Sef:
What up, brother? You know I miss you and think about you often. Lately I’ve been stepping up as a leader, as a boss, as a king. You always told me I was a leader, but back then, I wasn’t ready to take on that responsibility. Well, now I’m ready.
It’s been years since you left us. When they told me you had been shot, I couldn’t believe it. You were so strong, I guess I thought you were indestructible. To find out you’d been gunned down just steps from your own front door—it seemed impossible.
Back when we were kids, who could have known the course our lives would take? Two little black boys from the South Side—so much the same, so different. We first met at McDowell, but it wasn’t until high school that we started hanging for real. You were right there in the car when I heard them play my first single, “Take It EZ,” on the radio. You were right there to challenge me when you thought I wasn’t stepping up to my potential.
Back then, you were a shot caller. The only reason I could get away with calling myself a Four Corner Hustler in high school was because of you. Yes, you were in the streets but there was so much more in you. A thinker. A dreamer. A father. A friend.
Sef, you taught me so much. You did it by having faith in me, by calling me out, and by showing me how to do it yourself. I’ve learned that in being a leader, you have to inspire, teach, give, listen, learn, decide, rule, hurt people’s feelings sometimes, and help others develop. That’s what leadership is about.
When you were here, Sef, I didn’t know how to help others develop. Maybe I just hadn’t experienced enough myself. It’s in part because of you that I embraced the challenge of leading, using my experiences to empower others. Sometimes I don’t feel like it, but I do it. I have to. It might have taken thirteen years, but I’m on it.
Speaking of thirteen, my daughter, Omoye, just became a teenager. She and your daughter, Aliah, are about the same age. When Omoye lived in Chicago, they would hang out a lot. Aliah and your son, Abdullah, came to Omoye’s thirteenth birthday party. They were so mature. Dullah is smart and focused. I was out shooting hoops with him on the mini–basketball game, and he talked like a little man. He was stocky and built like a football player, and really doing well in school, too. I see him and can’t help but see you. Both of your kids are an inspiration. They’re looking in the right direction, focused on the right things.
Man, Sef, I’ve had dreams about you over the years. I think about how you were really taking care of your business when you made your transition. I never knew the true story of what happened, but I know those were dark days. But even in the darkness, you still shined your light.
Man, Chief, I feel like I’m getting stronger, becoming a warrior when necessary. I always looked at you as a warrior. Those days we used to kick it, it seemed like we didn’t have a care in the world. Times have changed for me, though, as I know they would have changed for you. I have a lot more on my mind, a lot more responsibility, but I know how to handle it now. I’m enjoying life, brother. Even with the moments of pain and hurt, I appreciate life in a new way. That’s thanks in part to you.
I want you to know, Sef, that I carry you with me—that when I lead, you’re leading, too.
Love,
Rashid
HIGH SCHOOL MEANT SEVERAL THINGS FOR ME. IT MEANT LEAVing Faulkner, where I had spent most of my waking hours since the age of seven. It meant stepping into a new phase of life, leaving some old friends and making some new ones. It meant Luther High School South.
Luther South was located on 3130 West Eighty-seventh Street. Being able to say you were a student there meant something. Luther South meant that you were smart, that you likely came from a good family, that you had a future. If I got hassled by the police, simply pulling out my Luther South ID card went a long way toward getting me out of trouble.
Playing ball at Luther South, I bonded with a new set of friends. Some of them had come from Lutheran grammar schools, and some of them were from the hard-knock neighborhood on the South Side that we called the Wild Hundreds (or sometimes just the Wild, Wild). But most of them were middle-class guys from other parts of the city. Playing sports prepares you for life. There’s a discipline, there’s a force to it. An athlete’s energy is at a higher level. I don’t know if I was as disciplined then as I am now, but it created certain habits that I still follow today. I had to go to practice. I had to run suicides. I’m not going to let myself get tired. When you challenge your mind and your body like that, it tends to bring out the warrior.
In my prime, my game was like a poor man’s Derrick Rose or Rajon Rondo. I made dudes around me better, but when I had to take over, I took over. I could be fancy, but I was always in control. I used to like putting on a show. Once I got to high school and started playing organized basketball for real, I had to learn how to tone down my game a little bit. But the flash was still there.
My pops tells the story about the time he took me to Larry Brown’s basketball camp at the University of Kansas. “Larry was basically recruiting you,” he says, maybe with a little bit of fatherly embellishment. “One day,” he recalls, “y’all were scrimmaging for Coach Brown, and I turned my back to talk to somebody, and all I could hear from the court was Larry saying to you, ‘Way to go, Lonnie. Way to go.’”
The big knock my dad had on my game, though, was that he said I lacked that killer instinct. “When I played,” he’d tell me, “I wanted to put a devastating move on somebody early in the game so that they didn’t even want to guard me. You? You never wanted to embarrass anybody.” I guess I didn’t. To me, I’d rather have eight points and seventeen assists than score thirty. I was a true point guard, not only in my height, build, and skills but also in my mentality. Still am today.
My sophomore year, I suffered a serious injury. I was killing it in this game, dishing out assists, cutting hard to the hoop. I was going for a rebound and this white kid on the opposing team accidentally poked me in the eye. It cut my cornea or something. My godbrother Skeet swears that when it happened, I yelled, “Oh, he detached my retina!” I know I didn’t say that. All I can remember is writhing in pain and pressing my palm against my eye like I thought it might fall out of the socket.
I was out of commission for a month and a half. I couldn’t play at all. That’s when I started getting more into rapping. When I rejoined the team, the coach’s son had taken my starting spot. The coach said I had to work my way back into the rotation. By the time I got to varsity, I was finally getting some ticks—but yet again, I wasn’t the starting point guard. It felt just like it did when I was eight years old, but this time I wasn’t even given the chance to prove my worth to the team. One game the coach put in everybody but me. My guys were yelling from the stands, “Man, put Rash in the game!” That hurt my pride, but more than that, it redirected my attention.
I quit the team in my junior year. I told my pops that the reason was that I knew I would never be a pro like he was. That was part of it. I also quit because I had discovered a new passion in rap. Why not go pro in that? I still think back on my hoop dreams from time to time. When I was training for my role as a professional point guard in the movie Just Wright, I got to see at least part of my potential. I was scrimmaging with NBA cats like Baron Davis. I wasn’t dominating, but I was holding my own. After one session, Baron came up to me and said, “Man, you got a little game.” I’ll take that.
One of the most memorable days of high school basketball had nothing at all to do with the game itself. It happened during practice on November 25, 1987—the day that we learned Mayor Harold Washington had died. Being black in Chicago in the 1980s meant a lot of things, both good and bad. The greatest thing it meant, though, could be summed up in two words: Harold Washington.
Just imagine what effect it had on black boys and girls when he was elected as the first black mayor of Chicago. Back in 1983, Harold Washington and his campaign organizers would canvass the South Side handing out buttons that read “Brother Harold.” It was a source of pride to know that a black man from our community could achieve such success. It inspired me to dream about what I could do. Man, even as a kid I wanted to thrust my fist up in the air and shout like James Brown, “Say it loud—I’m black and I’m proud!”
I remember it was a Wednesday and we were in the middle of a scrimmage when someone rushed into the gym with the news of Mayor Washington’s death. There were six-footers in tears about it. But there was one kid on the team, a white kid named Ed, who started clapping at the news. I’ll never forget that. Where does that kind of hatred come from? How could he have built up so much bitterness when he wasn’t any older than fifteen, sixteen? The coach had to excuse him from practice to keep him from getting beat down by the rest of the team. He played out the rest of the season, but my relationship with him was never the same.
My sense of racial identity really started taking shape in high school, in part because of moments like these—moments when your sense of self rubs up against something. Living on the South Side of Chicago, it was almost all black people. I never really had social experiences with people of other races and nationalities until high school at Luther South.
That Chicago blackness gave me understanding, awareness, street sense, and a rhythm. I learned the way that soulful people move, act, and talk. We all think differently, but there are certain common ways that we maneuver through life, through struggle. We have survival tactics. I learned a little about African history, but I also learned that black people in America have developed differently than our African family did. Hitting the shores of America as slaves, we cultivated a distinct culture. And though certain practices of our culture in Africa were taken from us, we developed a new way of living and being here. It is a birthright I inherited. It’s organically in my system, but I also had to learn more, too, and live it. Doing so allowed me to meet people of other backgrounds and maintain pride in my own heritage. I never wanted to be white. I have always been grateful to be black.
As grateful as I was to be black, though, I had an eye for girls of every race, creed, or color. My freshman year of high school I messed with this white girl named Erica. My mother caught me out there kissing her one time. “Okay, wait until you try to go home with her,” she told me later on. I liked Erica a lot, but there was always another girl for me around the corner. In school I was known for taking niggas’ girls, I guess you could say. I didn’t do it out of spite or disrespect. I’d just fall in love hard. I’d fall out of love just as hard too.
But I was a gentleman, respectful. My mother had taught me to open doors and pull out chairs. And I’ve always had a romantic side to me, so I’d write girls long love letters or stay up on the phone with some girl until dawn. Maybe I could relate to women because I was so close with my mom. I’m not saying I was an angel—I was still trying to get the drawers like every other boy my age—but even then I enjoyed talking to women and hearing their stories.
I lost my virginity with this girl named Kamiko. I said to her, “You wanna come through and hang out? What you doing later?” You think you’re slick, but she knows exactly what you have in mind. She came over to my boy Dave’s basement and we just started messing around. She had a funny smell, like cheap perfume or strong deodorant. I don’t know. But I was committed. We got naked, and she told me to put it in. I got inside of her and was just happy, you know? I’m not sure how long I lasted, but now I could at least say that I had done the deed.
Me and my boys were sex fanatics in high school. We’d go on sexual excursions looking for new girls. We were walking around hot from all that pent-up energy, all those hormones coursing through our veins. We’d find girls who felt the same and just fuck like rabbits—behind a bush, in a car, on the floor, standing up, whatever. I might be with four or five girls a week. And this is all before I had a record deal. This is just on the strength of Rashid, not Common. When my guys would complain about all the groupie love thrown my way on the road, I’d remind them: “Shit, I got more ass back in high school!”
I don’t wanna be a freak, but it’s the dog in me
I don’t pretend to be the open-door, roses type
I open the door for myself and I close it right
In your face. Now you wanna taste my food? What?
You got your own food—get a attitude
—“PUPPY CHOW”
The only steady girlfriend I had was Kiva, in my senior year of high school. Even as a shorty, I was captivated by the art of seduction. I loved that spark of romance. I would sit in class and write her long notes. She later told me that she knew back then that I was going to be a good writer. Kiva was a ride-or-die type girl. She was good people.
Luther South marked another turning point in my life: it was the time when my life outside the home began to loom as large as my life within the home. By the time I became a teen, I was living two lives: one with my family and one with my friends. Home was my mother, my stepfather—sometimes my stepsister, Rachelle—and my grandmother. We had church on Sundays, and I had homework every day. I spent afternoons helping my mother at her day care centers and spent free time dreaming about becoming a star. I was a good son, a hard worker, an athlete, and a little bit of a mama’s boy.
Away from home, my crew—Murray, Rasaan, Ron, Monard, Marlon—was my life. We spent our time on pick-up games until dusk, fighting, and chasing girls. To my boys, I was the little dude—until my growth spurt late senior year. But I was also a leader. When I first started hanging out, I was definitely softer than the rest of my friends. After all, I had essentially been raised by women.
I often wonder what the definition of a mama’s boy is. What does that mean? I know that we’re close, we’re really good friends. I know that he’ll listen, but does he do everything I say? No. No. I’m trying to figure out what that term means. If it means that you’re close to your mother and you honor your mother and you feel that your mother is responsible, then, yeah, he’s a mama’s boy. If it means that you’re going to seek your mother’s advice, then he’s a mama’s boy. But if it means that you are going to do whatever your mother says and you depend on your mother for your livelihood or for the important decisions in your life, that’s not him. I would have to have it defined.
It was always important for me to know who Rashid’s friends were. I wanted him to have good friends—people who would look out for him as much as he’d look out for them, people with similar goals and values. Ever since he was little, I taught Rashid that the people around you help shape who you are and who you’ll become. I told him never look down on anyone or think that you’re better than anyone, but you can be different.
It was easy for me to oversee who his friends would be when he was young. But around the time of middle school it started getting harder for me to exert control. Those are the years your children’s peers can become the most important thing in their lives—even more important than their parents if you let it happen. I wasn’t about to let that happen with Rashid. No. I couldn’t control who his friends were anymore. But I made sure of two things: that I got into his head and into his heart. I kept our relationship close so that he could talk to me and I made sure that he feared my disapproval of his behavior more than he wanted the approval of his friends. He wouldn’t want to disappoint me, and when he did, I made sure I let him know how I felt.
By the time high school came around, Rashid had friends from all walks of life. Some, I’d later find out, were involved in gangs. But even if I knew then what I know now about some of those boys, I wouldn’t have told him not to socialize with them. I never told Rashid he shouldn’t hang with this person or that person—that would have been the quickest way to get him to want to be with them. I believe in having lots of friends of all types, but you need to know where they belong as you go through life. I simply told him to think carefully about where people fit into your life. “You may have lots of friends in the audience of your life, but not everyone can sit in the front row,” I’d tell him. There are some friends that you need to move to the balcony, and some that you need to move out of the building altogether. You will try to change them because you care, but in most cases you can’t change people. You can still love them, though, but only from a distance.
ONCE I GOT AROUND BOYS MY AGE and older, things changed. You get a bunch of adolescent boys together and you can pretty much predict what’s going to happen. They’re going to talk shit to one another, they’re going to fight—other crews and sometimes one another. That’s how I grew up. That’s how I got tough. It was our way of showing love. Maybe we were toughening each other up because we all had the foreboding sense that the world would be even tougher on us. We didn’t know it at that time, but we were helping to shape one another into men.
Simple motherfuckers tellin’ me hard is criminal
Niggas you thought was hard, you pouring out your liquor fo’
Years ago, I thought I was hard, in high school fightin’
Now I’m the hardest man workin’ in show business
—“1’2 MANY . . .”
I can honestly say that my friends have shaped me just as much as my mother and my family. My mother was a constant force, a continuous guide, always a voice in my head. But like most kids, the majority of my time was spent among friends—in school and after school, at work and at play.
My friends helped teach me how to be a leader and Chicago helped cultivate an authenticity in me like no other place I could imagine. You gain a certain street sensibility and a certain awareness of your surroundings growing up there. I think that comes from being around so many slick people. You don’t let yourself be easily guided. As we say, you don’t let others put cables on you, or, rather, finagle you into doing something dumb. My homies embraced a think-for-yourself mentality. If one of my guys came up to me with a gun and said, “Yo, go shoot that nigga,” I would have looked him in the eye and said, “Man, you crazy!”
As I think back on it now, we were quite a crew. And we grew up to become surgeons, community organizers, real estate agents, gangbangers, and ex-gangbangers. We’d have children and wives and lives both in and out of Chicago.
I met Monard through Murray. Moe was this big, tall, fun-loving dude. But he would get into some scrapes—a little bit of trouble here and there. He’s a Pisces, so we related. We’re sensitive people. Monard was very talented as well. When he was in high school, he wanted to be a chef. But he always had issues with pleasing his parents. He’d blame a lot of things on the way his father treated him. He’d fall in love easy, too, kind of like me.
When I met Marlon during freshman year, he already knew he wanted to be a doctor. He was always very practical—a Virgo. He was that practical side of me: focused, hardworking. But he could fight, too. (Monard learned that the hard way one day.) Marlon would drink and have fun, but he wasn’t out there starting fights with us.
Ron was the hothead. He had lost his mother when he was young and his father was dealing with drugs. Ron and I used to start a lot of the fights. “Yo, stud!” he’d say. He could get real hype. We used to call him 4CH Ron. He used to lead the Four Corner Hustlers for a minute. Ron was that guy who was doing work in the streets, but he went to college for a while, too. His evolution actually mirrors mine. Ron’s a new person now. He’s had a rebirth and sees things from a lighter perspective, not so hype as before.
Murray, who was from the hard-knock neighborhood of South Shore, liked to joke that Eighty-seventh Street niggas like me were soft. And, yes, maybe there weren’t as many shootings and stabbings where I lived. Maybe you had two parents raising their children in single-family homes with a hoop out front and a lawn in back. But if you got caught slipping, if you let your guard down at all, Eighty-seventh Street niggas would rob you blind.
Sometimes, though, Eighty-seventh Street would eat its own. My crew and I would fight. We’d fight South Side niggas just for practice. For us, the entire South Side was a warm-up for the West and North. We’d tune our fists up around our own block, then take the bus, hop the L, or once we got cars, drive outside our neighborhood for the main event.
We’d fight West Side dudes for talking to the wrong girl in front of us. We’d fight North Side white boys for looking at us wrong, or for not looking at us at all. And when we were done with all of them, we’d fight each other to avenge some perceived insult or maybe just for fun. At the time, it was what we did. I didn’t give it much thought. If I gave it any thought at all, I suppose I believed fighting was a good way to build my rep. I always wanted to be known. In sports, I wanted to be the shortstop who could turn a double play or the point guard with the cold handle. In the neighborhood, I wanted to be the dude who got the girls or the cat who was nice with his fists. “Yo, Rashid and them is crazy!” I wanted a calling card. I wanted my reputation to precede me.
Back in high school, me and my partners would hit Kenwood Liquors on Eighty-eighth and Stony Island and buy a case or two of beer. We’d get a big bucket and fill it with ice and put the beers in there. After a couple hours, we’d be drunk and want to fight. Sometimes we would just roam the streets looking to start something. Other times we’d just stay around the crib and fight one another.
Looking back, I think there was something more going on when we fought. The fights were more than just rites of passage. My friends and I were making one another into men. We were toughening one another up in anticipation of the difficulties that undoubtedly awaited us. As hard as we were on one another, we knew life would be tougher. With few exceptions, we were coming from fatherless homes. We were boys being raised by single women who worked hard to support us and harder to be both our mother and our father. That meant they were protective, often over-protective. Even with Ralph in the house, my mother raised me like she was a single mother. She loved me so hard that I risked becoming soft. Something instinctive within me must have known this, so when I left home, I always seemed to seek out danger. Not true danger—at least, not by choice—but situations that were far enough out of my control, or anyone’s control, to test what I was made of.
I didn’t want Rashid kept away from the streets. By the time he started getting exposed to street things, he had a foundation. I believe that a child’s foundation is built between birth and ten or eleven. By then a child should know right from wrong. Did I go out and say I want him involved in street things? No. But in Chicago, the streets come to you. My brother was street. He was a loving uncle, but his struggles with drugs put him in constant touch with a street element. Some of the families of Rashid’s friends were street, but I wasn’t about to tell my son he couldn’t play with another boy because of who his father was or who his mother was. Rashid was going to be around the street regardless. The goal was for him to be street smart.
I intentionally put up a basketball hoop in our backyard for Rashid and his friends. I did this not just so that he would play close to home but also so that he would bring his friends around the house, too. His first introduction to the street was on that court. All the boys in the neighborhood started coming to play. And I let them all come because I knew that they would be the ones to protect him if something went down. I wasn’t worried, because Rashid was more afraid of me than he was of them. Believe me.
There was no protecting a child all the time. You couldn’t stop them from walking to the corner store. Not at fourteen or fifteen. That’s how he actually ended up getting a car early. Because right up on Eighty-seventh Street across from the high school there was some kind of burger place, and one day Rashid walked in, and they snatched the designer glasses right off his face. So I said, “Oh, no. I’m getting him a car so he doesn’t have to do that kind of walking.” Needless to say, that car gets you into more stuff. But it still was protection from some things.
The gang culture didn’t touch his life too much. Even though gangs were around during that time, they usually kept to their own. They weren’t like they are now. If you were hanging with them or opposing them, then you made yourself a target. And they weren’t trying to recruit you if you were sort of nerdy. And Rashid was really sort of nerdy.
I never worried about Rashid because he had a foundation that was spiritual and moral. He knew the right thing to do. Yes, I heard that he liked to fight. But I figured that’s just what boys do. They didn’t fight with guns, just fists. He would tell me that sometimes he would be walking through the park, and someone would start saying something to him, and someone else who had been over to play ball would say, “Uh-uh. Don’t say nothing to him.” Because they’d come over. I’d fed them. I knew which ones were street, but I knew that he needed to know them, being a black boy in Chicago.
That’s just how it was. It was giving him the foundation. It was also letting him have his freedom to make his mistakes. My philosophy was to protect him by putting him in the environment so that he could know about it and, number two, not to put him in there until he had the proper foundation. I think about it like little lion cubs. The mother protects them until they’re old enough. But if you don’t put them in the wilderness, they’ll never survive by themselves.
WE CALLED OURSELVES Four Corner Hustlers. It was our birthright. If you were from around Eighty-seventh and Stony Island, that was 4CH territory. In those days, the South Side of Chicago was a patchwork of warring territories, the borders of which could be plotted on a map in lines that snaked across streets and bisected neighborhoods.
Chicago has always had a gangster culture. After all, we brought the world Al Capone and Sam Giancana and Jeff Fort. We developed a mean political machine, too. Is it any wonder that we gave the world two pimps like Iceberg Slim and Rod Blagojevich?
It was like this. You had these two groups—two families really: Brothers and Folks. Under the Brothers umbrella, you had Blackstone Rangers, you had Vice Lords, you had Four Corner Hustlers. You had different types of Stones: Cobra Stones, Black P. Stones, Titanic Stones. You had Conservative Vice Lords. Back in the 1960s, Jeff Fort and Eugene Hairston turned what had begun as a community organization for black youth into one of the most powerful criminal syndicates in the city.
Both Hairston and Fort went to prison, and Fort emerged in the 1980s with a new vision for the Brothers based on Islam. He introduced the five-point star: Love, Peace, Truth, Freedom, and Justice. It had a lot of knowledge in it. They started with community and political presence, but, of course, the Brothers started adapting to street things. Eventually, they say Fort became so powerful that he was invited to the White House. In 1986 Fort, now renamed Adbullah-Malik, was charged with conspiring to buy weapons to commit terrorists acts on behalf of Colonel Mu’ammar Gadhafi’s Libyan government. Even as kids, we’d flash our gang signs, throwing down the pitchforks and throwing up a five or four, in emulation of the Four Corner Hustlers. We’d wear our black and red or black and gold and tilt our hat to the left, just like we saw the older kids do.
Then you had the Folks. They were Gangster Disciples, the Black Disciples. Disciples were the ones who threw up the pitchforks. They represented using a six-point-star symbol and tilted their hats to the right. I used to say it in my raps: the gangs are tribal. We’re tribal. When you represent a certain gang, you’re saying to the world, “These are the niggas I relate to. These are the niggas I’m connected to, and we’re going to keep things true.”
For us, Eighty-seventh Street was the land of Puda and Bebe. They were guys who were five or six years older, but they seemed generations apart. They set the standard. They were the generals. When we got to a certain age—maybe around fifteen—they said point-blank that if we were going to call ourselves Four Corner Hustlers, we were going to have to take some initiation.
So one night they came to whoop our asses. We knew we were going to have to catch it. A “bukin’,” is what we called it. I remember getting chased into Bebe’s yard and niggas beating me into the gate. It was one of those initiations. I remember that Bebe and Luther and them—all the niggas who were a little older and had ranking—they were whupping on us. They do have to know that you can take a beatdown, that you’re going to thump, you’re going to box with niggas. They need to know that you’ll be there.
Now we’re part of a regime, a family that is going to have your back. Now you can wear that star, you can throw up those signs. You’ve earned your stripes. You’ve earned a certain ranking. You can carry that with you.
Things changed, though, in the Crack Age. Crack hit the South Side of Chicago like a balled-up fist. Crack turned mothers into customers and sons into suppliers. It turned some neighborhoods into the Night of the Living Dead. If I had been born just a few years later, there’s no telling what my life would have looked like.
Drugs touched every family, no matter how educated or how comfortably middle-class you might be. It certainly hit my own. My uncle Steve, the dude who coached my peewee basketball team and snuck us into the drive-in theater in the trunk of his car, caught a habit. Even when he was getting high, though, he’d still be around showing us love. He battled his addictions for close to a decade before beating them into submission. Ralph’s first wife fell hard too, and soon one of their two daughters came to live with us. Every family has its own stories. Few families weren’t touched by it at all.
THE THING THAT KEPT ME out of trouble—and got me into different trouble, I guess—was having a car. My first car was a Hyundai Excel, which my mom gave to me when I was fifteen years old. I felt really loved, that she and Ralph trusted me. I didn’t even have my license yet, just my learner’s permit. But I rolled that Hyundai, and I played a lot of good hip-hop along the way: BDP. Rakim. Run-D.M.C. Big Daddy Kane. We’re bumping N.W.A., “Gangsta, Gangsta.” “With six niggas in the car, are you crazy?!?” Getting charged.
I would freestyle in that Hyundai, too. Monard or Murray started a game where one of them would say a word, and I’d have to spit a freestyle around it. “Heineken!” or “Hyundai!” or “Chlamydia!” Just crazy shit that came to mind. Junior year, I’d drive over to pick up Twilite Tone, and we would go to Marlon’s basement or Derek’s basement and make demo tapes. I think that contributed to me not wanting to play on the hoop team. I had a car. We had a lot of good days, getting bubbly, going around doing dirt. The Hyundai represented youth and fun. It represented freedom, but also responsibility. I’ve got to drive the fellas around. Cats might be busting out my windows, shooting at cats. I’m gonna drink a little, but I’ll have to drive.
Having the car allowed me to meet people I might not otherwise have met. My mother got me a job working at a summer program through Paul Robeson High School. While I was there, I met these dudes who played ball. They also sold dope. One day they asked me to hold some of their work in my trunk. This was the only time I decided to get involved in that street shit. I wasn’t dealing dope, but I drove it for them. I had that dope in my trunk all day while I was at school. It was adventurous and fun, but it was frightening too. I was driving safe—I didn’t want the law to get on me for anything. I stayed chill about it and did what I had to do. That’s the only time that I ever dealt with any drugs.
Me, Murray, and Monard used to have this one gun we’d carry. In certain situations, we would get in a little bit of shooting sometimes. Nobody got killed or anything like that. But I’ve had guns pointed in my face. I’ve pulled a gun on someone else. That gun was a weapon of last resort for us, though. The first time I shot a gun was on my dude Dart’s front porch. Dart was in the streets for real, but he was also a deep thinker. He liked the Ultramagnetic MC’s; he read Malcolm X. But he sold dope. He ended up getting shot five times. Most of my homies who were doing dirt, they came from hard situations. Dart’s father was locked up. His mother had passed away. He was a kid doing the best that he could for himself.
I started hanging with the Abraham brothers—Rasaan and Deante—in high school. One time Rasaan got in a fight with this dude over some girl. He ran off in the middle of it, and little ‘Te got knocked out by a girl. So we’re pulling up in the car. Murray and I get out the car and start whoopin’ niggas’ asses. These dudes jump in their car, and the way they spin out, they jar the door open, and the girl’s purse falls out. We didn’t steal the purse, mind you; the purse fell out. Our dumb asses decide to go to the ATM and see how much we can get off her card. We’re drunk. We’re not thinking. One of our homies takes off his shirt and breaks the ATM glass so he can shatter the camera. Now, this is how stupid Murray and I are: we head home like nothing happened. By the time I get to the crib, the police have already called my mother.
Used to gangbang, ain’t really thug that much
Rather have some thick broads than the dutch to clutch
Went to school in Baton Rouge for a couple of years
My college career got downed with a couple of beers
Came back home, now I gotta pay back loans
—“IT’S YOUR WORLD, PT. 1 & 2”
I’ve been arrested a couple times in my life, never for anything too heavy. I’m sure my mother stayed up many nights in those years over things that I did. Another time Murray and I headed over to this school called Lindblom. We went to confront these dudes we had been getting into it with. I’m sure it was over a girl. We started fighting right in front of the police cars. So the police picked us up and took us down to the station. They didn’t want to do too much to us, though, because they found out we went to Luther South. So they just handcuffed us to a bench in the hall and called our folks. My mother came down to the police station and started whaling on us, right there out in the open while we’re handcuffed to the bench! I got off the hook that time, but the next I wasn’t so lucky.
The scariest incident of all involved a dude named Chris. I used to fight with him a lot. He was kind of like my nemesis. He had a partner who was a known killer. You’ve seen the HBO series The Wire? Well, this dude was our Omar. He used to carry a shotgun through the city like he was in the Wild West or something. So this cat—let’s call him Omar—was known for carrying a gun and being willing to use it. One day, I got into it with Chris. We were boxing, and Murray jumped into the melee. Next thing I knew, Omar had Murray on his back, cocking a gauge right at his chest. But somebody, I think it was Monard, knocked Omar down before he could pull the trigger. Omar was a bona fide killer, but like so many killers, he’s dead now himself.
It was mostly fists with us. Every now and then someone would pick up a brick or pull out a knife. And once in a while someone would threaten to “go to my car,” which was code for going for a gun. Occasionally dudes would get shot. This is just to give you a sense of the silly shit we were doing at that time. We didn’t start trouble, but we created a lot of chaos. In fact, in high school we used to go to jail so much that on Friday nights we’d call up girls and say we needed three hundred dollars for bail, even though we only wanted beer money. It said something—more about us than about them—that they often believed it.
We spent days on the basketball court and nights on Lake Shore Drive. We drove my red Hyundai until the tires went bald, day tripping to Six Flags to pick up girls and ride the rides or to the suburbs to pick some fights. We’d hang outside of Kenwood Liquors or at Harold’s Chicken on Eighty-eighth and Stony Island, drinking beer and talking shit.
It’s funny. As I write about this, I feel like I’ve almost denied certain parts of myself and my past. I wasn’t a killer, but I guess I was out there doing certain things. Dion once told me that he thought he could easily have gone the wrong way and ended up hustling on the streets, in jail, or dead. I don’t think I ever could have. I felt like I had too many things I wanted to achieve in life.
Maybe things could have gone wrong. I’m going out and niggas are shooting at us. I’m going out and niggas are getting stabbed. I’m going out and something jumps off. I could have gone the wrong way. But I never said, “Fuck it, I’m just going to hang on the corner and sell dope.”
I sometimes think about what would happen if I hadn’t been so driven and if I hadn’t been so fortunate to avoid the heavy costs of my heedless actions. I think about Yusef Asad, and I wonder where he’d be today if he’d been as lucky as me.
I want to be as free as the spirits of those who left
I’m talking Malcolm, Coltrane, my man Yusef
—“BE”
Yusef was a friend of mine. We grew up together, but our lives couldn’t have moved farther apart. Where I had a home with a loving mother and a stepfather to raise me, he had an apartment to come home to at night that was either empty or filled with strife. Early on, he got caught up in street life. By the time we were in high school, he was a shot caller. But to me he was just Sef.
Sef was one of those dudes Malcolm X was talking about when he marveled at how the hustlers he knew might have been doctors or lawyers or even president if given the right opportunities. Come to think of it, I think Sef could have been a psychologist. He could look at you and see all the way through, no matter what front you tried to put up.
Sef was a Gordon Gartrell. You remember that episode of The Cosby Show where Theo wants that expensive designer shirt, the Gordon Gartrell? He can’t afford it, so he has Denise make him one from scratch. Sef was a Gordon Gartrell. He was one of a kind. He was a dominant personality. As Black, one of our mutual friends puts it, he was “lightning in a bottle.”
Yusef was from a family of a lot of brothers—maybe twelve. The Asads were Muslim, but they were known for holding down the streets. Some fought. Some hustled. Yusef was my age. So was his brother Esau. I used to go to McDowell with Yusef. They lived on Dorchester when I lived on Blackstone. Those blocks seemed so big when we were young, but they’re just some little blocks from my perspective now. Yusef talked a lot. He would speak his mind. And he had something real good about him inside. But he knew how to be tough when it was necessary. He and Esau were the coldest breakdancers. They could do windmills. But they’d get in trouble and do stuff while hanging out with their older brothers.
Sef had a certain strength about him. If he went to a party, he would drive. And when he got tired of being at the party, he would just leave you there. He was able to do what he wanted to do in many ways. He had his son before any of us had children, so he was growing up faster too.
One day when we were older and I already had a couple albums to my name, Sef and I were sitting out on the stoop, a couple Mich Drys in our hands, just watching the day go by.
“Why you always play the background, Rash?”
“What you mean?”
“I’m saying, why you always let these other knuckleheads take the lead? Rash, you the leader. You the center point. Don’t you understand that?”
“Nah, nigga, not me.”
“It’s not a choice. You’re the leader. You’re going to have to lead.”
I looked at him puzzled.
“That’s crazy, Sef. If anybody’s the leader, it’s you. You got on the fresh new gear. You’re the one making moves.”
“This? Man, this ain’t leading. I’m the biggest follower around. Let me put it this way: on the basketball court, who runs point?”
“Me.”
“When we go to parties over on the West Side, who drives?”
“When Murray and Monard are beefing, who steps in the middle?”
“Me, I guess.”
“Don’t you see? You’re the leader. You may not want to be, but that’s just how it is. That’s how it always will be. Just think of what can happen if you step up and own it.”
Over time, I came to understand what Sef meant. He saw me better than I saw myself. He witnessed my potential. More than that, he had faith to believe that I would realize that potential. I wonder what he saw when he looked at himself?
Sef was shot and killed in 1997. I remember getting a call at three in the morning from my man Sean Lett. He couldn’t contain his grief. Neither could I.
“Nah, Rash. Nah, Rash. They killed Sef. They killed him. Why they do that? He laid out. Laid out right here in the street.”
Sef was shot right outside of the Godfather, the club where people would step, the place where we shot the “Resurrection” video in happier times. He left a daughter and a son. He got killed no more than a hundred feet from his front door, just a hundred feet from home.
FOR ALL THE DUMB STUFF I did, three things always brought me back: my dreams, my mother, and my faith in God. Don’t get me wrong, I made more than my share of mistakes. But things never got too out of hand. Pretty soon I was pouring myself into music, into my dreams of becoming an MC. When people think of hip-hop, they rightfully think of New York City. Then LA. But Chicago was fertile soil for a new style of rap music—hard-edged but playful, eclectic but ultimately soulful.
To understand Chicago hip-hop, you first have to understand Chicago music as a whole. You have to start with the blues. When all those black folk started hopping trains and heading north from the Mississippi Delta, you know that some of them brought their guitars. Some of them brought their harmonicas. Some of them brought their voices that could holler just as well as they could coo. Some of them brought that sense of timing, that way of slipping in between the breaks and reaching the soul. When southern blues people got to Chicago, they must have thought: “Why not plug this guitar into an amplifier? Why not add some distortion and some sound?” The Chicago blues was born. The names read like legend: Muddy Waters, Willie Dixon, Howlin’ Wolf, Buddy Guy, Jimmy Rogers, Bo Diddley, Elmore James, Big Walter Horton, Little Walter, Jimmy Reed, Junior Wells.
Out of that blues tradition, you get Chicago soul. Curtis Mayfield. Jackie Wilson. The Dells. Jerry Butler. And, later, the divine Chaka Khan and the incomparable Minnie Ripperton. We heard all this music growing up. It was a sonic birthright.
But the most popular music in 1980s Chicago was house. That house music was very influential for us, but it was soulful house music. It wasn’t just dunt, dunt, dunt, dunt, dunt. It was some of that, but it was also All I do . . . is think about you! Michael Jackson’s “Off the Wall” was a house song because it had the right tempo. So was Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes’” The Love I Lost (Part 1).” Ron Hardy, the famous Chicago house DJ, was a legend. That music was discovery, that house music. It had such a strong presence and influence in Chicago.
House music and culture endorsed individuality. Dudes would wear Chucks in different colors. They’d rock boufs, slanted haircuts. There was a uniqueness that was embraced by all. There were gay dudes who were kickin’ it at the parties, bringing their own sense of style to the mix. Those house music parties were far more inclusive and accepting of individuality than any other part of the culture. Me and my boys might use gay slurs, but then we’d go to a party with gay cats who loved the same music we did. I don’t think we understood the contradiction. In fact, it would take me years to realize that the words I might use in casual conversation could injure.
One of my greatest regrets about my music is that my early albums include lyrics that might be considered homophobic. I was just using the language we used growing up, I told myself. I really didn’t give it a second thought. Then one time after a concert I gave in the Bay Area, a fan came up to me backstage and said, “Common, I love your music, but sometimes I hear you saying homophobic things in your rhymes, and it hurts me. I hear them, and I hear you talking about me.”
That affected me. Here I was claiming the title of “conscious artist,” and I had this huge blind spot in my consciousness. I never wanted to be guilty of mismeasuring someone else’s humanity. I’ve had it done to me, and I know the pain it causes. Hearing from that fan opened my eyes.
Chicago’s musical culture, in all its diversity, opened my ears. It gave me a foundation for the music I was drawn to and would want to make later. I was always a fan of good chords and strong melodies. That’s why I love that “Take It EZ” sample. Soul. Jazz. Blues. Funk. House. I loved all that. In fact, I was kind of going against the norm by loving rap like I did. But I loved her, and pretty soon she started loving me back.