The Plot Against Hip Hop Read online

  “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.”

  At that moment the lovely Latina popped her head in. Time for Gibbs to go. Next meeting.

  D asked, “You think you have a copy of it?”

  “Oh no. That was what, twenty or so years ago. Besides, that report would be as outdated as an MC Shan twelve-inch.”

  D gave the luscious Latina a lingering glance as he left Gibbs’s office, hoping he’d get a chance to see her again at the Macy’s event. Absorbing her thick hair and light brown skin—she was probably Dominican, he thought—briefly distracted him from the uncomfortable conversation he’d just had with her boss. He hadn’t really learned much. Dwayne was probably the least “crazy” man he’d known. Maybe he’d become overzealous when talking about his books, but “crazy” seemed the word of a man who wasn’t used to having his worldview questioned.

  Was the Sawyer marketing survey a clue? Probably not. But in a world where almost anything could be found somewhere on the net, D was sure he could run down a copy. It might be fun to read prognostications about hip hop written back in the ’80s. How close could they have come to predicting this future?

  CHAPTER 7

  YOU MUST LEARN

  Back at his office with his Apple Pro computer radiating a blue glow upon his face, D contemplated his search options. If Dwayne Robinson was still alive he’d have been the first person D would have called. He’d done the next best thing and called Dwayne’s wife. Danielle said the Sawyer report sounded vaguely familiar, but when she looked through the bibliography of Dwayne’s work she’d been compiling, it wasn’t there. Perhaps a copy had been amongst the papers in his ransacked attic office.

  But no sign of it now. Danielle wasn’t surprised that Gibbs knew of it and she didn’t. She’d always seen the talent-manager-turned-marketing-guru as a bad influence on her husband. “When Dwayne did anything with Gibbs, especially in the years before were we married, he was usually not too anxious to tell me about it,” she had said. “We had a very serious breakup years before we reconnected and Gibbs played a role in that. It’s probably one of the reasons he didn’t come to the funeral. It was an unspoken thing between us all.”

  D took all that in. Maybe it explained Gibbs’s somewhat defensive behavior during their talk. Still, no luck in tracing the Sawyer report. After speaking to Danielle, D got on the phone to some editors at Source and Vibe, but they were clueless when it came to anything that happened before 1992. He tried a couple of hip hop academics but they were worthless on the report too.

  So now D did what he usually dreaded—he entered hip hop cyberspace. Aside from checking out ESPN.com and NBA.com, D wasn’t very interested in the Internet. Normally he would have asked his assistant or one of his net-addicted staffers to surf around for him. But he’d decided not to get any of his staff involved with his private investigation into Dwayne’s death. Sure, they were loyal to him, but chasing down unsolved murders wasn’t like breaking up bar fights or keeping screaming groupies behind barricades. Dwayne’s death was his burden and was best kept private.

  So there he was on AllHipHop.com, Okayplayer.com, GlobalGrind.com, and on and on, typing Sawyer report into search engines, querying editors, and asking online communities if anybody had heard of it. From distant corners of the hip hop world, bits of reconnaissance floated in: Davey D from the Bay Area had heard tell of it in the early ’90s but he’d never seen a copy; some young head on MurderDog.com had a cousin who had found a copy while researching his dissertation, but that relative had been shot dead while buying herb; a kid in Amsterdam said his father had worked on it but Pops didn’t have a copy.

  Twenty pages in on Google, D came across a site called Hiphopcointelpro.com. COINTELPRO had been the FBI’s code name for its various nefarious strategies to undermine the efforts of the Black Panthers, the U.S. Organization, and other nationalist groups to organize the black masses in the ’50s and ’60s. Character assassination, espionage, and straight-up murder were all coordinated by J. Edgar Hoover’s men in a tragically successful campaign to send big Afro-wearing leaders into jail, exile, insanity, or the grave.

  There had been scattered signs of law enforcement monitoring hip hop throughout its short history. A police letter was once sent around the country warning local authorities about the danger of letting NWA perform in their jurisdictions. Rappers such as Busta Rhymes, who’d refused to cooperate in murder investigations, were regularly pulled over and searched by aggressive patrolmen in what looked like systematic harassment. But nothing in the hip hop era came close to Hoover’s campaign of terror. The bottom line: for all their posturing as important voices of the people, MCs hadn’t been dangerous to the system since the early ’90s. These days everybody was complacently capitalistic and proud of it. No need to waste government money on diamond-studded entertainers, who were more nuisances than threats, when there were terrorist sand niggas for the feds to clock.

  Yet Hiphopcointelpro.com was full of every conspiracy theory you could imagine. Biggie and Tupac were killed by elements of LAPD’s rogue Rampart Division. Bootlegged rap CDs were being used to fund CIA counterterror operations in the Caribbean. AIDS in Africa was a long-term strategy to clear large parcels of land for European and Chinese business intere
sts. One story went all the way back to the KKK owning the company that made Troop jackets when they became popular urban gear. Like Fox News, Hiphopcointelpro.com sold paranoia and was damned entertaining in doing so. One section of its home page read:

  Many people cannot fathom just how deep this war against the rising consciousness in the music went (and is still going). Military/intelligence-directed psychological operations in the form of gangsta rap. Chemical warfare (crack, malt liquor, PCP, heroin) to destabilize and commit genocide in targeted communities. Strategic biological warfare known as AIDS. The development, funding, and coopting of pseudogangs (Crips, Bloods, Latin Kings) with the top leadership and U.S. intelligence. The strategic funneling of arms throughout the African-American community by military intelligence.

  The major record labels are all controlled by the same elite of people, who run their businesses through the occult and are the heads of secret societies like the Freemasons and Illuminati. For a musician to sign with one of these labels, you have to be willing to work toward the agenda, which is to eventually obtain total control over the world population. This doesn’t mean that all artists signed are aware of the agenda, but they are tied to the rules of the industry. These artists become mind-control victims of a programmer or handler (usually a manager or attorney).

  One of D’s favorite images on the site was a Rose Garden pic of President Ronald Reagan and Vice President George H.W. Bush with the caption, The Real Godfathers of Crack & Gangsta Rap. Next to it was a Reagan quote: Out of these troubled times, our objective—a new world order—can emerge.

  Another item linked a Los Angeles physician, who had treated Eazy-E, comic Martin Lawrence, and funk star Rick James, to MKULTRA, a mind-control program developed by the CIA in the ’50s. Eazy and James had supposedly been tools used to pollute young minds, while Lawrence’s cross-dressing Big Momma films were attempts to undermine the masculinity of black males. (Tyler Perry received a mention too.)

  Def Jam Records came in for particular scrutiny on the site, which argued that since its founding by the powerful and mysterious “enlightened one” Rick Rubin, the legendary label has been a hotbed of satanic warfare against hip hop. Videos by Jay-Z, Kanye, and Rihanna were cited for patently satanic iconography that promoted teen suicide. These artists were controlled whether wittingly through the security of hell by satanic blood oath or unwittingly through MK-ULTRA programming. Non–Def Jam performers cited for satanic influences were Lil Wayne and Chris Brown. Further down the home page D found more speculation:

  The satanic gestures and ramblings of these artists is just the tip of an iceberg. Don’t miss the forest for the trees. They are controlled. Keep the pressure and spotlight on them. Reeducate and reprogram them if necessary. But bring them back home from the clutches of NWO, a.k.a. New World Order.

  D wasn’t sure if he wanted to go forward. This comingling of hip hop, government mind control, and Satan unsettled him. He’d heard bits and pieces of all this paranoia in conversations on tour buses and in VIP booths. It was crazy stuff. Yet there was something strangely compelling about it. Plus, it’s where the trail seemed to lead.

  So D went to a message board and typed in:

  I’m looking for a copy of a marketing report by a company called Sawyer on the hip hop audience circa late ’80s. The late, great writer Dwayne Robinson worked on it and I’d like to see a copy. I’m willing to pay for the pleasure.

  He included his e-mail address at the end of the message.

  Not thirty seconds later his BlackBerry buzzed. The message was from [email protected]. He wanted to know: Who the fuck are you?

  D hit him back with a little bio and mentioned his relationship to Dwayne Robinson. Two minutes passed before Truegod’s next message: Meet me at the corner of 116th and St. Nicholas tomorrow at 1 p.m.

  CHAPTER 8

  THE MESSAGE

  D stood at the corner of 116th Street and St. Nicholas, an intersection once notorious for drug trafficking. Back in the ’70s, Nicky Barnes’s self-described “council” of heroin dealers made daily deliveries of smack that had junkies lined up for “the package” like they were waiting for theater tickets. During crack’s vicious reign in the ’80s there were crack houses up and down 116th, where a generation of base heads sucked away their futures.

  So many rap records of the ’80s and ’90s were inspired by intersections like this one. KRS-One, Biggie, Eazy-E, and countless others translated the paranoia and pathos of the illegal street transactions into verbal blaxploitation movies. It was on 116th Street that some of these urban griots, these proud street reporters, turned drug dealing into musical entertainment, taking their narratives into self-congratulatory boasts that would have appalled Curtis Mayfield. But at least that first wave of MCs were pioneers, experimenting with storytelling no one was sure would work. Drug narratives went on to have the calculation of market research and the freshness of soap opera drama. At least that’s how they sounded to D’s ears.

  The street entrepreneurs of old 116th Street had given way to real estate developers, who were refurbishing buildings and constructing mixed-use sites. Now you could live in your spanking-new condo and go downstairs to score a latte. Businesspeople from Senegal, Ghana, and throughout West Africa had reclaimed the aging storefronts from disrepair and turned 116th into a new-world African marketplace of import/export between Harlem and their homelands.

  Remnants of old St. Nick and 116th Street were still visible—cluttered bodegas, church ladies walking toward Canaan Baptist, some hardcore addicts who hadn’t gotten the memo on the mayor’s gentrification program. But to D’s eye, they seemed like ghostly echoes of an old, fading Harlem, one soon to be forever lost to the bulldozer of investment.

  This was on his mind as he watched a man approach him. He assumed the dude was Truegod, though he didn’t look much like a Five Percenter. His dreads were long and gray, more like the limbs of an aging beast that the healthy hair of a man in his thirties. His skin was shiny, usually a sign of good health, but he was also gaunt and rawboned. His eyes were owlish behind thin-frame glasses; his lips, surrounded by gray hair, were reddish-black and cracked like dry ice. The man wore a loose-fitting, multicolored African top, something probably purchased in the neighborhood, but worn at the edges like a damaged flag. His pants were formless and ill-fitting, but not nearly as tattered as his unlaced white Adidas shell-toe sneakers.

  “You D Hunter?”

  “Yes I am, Truegod.”

  “Well, you ain’t the only Hunter on this corner.”

  “Is that so?”

  “Yeah. I watched you for a good fifteen minutes before I came over. I checked you out.”

  “That’s true. I saw you peeking from behind that SUV across the street.”

  “Oh, okay. But I can’t be too careful. Once they know you know, they can make life difficult. They control so much.”

  D decided if Truegod said “they” again he was gonna leave. This was a long shot anyway. Now that he could see Truegod really was paranoid, D considered cutting his losses and heading back downtown.

  “I’m hungry,” Truegod said. “I know a great Ethiopian place right down the street.”

  D nodded and began following the oddly dressed man east on 116th.

  Ethiopian food is eaten with the fingers, using a hunk of injera bread to scoop up a medley of foods. D watched the spectacle of Truegod eat and talk, the couscous often dribbling off his cracked lips back to the plate (and sometimes his lap or the floor) with disgusted fascination.

  “Truegod, you a Five Percenter?”

  “No, but I understand the impulse. The black man is a God here on earth. A chosen person.”

  “I recognize you, Truegod. You used to be a writer. Harry Allen, right?”

  “Harry Tate, actually. People used to confuse me with him and that other writer Greg Tate too. It’s why I use Truegod now, and I’ve made my own space. No one covers the undercurrents of what’s happening in hip hop like I do.
No one. That’s why I know why your friend Dwayne Robinson said what he said.”

  “It was all a dream.”

  “That’s right.”

  “Does it have something to do with the Sawyer report?”

  “Does a DJ need a turntable?”

  “Okay.”

  “Okay nothing. You said something about a fee?”

  D pulled $500 out of his wallet and placed it on the table.

  “You know that ain’t nearly enough. Not enough for what I know.”

  “I’m not sure you know a damn thing.”

  “People would kill for what I know. In fact, they killed Dwayne for it.”

  D reached across the table, took Truegod by the dashiki, and pulled the man’s dreadlocked head toward his. “Don’t fuck with my man’s memory and don’t try to play it like a poker chip. I won’t kill you, but I will fuck you up so bad you’ll wish I had.” D let go of Truegod and watched couscous drop from the edges of his mouth.

  “I’ve been threatened before,” Truegod replied, shaky and defiant.

  D pushed the $500 across the table. “But you don’t look like you’ve ever been paid.”

  “I want $5,000.”

  “Motherfucker, you better tell me something before I go upside your head.”

  “Look,” Truegod said, lowering his tone while he fingered the money, “I’m sorry I was a little, you know, disrespectful in talking about your friend. I see how upset you are. After all, you came in good faith.”

  “Okay, I lost my temper,” D admitted. “I was there when he died and I’m still not over it. You feel me?”

  “Absolutely. So let me give you the short version: the Sawyer memorandum was more than a marketing survey; it was a blueprint on how to control hip hop and, in the process, the future of black America.”

  “The Plot Against Hip Hop was the title of Dwayne’s book.”