The Plot Against Hip Hop (3 page)
When Fred asked about getting some club security in the city for extra dollars, D knew he had a useful new friend.
On the way back to Manhattan, D mulled over the latest turn in Dwayne Robinson’s murder and took some stock of his own life. D often felt like his existence had been just a series of unsolved mysteries. He didn’t know where his father was; he didn’t know why his brothers had been shot; he didn’t understand why God had allowed him to contract the HIV virus. But Dwayne’s death? There was an answer to that. It was something he could solve, something he could know the truth about.
D
hadn’t picked up Dwayne Robinson’s
The Relentless Beat
since he’d first met the author in the mid-’90s when Dwayne had already begun his long, slow retirement from covering music full-time for a variety of publications. Back then there were enough music magazines that, if you hustled, you could eke out a living from record and concert reviews, and celebrity profiles.
Dwayne had got out just in time, before the Internet destroyed the print music mags and created a legion of nonpaying blogs where anyone could spew opinions and few were paid anything approaching a living wage. At the beginning of their relationship it was Dwayne who’d treated for long lunches, where he schooled D on the differences between the soul songs of Philly, Detroit, Chicago, and Memphis. In the last few years it was D who picked up the check for dinner while he kept the middle-aged writer hip to the Lil’s and Yung’s of contemporary rap.
Now D sat in the Starbucks nearest his Seventh Avenue apartment, leafing through
The Relentless Beat
to mourn his friend and search for some connection between his greatest work and his murder. The book had been published at the height of the golden age of New York hip hop, a time that now seemed utopian in its optimism. There was no doubt in Dwayne’s mind that Chuck D and KRS-One were street prophets, that Rakim and Kane were true urban poets, and that talents like LL Cool J and rival Kool Moe Dee were champs of bodacious boasting. Flow, articulation, and sticking to theme were celebrated; freestyle ciphers in narrow ghetto hallways were crucibles of fire.
Dwayne’s central idea was that the radical intellectual fire, passionate one-upsmanship, and straight-up virility of hip hop’s greatest MCs had made them—and not the R&B singers of that era—the true inheritors of the masculine mantle of soul. The author was quite disdainful of the nonthreatening, jheri curl–wearing, kinda bisexual generation of singers who filled the playlist of urban contemporary radio.
To a great degree
The Relentless Beat
tossed much of the black pop that was emanating from the major West Coast labels under a fastmoving tour bus. Only the work of a few producers (Quincy Jones, Leon Sylvers), record label heads (Solar’s Dick Griffey, Total Experience’s Lonnie Simmons), and a couple of power brokers (Clarence Avant, Amos Pilgrim) elicited any praise from the New York–centric journalist. Dwayne had clearly turned in his manuscript before he heard NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” and the gangs of South Central changed the West Coast game forever.
As engaging as
The Relentless Beat
remained, it was a powerful document that offered no clues or secret codes to suggest who might have stabbed its author to death half a lifetime later.
F
or days after the funeral D tried to set up a meeting with Walter Gibbs. He called, e-mailed, and text messaged, but Gibbs was either traveling or in a conference, or just plain unavailable. He was never told Gibbs didn’t wanna talk to him. Nor was his outreach ever unreturned. The replies were always very polite. Never “no way” they’d meet or “Don’t call again.” More like, “Mr. Gibbs will return your call at his earliest convenience.” It was the classiest brush-off D had ever experienced.
Despite the stonewall, D kept trying. What else was there to do? Fly Ty had nothing to report and was gruff when asked about the investigation, especially the audio tape. The gang guys had called once, spoke very perfunctorily, and hadn’t called back. Ray Ray was asking around but couldn’t be too aggressive. There were so many Bloods and so much blood. Felt like a dead end indeed.
So when D got a call from Walter Gibbs’s office, he was as surprised as he was pleased. However, the invitation that followed was not to talk about Dwayne or death or hip hop. Gibbs had been an early hip hop manager and an indie label head during the breakthrough ’80s. In the ’90s he secured a distribution deal with a major label, then bought a fancy house in the Hollywood Hills to be closer to TV and film. He executive produced a couple of rap soundtracks for urban movies and got his feet wet as an associate producer on one of Wesley Snipes’s action flicks. Gibbs saw his future on celluloid.
Then one day at the posh Polo Lounge in Beverly Hills, Gibbs’s life changed. He was supposed to meet a white ingénue for lunch and maybe a quickie at her nearby condo. On his way over he spotted a table with Lionel Richie, two fine-ass Filipinas, and a balding Jewish man dressed in a pink and white sweater, white pants, rakish shades, and a deep Palm Springs tan. Morgie, a.k.a. Samuel Morgenstern, was in the leisurewear business. He’d met Lionel playing golf at an LA country club and they’d become fast friends, meeting occasionally for drinks and female company at this old Hollywood haunt.
Gibbs had quickly forgotten about his date, drawn to the black popstar power, the Asian beauties, and, most fatefully, Morgie’s business acumen. Turned out Morgie was raised in the same Brooklyn ghetto that had spawned Gibbs—albeit four decades earlier. Morgie’s family had owned two retail outlets in that hood. By the time they met that afternoon at the Polo Lounge, Morgie owned three hundred clothing stores in various ghettos throughout the Northeast, but was trying to figure out the new urban buyer. Clearly Lionel Richie wasn’t the person to ask, but Morgie immediately saw Gibbs as a kindred BK salesman.
Out of that chance meeting a partnership was born. Taking all he’d learned in the hip hop biz and applying it to Morgie’s stores, Gibbs transformed them into new jack emporiums that sold every hot item an urban consumer could want (including a couple of spots that sold some herb out the back). Gibbs was so effective that Morgie even gave the young black man a (small) piece of the business. With that as his calling card, Gibbs began a consulting firm with clients from Coke to Cadillac, all of whom wanted to tap the “urban” market (and the white kids who followed its lead).
And it was this business that got D invited to Gibbs’s swanky lower–Fifth Avenue office. D rolled into the large glass-enclosed conference room and shook hands with various reps from the maker of Lee jeans. They had designed a new straight-legged dungaree aimed at the black/Hispanic/Asian rebel. This particular meeting was focused on coordinating the details of a party to launch the jeans at Macy’s. Lots of hip hop celebs would be in effect, along with some basketball players, video vixens, and various scenesters. D was being brought in to handle security, which would be a well-paying gig.
Gibbs greeted him graciously when he entered but, with seven other folks in the room, D didn’t mention Dwayne or his funeral. Near the end of the meeting a luscious Latina came into the conference room and whispered to Gibbs. He nodded, mumbled “Yeah,” and then excused himself. D wanted to say,
Stop! Don’t duck me anymore, motherfucker!
But he knew that wasn’t the move. When Gibbs disappeared out the door D was determined to find his personal office and, if he had to, barge in and demand an audience.
Thankfully all that drama wasn’t necessary. As the meeting broke up that same Latina, about twenty-seven with thick black hair, a little round in the waist, but still easy on the eyes, came over to D. “Mr. Hunter, Mr. Gibbs wonders if you had a moment.”
In contrast to the bright, sleek, modernist design of the rest of the office, Gibbs’s space was dimly lit and a little smoky. The ashtray on his desk held two dead cigars with one still smoldering. Sharing the desk with the tray were stacks of reports full of multicolored graphs and bullet points. Next to them was a D.M.C. doll, one of a Japanese line of collectibles built around famous hip hop figures. The rest of the desk was covered in various devices—BlackBerry, Sony Playstation, iPod, and a futuristic thing D couldn’t place.
He had a couple minutes to contemplate Gibbs’s desk since the mogul wasn’t actually there yet. Well, D thought, I did make it into the dude’s office. At least I did that. To kill time between sips of the Evian that the Latina had generously handed him, D practiced a trick Dwayne had told him about back in the day. D began trying to read Gibbs’s files upside down. You couldn’t get the small print but a log line or caption here or there could yield a nugget of useful info.
From what D could see, most of the reports were marketing surveys of “urban buying habits” tied to “embedded brand desire.” It was the gobbledygook of psychological selling, something D had often encountered in meetings with people trying to move sneakers, video games, and liquor. D didn’t understand much about it, though he knew that anyone who talked that talk could squeeze a living out of corporations from here to hell and back. Gibbs had gone from selling records out of the backs of cars to selling digital dreams to lifestyle companies and the big Walmart brand.
D was gazing at an upside-down graph of red, blue, and green lines when Gibbs walked in wearing a white shirt, jeans, and a diamond in each earlobe. “Sorry about the wait, D,” he began after a handshake and a polite hug. “I had to change for a meeting I have in fifteen minutes. But I wanted to make sure I spoke to you before I left.” In that one bit of dialogue Gibbs had put a time limit on their conversation, while also acknowledging the need to speak. D dove right in.
“As you probably know, I was the last person Dwayne Robinson spoke to before he died.”
“Yeah, I read that.”
“The police have no leads and are treating this as a Bloods initiation. Simple as that.”
“But you think his last words mean something. A clue to who did it.”
“Maybe more like
why
it happened. At least I hope they do.”
“I’ve thought a lot about it since I read that stuff in the papers. It’s funny cause I never thought Dwayne was a huge Biggie fan, so for him to reference the dude at that moment, it had to be about more than a record.”
“What’s your guess?”
“I hate to say this, but I don’t know that I have a guess. To be honest, these last few years Dwayne and I haven’t been close. I mean, if I ran into him it was all love on my part. But we had some major differences over the direction of my life.”
“I don’t wanna get all up in your business, but were the differences things that, you know, reflected his state of mind?”
“Well, he was one of the few people I knew from back in the day who didn’t think I’d sold out. No. He thought we’d been sold out.”
“
We’d?
”
“Yeah, like everyone who was in the hip hop game had been talked out of being rebels and just handed the culture over to corporate America for chump change.”
“You know he was writing a book titled
The Plot Against Hip Hop
.”
“That’s strange to me.” Gibbs paused now, his face revealing both anger and amusement. “How a man who’d seen how we’d all pushed and shoved this street culture into an industry could think that one force or person could control its direction—well, that idea just tripped me out. These niggas are so hard-headed you can barely get two MCs to do a tour together without someone shooting someone backstage. In fact, niggas are, by definition, antiorganization. That’s why I do what I do now. I can’t be around fools who shoot each other over diamonds. Anyway, when Dwayne came up with all this mess I thought he was joking, but he meant it. Over time that made things a little tense between us. Instead of a normal conversation, every time I saw Dwayne things got a little crazy.”
“I don’t remember him acting that way.”
“Well, D, you didn’t know him as well or for as long as I did. No disrespect. It’s just the truth.”
“Okay,” D said after a long beat. He suddenly felt like it was time for him to go.
“Believe me,” Gibbs continued with some softness, “I know you feel obligated to look into Dwayne’s murder. I’m glad someone aside from NYPD is. You know that KRS-One song ‘Kill a Rapper’? He put it out there with Marley Marl. He says the best method to get away with murder is to kill a rapper. Damned if Dwayne didn’t die an MC’s death.”
“Yeah.” D stood up. “I guess you’re right.” He didn’t know what else to ask. He was sure there was more to find out, but he felt a little intimidated and outclassed by Gibbs and now just wanted to leave as bad as he had wanted in. “Thanks for your time, man. And I’m very happy to be working with your company on this event.”
Gibbs stood up behind his desk. “Shit,” he said, “talking about Dwayne, well, it was good for me. I know you know I didn’t go to the funeral. I know that was fucked up. I don’t have an excuse. He came to my first parties, back before I was even in the hip hop game and was promoting R&B singers. We went through a lot together.” For the first time in their conversation Gibbs looked emotional. He picked up one of the marketing reports from his desk. “This is funny. The first time I dipped my toe in the corporate game, it was because of him. I helped do research for a survey of the hip hop market that he was writing for some marketing company. Shit, that’s what I do now 24/7/365. Things do change.”
“You remember the name of the survey?”
“It was probably something like ‘Understanding the Hip Hop Market: Its Aspirations, Its Potential.’” Gibbs laughed. “I don’t know the name. I do remember I got paid by this company called Sawyer. Dwayne worked hard on that thing; I guess it was my first sellout move, huh? But you can’t really sell out in hip hop. It was all about buying in, in the first place.”