When I was growing up, adults would often ask each other what they were doing when certain major events took place. They were usually referring to the assassinations of President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr. I was baffled how they could recollect with such peculiar accuracy what was going on around them in those moments. When I grew older, the death of the rapper Hannibal Streets would become one of those “what were you doing when” moments for my generation.
I remember very vividly what I was doing when I heard the news of his passing, mainly because I was preparing to do a stand-up routine at Hosea’s Amateur Comedy Night, where I had prepared some jokes about Hannibal. I ultimately decided against telling those jokes—which were largely impersonations—and ended up bombing, although the largely grieving audience was merciful. If I had been a halfway decent comedian, I could have flipped my act that night and used those impersonations to comfort and uplift the spirits of my audience. The shock of the news at that moment, though, impaired my judgment, and I panicked.
A year later I ventured into another open-mic amateur night and did the original Hannibal routine. It got a few laughs, but it didn’t completely slay the audience, as I had hoped. Afterwards, however, a few people came up to me and complimented me on my impersonation. Unbeknownst to me at the time, one of those people would eventually take my career to the next level.
Hannibal Street’s rise to becoming arguably the greatest emcee of all time started inauspiciously with him serving as a roadie and background dancer for a West Coast rap group called Kilobytes. But you probably already know most of this, since his bio has been rehashed thousands of times by every news source covering entertainment the world over. During his seven years in the music business, he released three platinum-selling albums before being murdered outside of the Super Bowl in 1997. But I’m sure you already know that, too.
Probably one of the most fascinating things about Hannibal was how prolific an artist he had been, especially once he completed a two-year stint in prison for the alleged sexual assault of a beauty queen (an issue relentlessly debated by fans well after he had already served his time). His second album (or first since his release) was a double LP that went four times platinum. His third LP sold nearly six million units. After his death, rumors circulated that he had damn near five hundred songs locked away in some vault, heavily guarded by his record label, Three Strikes. As a result, almost like clockwork, Three Strikes drops a new Hannibal Streets LP each year, showcasing some hot new producer the label is looking to promote.
It’s all quite a story, really. It’s like one of the greatest emcees of all time never really died (don’t get me started on the rumors that he faked his death). This is the public narrative as we know it, and it is the story my daughter, Zina, knows.
But it’s not the only story there is.
There’s also my story.
On the night I was finally able to perform my Hannibal Streets routine, I met a guy name Eli Jones, who introduced himself as the owner of a talent agency of the same name. Roughly 5’5”, he was full of confidence and knew just how to approach me to get me to sign on as a client. He gushed over my comedic timing, my choice of material, and my level of comfort in front of an audience. What really floored him, though, was what he referred to as a spot-on impersonation of Hannibal Streets. Up till that point, I had thought my impersonation as just good enough—definitely not spot-on.
“Who you kiddin’?” Eli responded. “I closed my eyes and thought that nigga was still alive.”
“Well, you know what some people say,” I offered, referring to the conspiracy theorists.
“Whatever, man. What I do know is that you sound just like that motherfucker. Don’t look a damn thing like him, but I bet you could fool his mama on the phone.”
“Really?” I asked. “Did you know him personally?”
“Yeah, I knew him. That’s why I know what the fuck I’m talkin’ ‘bout.”
His interest seemed genuine enough, so I signed with him. I thought he might help me get booked at a few places—maybe set me up for the occasional talk show appearance. That was not his plan for me, he told me. “Let’s go make some real money.”
To me, in my naiveté, that meant an HBO show or something on Netflix, but it wouldn’t be long before the I realized who my employer for the next decade would be: Three Strikes Records.
Back when Three Strikes first started, they owned one studio at the back end of a shopping center, and most of the music production was done by one person, Infinite Design. In fact, music journalists are quick to point out that the “sound” of Three Strikes was built on the back of that single producer. Hannibal’s rise to success was likely accelerated by Infinite Design’s beats, but later on, after Infinite Design left the label, Hannibal Streets’s voice became the strongest cachet for Three Strikes. I guess the thinking was that they could cultivate a whole new crop of producers as long as they had Hannibal’s voice to anchor the tracks.
Once Eli introduced me to the executive team over at Three Strikes, I came to see things a bit differently.
“Eli tells me great things about you,” Gamma, the CEO, said, shaking my hand.
I was floored by the compliment. I had never met a black man who was listed on the Forbes 400 Wealthiest Americans list. He could have told me he shit strawberries, and I would have believed him.
“I hear you do a pretty good Hannibal,” he said.
“I try.”
“Do you know any of his songs by heart?”
“A few,” I responded.
“Well, let me hear you spit something then.”
I thought for a moment, fighting my nerves with each passing second. I figured I’d just do the latest song I’d heard of Hannibal’s on the radio a few weeks earlier.
As I launched into the rap, Gamma’s eyes grew larger. He stopped me halfway through the second verse.
“Gotdamn, Eli!” he said. “I thought you was just fuckin’ with me.”
“I told you,” Eli responded. “Sounds just like that motherfucker, don’t it?”
Gamma nodded enthusiastically, tugging on his rugged goatee. “Well, then. Let’s talk turkey. You wanna call it consulting? How about 100 grand per project?”
“I was thinking more like 150 and a finder’s fee,” Eli said.
“Hey, what’s going on here?” I finally piped up.
“I’m negotiating your contract,” Eli said.
“But what exactly am I being hired to do?”
“He don’t know?” Gamma said.
“Well, I wanted to wait and see if you liked him first,” Eli responded.
“Can someone please fill me in?” I asked.
Gamma looked at me and smiled. “No problem. Let me break it down for you.”
Over the next hour Gamma explained everything to me, as Eli stood by, patiently nodding. Apparently, the infamous vault of recorded material by Hannibal Streets, while once voluminous, had all but dried up, yet his album sales were higher than ever.
“At first it was just a crazy theory, since I’ve never heard anyone sound enough like Hannibal to pull it off,” Gamma said. “Son, what I’m offering you is an opportunity. If you’re not interested, we never had this conversation. You feel me?”
“Yes, sir,” I said, suddenly realizing what was being asked of me.
“Sir?” Gamma responded, looking at Ali, yet pointing at me. “I like this little nigga.”
Shortly after that meeting, Eli negotiated a contract with me that, due to the sensitive nature of our dealings, would allow me to be paid six figures in cash per LP. The only problem was that, beyond my imitations of Hannibal, I couldn’t actually rap to save my life.
As fate would have it, I didn’t have to be a rapper at all—just a voice impersonator. Gamma had already assembled a small production team of up and coming producers and ghostwriters. The ghostwriters would pen the raps and show me the intonations, inflexions, and rhythms. In many ways I found their roles far more difficult than my own. They were the ones perpetually tasked with going into the creative mind of Hannibal Streets and asking themselves what he might have said and how he might have said it. They had to be both rapper and speechwriter. All I had to do was imitate Hannibal’s voice, but, according to everyone involved, that apparently was the hardest part of the equation. I was told no one had ever mastered Hannibal’s uniquely raspy voice and his energetic and rhythmic cadence.
We did nearly one hundred songs before my girlfriend told me that we were expecting. Few things can make you reassess your life like the awareness that you are about to be a parent. Still, I kept on with Three Strikes.
I found doing Hannibal to be fun, a way of stepping outside of my regular life and becoming someone else. At times, while recording, I would not just imitate Hannibal’s voice; I would imitate his mannerisms, bouncing on the balls of my feet as I spoke, throwing my arms back and forth so that my body swayed in his familiar rhythms. I would close my eyes and imagine I was really him. The producers ate it up. So did the public, as Hannibal’s records continued to sell through the roof.
In retrospect, I sometimes feel that the public had to know of our ruse. I was convinced that maybe we all wanted to believe Hannibal had an inexhaustible supply of unreleased material sitting in a vault somewhere. Or maybe the conspiracy theorists were right: Hannibal had in fact faked his death and was now living his life in seclusion out in Cuba or some island out in the Caribbean.
I knew better, but I allowed myself to get caught up in all of it. Even as I saw my daughter growing up beside me, I felt more than a financial obligation to uphold the legacy of Hannibal Streets. His life’s work was now my life’s work.
And I thought I would always be fine with that.
Then one day my daughter, who was now twelve, came up to me and asked me a very simple questions that I should have long ago expected (but had never gotten) that put me into a bit of a tailspin: “Dad, what do you do for a living?”
I thought about telling her that I was a voice actor or a consultant for a record label or something like that (all variations of the truth), but I found myself unable to really articulate any of these thoughts for fear that she would ask me follow-up questions I was unprepared to answer. I was a man who couldn’t answer a simple questions, and sadly, that question gave way to a far more paralyzing question: who had I become?
Twelve hours out of the day I was a father, a guy who rooted for all of the local sports teams, a guy who lived to binge-watch newly discovered TV shows on Netflix. The other twelve hours, though, I was a musical—a spiritual—conduit for one of the greatest emcees to ever live. There was no greater high, except for the day that my daughter was born. During those twelve hours, I would talk like Hannibal, move like him, even try to eat like I imagined he would eat. The producers at Three Strikes gave me the space to inhabit Hannibal however I could, and I did that. I did my best to become him. The albums kept coming, and I never took my foot off the gas. I had come to a point where I had to impersonate the self that I once was so as to not betray those in my life before all of this began.
I had become a nameless ghost that moved from voice to voice, body to body, and no one, not even I, was the wiser. I had lost myself, all while attempting to become someone I could never become.
When I approached Gamma about walking away to start a new life and be a respectable father to my daughter, I had half-expected him to have one of his goons beat me to a pulp in the lobby of Three Strikes. There was definitely a time when he might have done that, if only to maintain his rep as the no-shit taking ex-con mogul of a record company specializing in gangsta rap. But I knew he wouldn’t. For one, the work I did for him was too confidential to invite any attention. Second, I had cut him more songs than even Hannibal had, and the company would be good for at least another decade. But the main reason I knew I would be able to walk away in one piece was because I wasn’t the only one who had changed over the years. We all had. Gamma was now spending more time with his own kids, as his oldest son was preparing to accept a lacrosse scholarship to Hampton University in the fall.
We parted ways with a half-hug/half-handshake and his insistence that I take another $25,000 for severance.
These days I spend my work hours on the stage at any comedy club that will host me. So Dad is now a struggling comedian, my daughter often says, before adding, “How is that even possible when you’re not even funny around the house?”
Maybe not, I think and then smile to myself. It’s so hard to know these days what’s really funny. Occasionally I want to break out my Hannibal impersonation—go for the lowest hanging fruit—but I resist. That part of my life is now behind me. What lies ahead, though, I am still attempting to figure out.