The Plot Against Hip Hop (6 page)
Y
ou could never tell whether it was day or night in D Hunter’s apartment. Heavy drapes covered the windows; the walls and ceiling were black, as was most of the furniture. On one wall was a framed photo of D and his relatives from back when he was the baby of the Hunter family. Next to it was a letter from his mother, written years ago, when the psychic wounds from the deaths of his three brothers were still painfully fresh.
D’s apartment was a place of mourning, his own personal tomb of grief. It was twelve noon outside, but you’d never know it if you saw D curled up under black sheets, bandages on his head, hands, and shoulders, and a bottle of painkillers on the nightstand. So when he slowly awakened there was nothing that suggested day or night, the ambiguity that he craved, a sense of being lost in a dayless time. He’d always felt time was a trap. Everything that took place in the past was so present in his life, it was like tragic events kept happening over and over, even as new memories—many of them equally painful—rolled atop them, adding layer after layer, each darker than the one before.
This day, however, his physical pain was more pungent than any memory. The slashes on his body stung, particularly a nasty one on the fat part of his left hand. The back of his head throbbed where a baseball bat had introduced itself to the base of his skull. Pain pulsed through his head as D stirred, so he moved slowly, hoping it would delay the feeling he’d had his ass kicked.
Being HIV-positive always complicated his recovery from any altercation. How would his body respond? Would it weaken his already questionable immune system? Would it take him months to come back from something that, in his otherwise great condition, should take just weeks?
So far, so funky. Since returning home from the hospital D had laid up, hoping to get back out in the field by the weekend. He’d promised himself to chill out, especially after the shouting match he’d had with Fly Ty.
“Why is it that old hip hop writers die when you’re around?” Ty had asked sarcastically.
“Because I’m apparently a bad bodyguard but a damn good detective.”
Ty was actually very concerned about D and, also, quite embarrassed that a glorified security guard had apparently flushed out Dwayne’s assassins. The MO had been the same as Dwayne’s hit: two Bloods with box cutters, plus a third—who in D’s case applied the game-winning blow with a baseball bat. D knew he was lucky to be alive. The third man, who a workman described as a light-skinned black man or Latino in a Phillies jersey and cap, could have just as easily cut his neck when he fell to the ground.
The facts of the attack were these: the getaway car, a blue Audi, had been abandoned in Washington Heights with bloodstains on the seats, along with red clothes and a old Westside Connection CD (which D couldn’t believe anyone would still listen to, much less any self-respecting East Coast thug). The cops did their CSI thing to the car, comparing fibers, etc., from the Dwayne Robinson crime scene, but there were no matches. They did find hair in the Audi that belonged to a Caucasian, but since the car had been stolen from a white family in Hackensack, New Jersey, they weren’t convinced it was significant. In short, no forensic evidence tied the two stabbings together beyond the choice of weapons and the presence of a third man with a car.
The gang squad found the evidence inconclusive. Gang initiation or paid hit? A paid hit over a decades-old marketing report? No,
two
paid hits over articles about hip hop. That didn’t impress the NYPD. Fly Ty thought it was too much of a coincidence that D was involved in two initiation incidents so close together. But he too found the Sawyer memorandum theory “a silly load of bullshit.” Hence the shouting match.
It didn’t help that Fly Ty had answered, “It’s in our system,” when asked about the cassette found on Dwayne’s body.
“Which means we’ll hear it when?”
“It’s an audio tape that is, as far as we know, tangentially, if at all, connected to an gang initiation.”
“I thought murders in Soho were a priority for NYPD.”
“They are. Except when it conflicts with matters of national security.”
“What’s a terror threat have to do with the cassette?”
“Don’t act stupid, D. The team that handles audio recordings and such is backed up with intercepts of phone calls and tapes of meetings about possible terrorism in the city. It’s a major investigation.”
“And you know about it?”
“Yeah, they like to share here at NYPD. Anyway, you silly motherfucker, Dwayne’s tape isn’t on the back burner. It just isn’t in the front. Our folks are excellent. As good as the FBI. But we only have so many ears.”
D mulled all this over as he stood in boxer shorts in his small kitchen dropping strawberries, bananas, and whey protein into his blender. As he poured apple juice over this healthy concoction and turned on the blender, he wondered why that third attacker hadn’t taken another whack at him. Prone and unconscious, D had been an easy target. Another hit and he wouldn’t be making a fruit shake. No, he would be up in heaven joining his brothers in a two-on-two game like the ones back in the Tilden projects.
Maybe it was the workmen, one of whom came over with a hammer, or the approaching sirens of New York’s Finest alerted by the call of one of Harlem’s model citizens. When the police finally arrived there were just two men on the pavement, one dreadlocked and dead, the other bald and bleeding. And there were the papers. Tattered, dirty, ripped, and floating away in the breeze from a coming rainstorm.
After pouring his protein shake into a tall glass, laying out his regime of antiviral meds on his countertop, and digesting it all in one long gulp, D’s mind refocused on the papers on the floor by his bed. Of the original fifty or so pages, D now had thirty-nine. He suspected that some had never been there in the first place, that whatever the late Mr. Tate had given him had been incomplete from the start. Maybe he’d been playing his own game and was holding back on D until the check was cashed. Others were undoubtedly destroyed or lost in the attack. Three of them were smeared with Truegod’s blood.
So what D now possessed were like pieces of ancient parchment, links to some long-hidden wisdom. Or, at least, what passed for wisdom in 1989. Page 3 began:
Hip hop is an expression of black youth that was born out of the streets of the Bronx and Harlem in the early- to mid-’70s. It embraces a variety of disciplines that have proven to be attractive to young people in the U.S. as well as in Europe and Asia. It is a cultural movement with social, commercial, and increasingly political applications. From a demographical viewpoint it is making inroads on the terrain once dominated by rock and roll and is growing as a determiner of cool with each passing year.
Page 7 said:
Though the DJs, breakdancers, and graffiti writers were the early heroes of the culture, the record industry’s growing acceptance, and exploitation, of rap recordings has already made rappers the culture’s commercial vanguard. Because the average rap record contains four to five times the lyrical content of an R&B song, the possibilities for sending commercial (“My Adidas”), political (“The Message”), and behavioral (“Criminal-Minded”) messages go beyond any other pop artistic form of African-American expression. While young filmmaker Spike Lee suggests new possibilities in that medium, the inexpensive nature of rap records and its grassroots distribution make it the truest voice of the young black mind.
Nothing earth-shattering. D looked deeper into the report and on page 25 found a section titled,
Recommendations
. That’s where the fun began. “As the first fully formed community-inspired art movement since the cultural nationalists of the late ’60s, hip hop has great potential for directing the energy and hopes of a generation. The danger here is that the growing presence of Nation of Islam and Five Percent Nation references, plus the gang affiliations of the emerging West Coast scene, could lead the culture in general, and young black America in particular, down the same ghettocentric path that created the U.S. organization and the SLA on the West Coast and Islamic-inspired thugs like Philadelphia’s Black Mafia. Right now these tendencies are balanced by the Afrocentric philosophy of Professor Molefi Asante of Temple University, the antiapartheid movement linked to Nelson Mandela, and the proto-hippie leanings of the Native Tongues (De La Soul, A Tribe Called Quest).
It is this report’s contention that a targeted use of seed money (to buy or found labels, fund production companies), brand associations (connecting rap figures to significant brands via advertising and marketing), and strategic alliances (with filmmakers, entrepreneurs, “gangsters”) could change hip hop’s direction and, in a broader sense, that of black America. This opportunity, whether used for good or evil, is pregnant with opportunity for some entity with vision and financial resources to manifest them.
Public Enemy’s Chuck D said famously that his group’s goal is to create several thousand black leaders. Hip hop, overall, has done that and more. The question, however, is where these leaders will take their constituents; to Dr. King’s integrated promised land, to the Nation’s angry separatism, to street hegemony, or to some destination unforeseen at this time.
This was interesting stuff. And pretty prophetic, D thought. In a way, it had all happened. The boardrooms and ad campaigns of the early years of the twenty-first century both took hip hop as a given, its most potent figures embraced, at least in business, at the highest levels of corporate America. Fear of Islam was everywhere in white America, but Louis Farrakhan was dying as a revered figure among blacks and Muhammad was as common a name as Leroy or Washington had once been. The gangster ethos, of course, was omnipresent and had become a secular religion with rules of behavior as rigid as Vatican Bible study.
Implicitly laid out in this memorandum was the role of capital. The ability to fund hip hop would result in the ability to guide it. Some would even say control it. If that’s what had happened we could all name the culprits—the decreasing universe of major labels, a few greedy tastemakers, and the base materialism that drove the American Dream.
Really good stuff for 1989, D thought, but who would kill over this? What self-respecting street thug would risk incarceration over this? Somebody must have paid them to kill. If there was a connection between the papers in his hand and the murder of two old-school hip hop writers, the answer had to be found, as it was always and forever, in following the money.
At some point during this period, probably after
The Relentless Beat
was published, Dwayne had participated in the research and writing of the Sawyer memorandum, which could be seen as a market-focused version of his book. It was easy to see why they’d approach Dwayne—he was one of hip hop’s first critic/journalists with any above-ground credibility and had proven himself capable of a book-length narrative.
Plus he was a true believer in the culture’s ability to positively transform black America and, maybe, the world. And since cultural studies books, even classics, rarely paid serious money, he was likely eager to turn his insights into a real check.
While Dwayne would always be one of D’s heroes, the compromise implicit in the writer’s participation in the marketing survey was plain to see. As high-minded as Dwayne’s writing about hip hop was, taking a job to help maximize its nonmusical sales potential was no different than the path so many MCs, breakdancers, and graffiti writers would take over the next decade in search of higher profits and a wider audience. No wonder Dwayne never talked about the Sawyer memorandum.
It was a document of just the kind of commercial compromise
The Relentless Beat
was so judgmental about. Maybe by documenting (or creating?) a conspiracy against hip hop, Dwayne was trying to cleanse his own soul. To revisit your youth in middle age is to attempt to rewrite your history, D thought. Must have been a strange, sad journey back in time for him. Did Dwayne somehow blame himself for helping steer things in a direction that might have created a conspiracy where none existed?
But Dwayne was dead and Truegod was too. D had been laid up in bed with multiple stab wounds. History hadn’t stabbed all three of them. Those knives had been as tangible as his tall chai latte, and way more lethal. D put the report down and was maybe a bit closer to understanding Dwayne, but still not sure why he was dead.
T
he light-skinned man had freckles and a receding hairline that could have been disguised by a baldie, but Peter Nash was way too vain to cut off any of his wavy black hair. He used his plastic knife and fork to saw through his extremely long Hampton Chutney dosa with gusto. “He got done right around the corner, huh?” he asked, already knowing the answer.
“Yeah,” D replied, then took a sip of his hot chai. D didn’t like Peter Nash very much, but the man knew a lot of things about the hip hop world and D hoped he’d pass on a useful detail or two.
“Looks like a gang initiation,” D said, “but you don’t think so.”
“Do you? I deal in the tangible, D,” Nash said, and took another bite. “You know that.”
“Yeah, right,” D mumbled in reply.
“Hey.” Nash stopped sawing the dosa and looked D in the eye. “Detective Williams has watched out for me. And he’s watched out for you, I’m told, though I have no idea why. Now, if you wanna ask me some questions, just know any answer I give is out of respect for him. And I enjoyed Mr. Robinson’s books too. But if this was just about me and you, I’d be having my dosa by myself.”
Swallowing his pride along with his chai, D said, “I understand. No disrespect intended.” He sighed and nodded, thinking about how hard it was to deal with the hip hop cop.