes I get involved with. I also like to make a point about hip-hop by showing how so many of us give back, even when the news media would rather focus on the things we buy for ourselves. But whether it’s public or private, we can’t run away from our brothers and sisters as if poverty is a contagious disease. That shit will catch up to us sooner or later, even if it’s just the way we die a little when we turn on the television and watch someone’s grandmother, who looks like our grandmother, dying in the heat of a flooded city while the president flies twenty thousand feet over her head.