The Plot Against Hip Hop Page 6

  Edge had been a key inspiration/subject/source for The Relentless Beat, because the man’s career pretty much spanned post–World War II music history. He’d been a sand dancer outside juke joints in his native Macon, Georgia, recorded doo-wop songs with buddies in Harlem after he’d escaped the Jim Crow South, rocked microphones from Virginia to Boston during the soulful ’60s, and became a talent manager/label owner before being recruited as an executive for black/urban music when major corporations made their move into the scene in the ’70s.

  For the next twenty years or so Edge played ring-around-the-record-labels, moving from Capitol to Epic to RCA to MCA, until he finally ran out of jobs as hip hop altered the landscape in the ’90s.

  Unlike most R&B–bred heads, Edge wasn’t immediately disdainful of this new movement. Having lived through jump blues, cool jazz, rock and roll, R&B, rock, soul, free jazz, funk, and disco, he wasn’t intimidated by change. “Our music changes because our people are chameleons,” Edge told D several years back. “We change our slang. We change our threads. We change what we think is cool and what we think is corny. And all that ends up in our dance, and our dance responds to our music.”

  If Dwayne had been D’s adopted older brother, Edge had been his kinda grandfather, and the two men shared the same feeling of loss. So D told him everything he knew, from the tape to Truegod to the Bloods.

  “I remember Jimmy Sawyer,” Edge said thoughtfully. “He ran that marketing company.”

  “Can I talk to him?”

  “Oh, he’s long dead. Too much coke, too little sleep. Bane of that ’80s generation. Me? I did a line or two but I stuck with weed and bourbon. It’s why I’m still here.”

  “What about D talking about a ‘remix’ and Truegod talking about a government conspiracy?”

  “Well, a dying man could be talking about anything. I don’t put a lot of stock in that. It’s the Citizen Kane theory of life.”

  “What’s that?”

  “It’s a movie. At the beginning of the movie Kane dies and says a word—something about roses. They spend the whole movie trying to figure out what the words mean. Every damn body ever since is always trying to figure out what a dying man’s last words mean. But me, I’ve seen several men die and not once did their last words make a damn bit of sense.”

  D sat there next to the old man feeling silly, until Edge cleared his throat.

  “But let me say this: you can never go wrong suspecting that the government is involved in some plot to mess over black people. There’s a long history, you know.”

  “I’ve read some stuff online,” D responded, “but a lot of it sounds crazy.”

  “Well, I don’t know what you read but this stuff is real, youngblood. You know about the Tuskegee experiment? They even made a movie of it.”

  “Some medical shit, right?”

  “For years they shot up a gang of brothers with gonorrhea and syphilis to see what the fuck would happen. Like that was gonna be some surprise. And the U.S. government paid for the whole damn thing.”

  “That’s foul.”

  “You know the government put mikes under Dr. King’s bed. Hoover listened to that shit for fun,” Edge explained.

  “He got off listening to Dr. King sleeping?”

  “Damn, you kids don’t know shit about your history. King had a lot of female admirers and things happened.”

  “You telling me that Dr. King was crushing some groupies and the FBI was listening in? That’s scandalous shit.”

  “He was a man just like you and me. When they make heroes out of plywood, not flesh, these things won’t happen. But King made human mistakes; the government was all about harming a black leader. You know what COINTELPRO was?”

  “I do. But that was way back in the ’60s.”

  “The government has set up stings on black politicians—congressmen and mayors and activists of all kinds—in just the last few years.”

  “Didn’t they catch some fool with bricks of cash in his refrigerator? Some politician from Louisiana?”

  “Well, you do read more than the Source. He was set up by your tax dollars.”

  “So an anti–hip hop conspiracy is not impossible?”

  “Possible. It’s definitely possible. Get ten black people in a room talking about anything that might get them power or influence, I guarantee you one’s a government agent and two want to be.”

  “Didn’t know you were so political, Edge.”

  “I ain’t political. I’m alive. Ain’t a black person who’s lived as long as I have who doesn’t know that every federal agency with three letters—FBI, CIA, DEA, and especially that fucking IRS—will pull you down faster than a weedwhacker. Believe that.”

  “D’s book was called The Plot Against Hip Hop. But the plot had to have failed. I mean, I don’t like most of what passes for the music now, but there are so many hip hop–made millionaires. The culture sells everything under the sun and is all over the world. It feels like a success to me.”

  “But the thing is, do all these rich black folks really own hip hop?”

  “They own themselves. A guy like Jay-Z, for example, owns his brand and does with it what he pleases.”

  “Maybe Jay-Z has reached some kinda nirvana, maybe he’s become the guru of grandiosity he always said he was, but it don’t feel to me that we—meaning black folk—actually control something we built from the ground up. You know, D, that was the big dream back in the ’60s and ’70s. Black music was like oil to Arabs—it was gonna be our way to build a larger economic machine. Empower people through our culture.”

  “Yeah, that’s one of the things Dwayne Robinson talked about in The Relentless Beat.”

  “He did indeed.”

  “Was it a conspiracy that this didn’t happen?”

  “Black folks just wanted a corporate gig—an Am Ex card, expense account, and an office in a Sixth Avenue skyscraper were enough to satisfy most of them. I know cause I was one of them. It don’t take a conspiracy to drown a thirsty man. Just give him an overflowing cup of water.”

  The two men sat quiet for a minute, as Edge seemed lost in his memories. D wondered whether it was time to leave.

  “Yo,” Edge said finally, “they had a report back then too.”

  “About what?”

  “It was known as the Harvard Report. It was commissioned by CBS Records to study how the corporate labels could take over black music from the Motowns, Stax, and other black music labels. And they actually did what was in that report, so this kinda research is nothing new. They dissect it like a frog in biology class. They see how our heart works and what pumps blood to our brain and then pull us apart for sport. That’s how they did us then and that’s how they do us now, and I guess they will continue until we can finally make them stop. Dwayne knew that. In fact, he understood it better than I do. He was really good at looking under the chassis of the car and comprehending how the gears worked.”

  “Do you think that’s why he died?”

  “Youngblood, I’m sitting up in a old-folks home in the damn Bronx. So what’s happening in the streets today I won’t pretend to know. But this I do know: the world of black success is always a lot smaller than it seems from the outside. You go to any town, from New York to Lake Charles, Louisiana, to Akron, Ohio, and you go to any club that’s frequented by our people, and you’ll see the black undertaker, the black banker, and the black minister (or his children) up in that piece, alongside the people just coming through the town—the athletes, the entertainers, the dancers, and the actors.

  “What I’m saying, youngblood, is that everyone knows each other and everyone’s connected, from the highest of the high to the lowest of the low. I bet you that you are just one or two conversations away from knowing what you want to know. You just haven’t been to the right party on the right night yet. It could be tomorrow in New York or it could be six months from now in LA. So for Dwayne, and for me, please keep asking.”

  “Of course.” D reached insid
e his black suit and pulled out a plastic vacuum pack containing two Cohibas, top-notch Cuban cigars.

  “Youngblood, you are my main man.”

  “What does your doctor say about these?” D asked as his friend slipped the cigars into his pocket.

  Edge chuckled. “The average life expectancy for a black man of my generation is something like sixty-four. You know, like that Chris Rock joke—between hypertension, cancer, and the KKK, I should have been dead years ago. So a Cuban cigar at this point can only knock a day off, or maybe two, cause I’ve already used up most of my years.”

  “Right. Edge, you are gonna outlive me.”

  “Well, I outlived Dwayne.”

  “Yeah.”

  “Sad. A night-owl degenerate such as myself is still sucking God’s good air and a homebody writer gets stabbed to death over some street shit.”

  “Yeah.”

  “You taking your meds?”

  “Absolutely.”

  “Good. Don’t make me any sadder, D.”

  “No way I would, Edge.”

  D got up and headed out of the nursing home, his head buzzing from his talk with Edge and anxious to get back to Manhattan.

  CHAPTER 13

  PARTY FOR THE RIGHT TO FIGHT

  The Macy’s event went off smoothly. The crowd was mostly black and Latino teens who, despite some trepidation on the part of management, had been well behaved. The problem was, there weren’t very many of them. Gibbs made a cameo appearance. He smiled, shook D’s hand warmly, and spent most of his time conversing with his corporate clients (a.k.a. ass-kissing). D listened in from the periphery as there was a lot of talk about whether this sparse turnout was a reflection of the “soft” market for rap records over the last few years. Sales had been sagging and hip hop radio was getting its butt kicked in most major markets by pop and Latin-oriented stations. The clients were wondering whether hip hop was losing its hold on America’s youth. Gibbs was doing his best to put the best face on the marketing disaster.

  But Gibbs’s angst wasn’t really D’s concern. For him the light turnout just meant a nice comfortable day for D Security. Once the event was officially over, he headed up to the first-floor men’s department and picked up a few items—two turtlenecks, three pairs of socks, and two slacks—all in shades of black. To D, charcoal, ink, midnight, and ebony were as vibrant as crimson, scarlet, rose, or anything else red had to offer. Satisfied with his purchase, D walked downtown on Seventh Avenue toward his apartment. It had been two weeks since Truegod’s death and a month since Dwayne Robinson’s, and there had been zero movement in either case.

  After his recovery from the Harlem attack D had refocused on his business and lined up some choice gigs for D Security. They would handle security for the Rush Art for Life benefit in East Hampton, a Sprite commercial shoot in Los Angeles, and the BET Awards later in the year. The next afternoon some of his team were accompanying Kanye West to debut his first video game called Graduate Student at Best Buy on Broadway. His company’s reputation as being dependable and effective had spread across the country, something D was incredibly proud of. If he could just focus on that fact, he’d have been quite content.

  Still, Dwayne’s murder nagged at him. He knew the death of a black man at the hands of other black men was never a priority for American justice. The new century hadn’t changed that. None of the triggermen who’d put caps in his older brothers had done a day of time. Even D, who’d been so filled with righteous anger when Dwayne’s blood was spilled on his clothes, had let things slide. Despite his initial outrage, D knew people got killed all the time in this country. It was a sea of violence that sometimes ebbed but never stopped flowing.

  D’s place was on Seventh Avenue in the 20s in the kind of highrise condo that he’d actually come to despise. It was one of the many pieces of evidence that Bloomberg wanted condos as far as his eye could see. They were all over the city now (in the 20s on Sixth Avenue, from Chelsea up to the 40s, along Flatbush Avenue in Brooklyn). All of them uniform, disconnected from street life, and destroyers of the very flavor people came to the Apple for. It was a rich man’s version of urban living, like something out of that Fountainhead book D had plowed through one semester to pass English lit.

  Living in just the kind of monstrosity he disliked made his loathing of it deeper. He’d lived in a three-story, well-maintained Midtown tenement for over a decade, content to coexist with the sometimes dicey plumbing in exchange for being low to the ground and knowing all his neighbors. After a lengthy battle with developers and the city, the building was condemned and D, wanting to stay in the middle of town, found himself living in this new condo. He’d found that compromise was essential to survive in this new century.

  As D hung and folded his new clothes, he listened to Public Enemy’s first album, Yo! Bum Rush the Show, the one that had been so overshadowed by It Takes a Nation of Millions and their subsequent albums. D always had a soft spot for it, cause it reminded him that every adult is first a baby—promising, immature, inventive, and inexperienced. Sometimes there’s more inspiration in the awkward first steps than in the confident classic, D thought. He saw himself in the sounds of PE’s struggle to define their voice. D just hoped he was turning out as well as they had.

  While Chuck and Flav rhymed on the title track of the album, D laid out his afternoon regimen of antiviral pills and gulped them down with a big swig of Evian. He sat listening, amused that stopping the bum-rushing of shows was just how he made his money.

  He pulled out the Sawyer memorandum and was leafing through it, looking for a fresh angle on this old document, when his BlackBerry ring tone came on, Ice Cube’s “The Wrong Nigga to Fuck Wit.” It was Todd Smith, one of his staffers, calling to say Kanye’s people were beefing about his absence. “You know how that camp is, D,” Todd said. “I know you wanted a night off but they feel slighted. The video game people joined in too, so I think you should run through.”

  “All right,” D answered, “I’ll be over in thirty.”

  Reluctantly, D set down the report and headed to the shower. Afterward he put on his new selection of clothes and hailed a taxi down to Broadway between Houston and Bleecker, just a block from his office.

  Metal barricades had been set up and male gamers, spiced with young female Kanye fans, were already standing in line. There was an NYPD cruiser outside, some skinny Best Buy staffers in T-shirts, and several of his well-dressed D Security folks. His peeps were supervising and manning key checkpoints. D had gone through all the details in the morning before heading up to Macy’s and knew his crew had everything under control. But the client is always right, especially when every company out there wanted video game biz.

  Kanye was at least two hours away, so D was wondering how to kill the time. Another walk-through of the store? Maybe a quick run to the office to check the mail? He was mulling his options when a black man in a thin, well-tailored beige suit and one of those mohawks where the hair peaks like a hill in the middle, approached him. The guy was around forty, with a thin mustache and the confident demeanor of someone who shopped via the Robb Report.

  He reached his hand out to D and said, “You don’t remember me, do you? I’m James Woodson. You guys on tour used to call me Woody. I met you when I was a tour manager for LL and you were doing security. Back then I wore Fila tracksuits and Air Force 1’s exclusively.”

  “Okay, I remember you.” Glancing at Woodson’s wardrobe, D added, “Things have changed.”

  “And for the better.”

  “You think so?”

  “Come on, man. Back then we were both scrambling to make it. Now we’re businessmen. You own your company. I’m an executive at a video game company and we are killing it, dude.”

  For a few moments they reminisced about working with LL, a couple of crazy tours, and some of the other folks from those tours who they hadn’t thought about in years. While D was a little nostalgic, Woodson seemed to look back at everything as a stepping stone to what he
was into now.

  “Best thing that happened to me back then was befriending these two guys who were putting together tour sponsorships for artists. Once the tour was over I ended up getting a marketing job with their company, Sawyer. I stayed there for a year and then got headhunted by these video game dudes and it’s been sweet ever since.”

  “Sawyer, huh? Walter Gibbs did some time there too, didn’t he? Just saw him today at an event my company handled down at Macy’s.”

  Woodson shook his head in admiration. “Yeah, Gibbs. Wow. That dude learned quite a bit at Sawyer. I like my career a lot, but that man has done better than all of us. He got out of hip hop before the market changed.”

  “You ever hear of a marketing survey Gibbs and a writer named Dwayne Robinson worked on for Sawyer? It was a plan for the best ways to exploit the hip hop audience. People called it the Sawyer memorandum.”

  Woodson’s face scrunched up, as if D had just passed gas. “When I was there we did three or four reports like that. JVC commissioned one. Nike had us do one. Some beer company—maybe St. Ides. Remember how foul that shit tasted?”

  “Yeah, it was nasty. Probably the worst malt liquor ever.”

  “And that’s saying a lot.”

  “No doubt. No doubt. So you guys did several reports, but I believe this one was different.”

  “How so?”

  “Dwayne Robinson. The writer I mentioned.”

  “Yes. Robinson. I remember reading his shit. He never really understood what rap was about, did he?”

  “What makes you say that?”

  “It was about paper from day one. All that sociopolitical shit was accidental, or maybe incidental. You feel me? Just like this video game world. It takes a lot of technology to make this stuff. But essentially it’s just a toy. Something to pass the time between living and dying.”

  “That’s it?”

  “That’s it.”

  “Well, Dwayne felt the music was about more than that and he might have even thought the particular Sawyer memorandum I’m talking about was some plan—not just to sell music to the audience, but to manipulate the audience and the artist.”