Decoded Page 15
MINORITY REPORT
[Intro: news excerpts] The damage here along the Gulf Coast is catastrophic. / There’s a frantic effort underway tonight to find / survivors. There are an uncounted number of the dead tonight … / People are being forced to live like animals … / We are desperate … / No one says the federal government is doing a good job … / And hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of people … / No water, I fought my country for years … / We need help, we really need help … / In Baghdad, they drop, they air drop water, food to people. Why can’t they do that to their own people? / The same idiots that can’t get water into a major American city in less than three days are trying to win a war …1 / [Jay-Z] People was poor before the hurricane came2 / Before the downpour poured is like when Mary J. sang / Every day it rains, so every day the pain / Went ignored, and I’m sure ignorance was to blame / but life is a chain, cause and effected / Niggas off the chain because they affected / It’s a dirty game so whatever is effective / From weed to selling kane, gotta put that in effect, shit3 / Wouldn’t you loot, if you didn’t have the loot? / and your baby needed food and you were stuck on the roof / and a helicopter swooped down just to get a scoop / Through his telescopic lens but he didn’t scoop you4 / and the next five days, no help ensued / They called you a refugee because you seek refuge / and the commander-in-chief just flew by / Didn’t stop, I know he had a couple seats / Just rude, JetBlue he’s not / Jet flew by the spot / What if he ran out of jet fuel and just dropped / huh, that woulda been something to watch / Helicopters doing fly-bys to take a couple of shots / Couple of portraits then ignored ’em / He’d be just another bush surrounded by a couple orchids5 / Poor kids just ’cause they were poor kids / Left ’em on they porches same old story in New Orleans / Silly rappers, because we got a couple Porsches / MTV stopped by to film our fortresses / We forget the unfortunate / Sure I ponied up a mill, but I didn’t give my time / So in reality I didn’t give a dime, or a damn6 / I just put my monies in the hands of the same people / that left my people stranded / Nothin but a bandit / Left them folks abandoned / Damn, that money that we gave was just a Band-Aid / Can’t say we better off than we was before / In synopsis this is my minority report / Can’t say we better off than we was before7 / In synopsis this is my minority report / [Outro: news excerpts] … Buses are on the way to take those people from New Orleans to Houston … / They lyin’… / People are dying at the convention center / … Their government has failed them / … George Bush doesn’t care about black people
DYNASTY (INTRO)
The theme song to The Sopranos1 / plays in the key of life on my mental piano2 / Got a strange way of seein life like / I’m Stevie Wonder with beads under the do-rag3 / Intuition is there even when my vision’s impaired, yeah / Knowin I can go just switchin a spare / On the highway of life, nigga it’s sharp in my sight / 0Oh! Keen senses ever since I was a teen on the benches / everytime somebody like Ennis4 was mentioned / I would turn green, me, bein in the trenches5 / Him, livin adventurous not worryin about expenditures / I’m bravin temperatures below zero, no hero / No father figure, you gotta pardon a nigga / But I’m starvin my niggaz, and the weight loss in my figure / is startin to darken my heart, ’bout to get to my liver6 / Watch it my nigga, I’m tryin to be calm but I’m gon’ get richer / through any means,7 with that thing that Malcolm palmed in the picture / Never read the Qu’ran or Islamic scriptures / Only psalms I read was on the arms of my niggaz / Tattooed so I carry on like I’m non-religious / Clap whoever stand between Shawn and figures / Niggaz, say it’s the dawn but I’m superstitious / Shit is as dark as it’s been, nothin is goin as you predicted / I move with biscuits, stop the hearts of niggaz actin too suspicious / This is food for thought, you do the dishes8
MY PRESIDENT IS BLACK (REMIX)
My president is black / My Maybach too / and I’ll be goddamn if my diamonds ain’t blue / my money dark green / and my Porsche is light gray / I’m headin for D.C. anybody feel me1 / My president is black / My Maybach too / and I’ll be goddamn if my diamonds aint blue / my money dark green2 / and my Porsche is light gray / I’m headin for D.C. anybody feel me / My president is black / in fact he’s half white / so even in a racist mind / he’s half right / if you have a racist mind / you be aight3 / my president is black / but his house is all WHITE / Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk / Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run / Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly4 / So I’ma spread my wings and / you can meet me in the sky / I already got my own clothes / already got my own shoes / I was hot before Barack imagine what I’m gonna do / Hello Ms. America / Hey pretty lady / that red white and blue flag / wave for me baby5 / never thought I’d say this shit baby I’m good / you can keep your puss I don’t want no more bush / no more war / no more Iraq / no more white lies6 / the president is BLACK
When I first started working on this book, I told my editor that I wanted it to do three important things. The first thing was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics—not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC—are poetry if you look at them closely enough. The second was I wanted the book to tell a little bit of the story of my generation, to show the context for the choices we made at a violent and chaotic crossroads in recent history.
And the third piece was that I wanted the book to show how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to.
All of those threads came together at a pivotal moment for me, the moment when I fully crossed from one life to another.
CLARK SOUGHT ME OUT, DAME BELIEVED
I hadn’t been to Manhattan in a minute; in fact, I probably hadn’t seen any of the five boroughs in months. There’s a line in a song I did with Scarface, guess who’s back, still smell the crack in my clothes, and that’s real after you’ve been putting in work for a while. No one else can actually smell the coke, of course, but you still feel it coming off you, like your pores are bleeding a haze of work into the air around you—especially if you’re sitting still for the first time in weeks, ass on a hard chair in a carpeted room with the door closed and windows sealed and a man in a suit staring you down. I could practically see the shit floating off of me.
I was sitting across a table from Ruben Rodriguez, a music business vet wearing the uniform: a double-breasted silk suit, a pinky ring, and a tie knotted like a small fist under his chin. The room, the table, the view outside the window of a pinstriped skyscraper—the whole scene was surreal to me. I’d been living like a vampire. The only people I’d seen in weeks were the people in my crew down south and my girl in Virginia. And, of course, the customers, the endless nighttime tide of fiends who kept us busy. My hands were raw from handling work and handling money; my nerves were shot from the pressure. Now I was in this office, sitting quietly, waiting to hear something worth my time from this dude, who was looking back at me like he was waiting for the same thing. Luckily the silence was filled by the third guy in the room. Sitting next to me was Dame Dash.
Clark Kent, the producer/DJ/sneakerhead, is the one who introduced me to Dame. I knew Clark through Mister Cee, Big Daddy Kane’s DJ. Clark was pivotal at this stage in my life. In the mirror, all I saw was a hustler—a hustler who wrote rhymes on corner-store paper bags and memorized them in hotel rooms far away from home—but still, first a hustler. It’s who I’d been since I was sixteen years old on my own in Trenton, New Jersey. I couldn’t even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn’t let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn’t stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane. When I’d leave Brooklyn for long stretches and come back a hundred years later, Clark would find me and say, “Let’s do this music.” I don’t know if he smelled the blow on my clothes, but if he did, it didn’t matter. He kept on me when I was halfway gone.
I appreciated him—and Ty-Ty and B-High—when they’d encourage me, but I was so skeptical about the business that I would also get annoyed
. B-High used to really come down hard on me. He’s real honest and direct, and he told me straight up he thought I was throwing my life away hustling. He may have had a job, a gig at Chemical Bank with a jacket and tie, but he wasn’t exactly in a position to judge. He’d see me on the street after I’d been away for six months and give me a look of absolute disgust. There were whole years when B-High, my own cousin, didn’t even speak to me.
But Clark wasn’t family like Ty-Ty and B-High. He had no reason to come after me, except that he thought I had something new to offer this world he loved. Clark would call me if there were open mics at a party, and if I wasn’t too far away, I’d come home, get on at the party, then head back, sometimes in the middle of the night, to get back to my business. The beats would still be ringing in my ears.
Clark had been passing Dame groups to manage and splitting a signing fee with him. He knew Dame was hungry for talent to represent so he could break into the music industry and thought we’d be a good match. So he arranged a meeting at an office somewhere. Dame walked into the room talking and didn’t stop. He would later tell me he was impressed because I had on Nike Airs and dudes from Brooklyn didn’t wear Airs, but I didn’t say much at that first meeting. I could barely get a word in edgewise. He was a Harlem dude through and through—flashy, loud, animated. Harlem cats enter every room like it’s a movie set and they’re the star of the flick. Dame was entertaining, but I could see that he was serious and had a real vision. His constant talking was like a release of all the ambition boiling in him, like a pot whistling steam. He was a few years younger than I was, just barely in his twenties, but he projected bulletproof confidence. And in the end, underneath all the performance, what he said made sense. I believed him.
Dame knew I needed convincing to leave hustling alone, so right away he offered to put me on a record, “Can I Get Open,” with Original Flavor, a group he was managing. I went to the studio, said my verse, and as soon as we finished the song and video, I skated back out of town and out of touch. When Dame could catch me, he would set up these meetings with record labels and drag me to them, but none of them were fucking with us. Not Columbia, not Def Jam, not Uptown. Sometimes there was talk of a single deal, but whenever it got to the point where it was supposed to be real, the label would renege.
THE WORLD DON’T LIKE US, IS THAT NOT CLEAR
So one more time here we were, again, in this office with Ruben Rodriguez. I didn’t know Rodriguez, but I knew this wasn’t like taking a meeting with Andre Harrell or Sylvia Rhone, both of whom had already shut us down. We were working our way down the industry depth chart. I didn’t have my hopes up, but I respected Dame’s hustle enough to keep coming to these meetings. Dame made his pitch and then Rodriguez sat back in his chair and leveled his eyes at me. “Yo, give me a rhyme right now,” he said.
I’m not against rhyming for people when they ask. I’d rapped for free at open mics all over the tri-state area, battling other MCs, spitting on underground radio shows, getting on mix tapes, hopping on pool tables in crowded back rooms. So I wasn’t too arrogant to break out into a rhyme. Maybe it was the drive into the city still wearing on me or maybe I was anxious about some loose end in Virginia. Or maybe I was just disoriented by the whiplash of my life. But when he asked me to rhyme, it felt like he was asking a nigger to tap-dance for him in his fancy suit and pinky ring. So I bounced. Well, first I said, “I ain’t giving no free shows,” and then I walked. It wasn’t arrogant, but I did expect a level of respect, not just for me personally, but for the art.
It’s hard to explain the feeling in the air in the early and mid-nineties. MCs were taking leaps and bounds. You had Big getting established. You had underground battle legends like Big L creating dense metaphorical landscapes, inventing slang so perfect you’d swear it was already in the dictionary. You had Nas doing Illmatic. Wu-Tang starting to buzz. There was some creative, mind-blowing shit going on. Every MC with a mic was competing to push the art further than the last one, flipping all kinds of new content, new ways of telling stories, new slang, new rhyme schemes, new characters, new sources of inspiration. When I would come back to New York and get into the music, that was the world I was walking in, competing in. For all of my disgust with the industry, I never stopped caring about the craft or my standing in it. When I was in the presence of another true MC, I’d spit for days; I never said no. I’d put all the money and hustling to the side and be just like a traveling bluesman or something, ready to put my guitar case down and start playing. I wasn’t so thirsty for rap to pay my bills. It wasn’t just about money.
Every time Dame left these meetings he’d get so heated. He couldn’t believe they didn’t “get” me. But I wasn’t surprised. I expected nothing from the industry. I just tried to shrug it off and get back to my real life. Dame was getting frustrated trying to keep up with me, so he put together a makeshift tour to keep me focused on music. At the time, Dame was trying to do business with Kareem “Biggs” Burke, his man from the Bronx. Biggs and I clicked right away. We had a similar outlook and disposition. He came on and acted as a kind of road manager to help Dame with the tour dates, if you could call it a tour. Sometimes Dame and his group Original Flavor—Suave Lover, Tone, and Ski—and I would just pile up in a Pathfinder and do shows up and down the East Coast. I was being a team player; I piled in the truck, stayed in the double rooms with the rest of them. In some ways, those were like my college days, taking road trips, bunked up with friends, learning my profession, except that I still had a full-time job. It was a schizoid life, but it was all I knew.
THE SAME PLACE WHERE THE RHYME’S INVENTED
In some ways, rap was the ideal way for me to make sense of a life that was doubled, split into contradictory halves. This is one of the most powerful aspects of hip-hop as it evolved over the years. Rap is built to handle contradictions. To this day people look at me and assume that I must not be serious on some level, that I must be playing some kind of joke on the world: How can he be rapping about selling drugs on one album and then get on Oprah talking about making lemon pie the next day? How can he say that police were al-Qaeda to black men on one album and then do a benefit concert for the police who died on 9/11 to launch another? How can a song about the election of a black president and the dreams of Martin Luther King have a chorus about the color of his Maybach? When I was on the streets, my team would wonder why I was fucking with the rap shit. And when I was out doing shows, music cats would shake their heads at the fact that I was still hustling. How can he do both unless he’s some kind of hypocrite?
But this is one of the things that makes rap at its best so human. It doesn’t force you to pretend to be only one thing or another, to be a saint or sinner. It recognizes that you can be true to yourself and still have unexpected dimensions and opposing ideas. Having a devil on one shoulder and an angel on the other is the most common thing in the world. The real bullshit is when you act like you don’t have contradictions inside you, that you’re so dull and unimaginative that your mind never changes or wanders into strange, unexpected places.
Part of how contradictions are reconciled in rap comes from the nature of the music. I’ve rapped over bhangra, electronica, soul samples, classic rock, alternative rock, indie rock, the blues, doo-wop, bolero, jazz, Afrobeat, gypsy ballads, Luciano Pavarotti, and the theme song of a Broadway musical. That’s hip-hop: Anything can work—there are no laws, no rules. Hip-hop created a space where all kinds of music could meet, without contradiction.
When I recorded “Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem)” over a mix of the theme song from Annie—a brilliant track put together by Mark the 45 King that I found through Kid Capri—I wasn’t worried about the clash between the hard lyrics (where all my niggas with the rubber grips, buck shots) and the image of redheaded Annie. Instead, I found the mirror between the two stories—that Annie’s story was mine, and mine was hers, and the song was the place where our experiences weren’t contradictions, just different dimensions of the same reali
ty.
To use that song from Annie we had to get clearance from the copyright holder. I wasn’t surprised when the company that owned the rights sent our lawyers a letter turning us down. Lord knows what they thought I was going to rap about over that track. Can you imagine “Fuck the Police” over “It’s a Hard Knock Life”? Actually, it would’ve been genius.
But I felt like the chorus to that song perfectly captured what little kids in the ghetto felt every day: “ ’Stead of kisses, we get kicked.” We might not all have literally been orphans, but a whole generation of us had basically raised ourselves in the streets. So I decided to write the company a letter myself. I made up this story about how when I was a seventh-grader in Bed-Stuy, our teacher held an essay contest and the three best papers won the writers a trip to the city to see Annie. A lie. I wrote that as kids in Brooklyn we hardly ever came into the city. True. I wrote that from the moment the curtain came up I felt like I understood honey’s story. Of course, I’d never been to see Annie on Broadway. But I had seen the movie on TV. Anyway, they bought it, cleared it, and I had one of my biggest hits. During my live shows I always stop the music and throw it to the crowd during the chorus. I stare out as a sea of people—old heads, teenagers, black, white, whatever—throw their hands up and heads back and sing like it’s the story of their own lives.