In a back room of a Memphis-based record distributorship called Select-o-Hits, a pudgy white promotions man named John “J-Dogg” Shaw was showing me a few of the gangsta rap CDs that had recently passed across his desk. An album called In Remembrance of Thug Chuc showed the eponymous rapper laid out dead on a gurney. An album by the Skrilla Gettaz, called For This Thing Called Skrilla (skrilla being money), featured the titles “We Some Gangsta,” “Organized Crime,” “She on This Pole.” Another album, by Birmingham J, had a track called “Hustlaz and Cap Pellas.”
“What’s a ‘cap pella’?” I asked.
“Cap pealer. Pealing a cap is killing you,” J-Dogg said.
Then he said, “Have you seen the picture of Jeezy with a platinum snowman?”
“No,” I said.
He dug out the most recent issue of the gangsta rap magazine Murder Dog. He turned to a full-page photo of the up-and-coming Atlanta rapper Young Jeezy. In the photo, Jeezy was frowning and carrying a very large gun, and wearing a platinum snowman medallion.
“What does it mean?” I asked
“Snow is cocaine. So it means he’s a cocaine dealer. Or was one,” J-Dogg said. “Isn’t that great for the youth? What a great role model!”
J-Dogg is a hip-hop historian and a longtime fan of the music, but he’d grown disenchanted in the last couple of years. “All these folks can rap about is dope dope dope, shoot shoot shoot, kill kill kill,” he said. “And then people wonder why youth violence is at an all-time high.”
I looked at the photo again. I wasn’t quite sure what I felt about it—whether I thought Jeezy looked faintly ludicrous, holding his gun for a publicity shot, or thrillingly badass, and whether I lamented the direction the music was taking or saw it as a harmless bit of provocation.
This was always the question with gangsta rap. Was it just show business, no different and no more harmful than movies about mobsters or heavy-metal songs about death and mayhem? Or did it represent something bigger? Was it a kind of outlaw code, as much a cause as a symptom of the lifestyle it described?
In 2000, I’d spent two weeks traveling what was then the latest spawning ground for the genre, the so-called “Dirty South,” for a documentary about the music and the lifestyle. Most of the time I’d been in Jackson, Mississippi, following a pimp and gangsta rapper named Mello T. That trip had taken place a couple of years after the killings of two of the most popular gangsta rappers, Notorious B.I.G and Tupac Shakur, both of them victims of a bizarre musical turf war between the East Coast and the West Coast. Possibly as a result, a mood of restraint had held sway over the industry. But five years later, the period of mourning was over. The most popular style of rap was called “crunk.” Invented in the South, it was raucous and bass-heavy—“meant to evoke, and sometimes accompany, drunken nightclub brawls,” according to an article in that premier hip-hop publication the New York Times.
Feuding—“beefing” as it’s called—was back, too. Lil’ Kim against Foxy Brown. Eminem against Benzino. Lil’ Flip against TI, beefing over who could rightfully claim to be the “King of the South.” Perhaps the most prolific beefer of all was the numberone- selling artist in the country, 50 Cent. The inside sleeve of his latest album, The Massacre, contained coded death threats on rival artists, along with mocked-up photographs of 50 himself weighing out quantities of cocaine in his apartment and committing a driveby shooting with a machine gun. Though there was something amusingly kitsch about it—the idea of a musical performer reenacting criminal moments from his past—the comedy was somewhat muted by the fact that 50 Cent’s entourage had recently got into a real shootout with the entourage of another rapper outside a radio station in New York.
Oddly enough, amid all this merchandizing of crime, my old interviewee, Mello T, had moved away from criminal themes. His latest record was an inspirational rap for kids entitled “If You Try You Can Do It.” Supposedly he was no longer pimping. He’d married his “boss bitch” Sunshine, and they were raising a baby daughter. From what I knew about Mello—his casual professions of violence and the eerie hold he exercised over his stable of women—this reformation was hard to credit, but it came from a good source, a Jackson-based hip-hop journalist named Charlie Braxton.
And to be fair, Mello had always been ambivalent about his life of crime, lamenting it and celebrating it by turns in true hip-hop style. The first day we were together he told me that the pimping was “the money behind the music,” a way to pay the bills until his career heated up. I expressed surprise that he was a pimp. “Because in Britain, that would be looked on as maybe immoral,” I said. “Well, not maybe. Immoral.” The idea of a pimp was so foreign to me that I took the claim with a pinch of salt. I thought perhaps his being a pimp was part of his show business persona rather than his actual job—a character he played, a little like a professional wrestler. Still, I thought it prudent to affect surprise, just in case he really was telling the truth.
I’d met him in the driveway of a mustard-colored bungalow, the residence of a group he managed, the Children of the Cornbread. He was twenty-seven, wearing a tailored three-piece suit, a bowler hat, Chanel sunglasses. “This is just Mello style,” he said when I complimented him. “This is like worldwide international godfather gangsta pimp style.” He spoke in a deep mellifluous voice, with soft consonants, as people do down in Mississippi, saying “luh” for “love” and “cluh” for “club.” He also sometimes transposed his Ts and Ks. One of his ambitions, he said, was to open Jackson’s first black-owned “skrip club.”
Mello and I drove out to a field where we took shots at a rusty tin can with a gun he kept tucked down his trousers, while an unworried horse off to the side flicked its tail. I told Mello my theory that rap is like wrestling, with rappers exaggerating reality for the purpose of entertaining the public. “This character I play might just get me killed,” Mello said. “That’s what’s so real about it.” He took a few more pot shots, missing the target wildly, and then said, “When a pistol’s up against a woman’s head, seem like she listen better.” I didn’t really known how to react to this remark. It was so over the top, I had to resist the urge to smile. I suspected he was trying to get a rise out of me. “That’s quite shocking,” I said.
We spent the best part of three days together, me never knowing where the persona ended and the real person began. On our last day Mello offered to introduce me to two female rappers he was working with, Sunshine and Fantasy. We drove over to a nondescript condo on the outskirts of Jackson; it soon became clear that Sunshine and Fantasy were not really rappers but, in Mello’s phrase, “pleasure entrepreneurs.” It was all a little weird and uncomfortable. The women seemed cowed, or possibly they were just being respectful, as they saw it, to Mello for what they must have realized was a big opportunity for him, his international TV debut.
The recital consisted of Mello rapping while Sunshine and Fantasy danced in the raw style of a strip club, bouncing their behinds and pumping their pelvises against the floor. Fantasy looked a little distracted; Sunshine gazed moonily at Mello. The song was called “Get Your Beg On.” Sunshine said she was working on an album for release the following year. She was also getting married. When I asked to whom, she said, “My baby over there. My daddy. The number one. My king. My savior. My Jesus Christ.”
Five years later, I arrived back in Jackson one Friday in July, having driven across country. From the freeway, Jackson looks like other small American cities—the usual gamut of franchise outlets and, off in the distance, a few small skyscrapers and civic buildings. But once you’re on the streets, it’s a different story. The downtown is bombed-out and dispossessed. The back roads run past boarded-up houses strangled with vines, distempered and damp-looking old billboards, nameless gas stations. The roads are humped, as though the fertility of the land on the banks of the Pearl River is pushing up from underneath, straining against the tarmac. The air is damp and everything is green, but there is something morbid about this abundance when the buildings are rundown and dead.
I’d made a plan to visit a nightclub called the Upper Level, which was hosting a freestyle competition. I wasn’t sure how to contact Mello, and I figured it would be a way to dip my toe back in the scene. Late in the evening I met up with one of the club’s promoters, Chris “Big Yayo” Mabry, at a branch of Red Lobster. Yayo was thirty-three, in a red lumberjack shirt and jeans, wearing a discreet diamond earring. He described his style as “ghetto nerd.” “I’m cool in the hood, cool in the boardroom too,” he said.
We reached the club at around eleven thirty, when it was hitting its stride: loud, dark, smoky, and packed with two or three hundred people. Everyone was moving, bouncing, waving his arms, rapping along to the crunk records. From time to time, the music would drop out and the crowd would shout the words.
Back off bitch!
Get the fuck out the way!
Whatchoo lookin’ at, nigga?
Whatchoo lookin’ at, nigga?
Throw it up!
Throw it up!
I made my way across the dance floor, following Yayo like a man trekking across a crevasse in a blizzard, wary of stepping on anyone’s feet, spilling any drinks, making unwanted eye contact. Not that I thought I was in danger of starting any “static,” but I felt self-conscious and slightly foolish: the only white person there, in my western-wear shirt, my scuffed boots, carrying my effeminate satchel and my notebook. I reflected that I couldn’t have looked much more out of place if I’d been wearing my old prep school uniform.
Yayo and I arrived at the DJ booth, a walled-off enclosure. He introduced me to the manager of the club, Tonarri, and the DJs Zigzag and Ra-Ra. Tonarri offered me a cognac. I knocked it back and my head quivered. Then Ra-Ra got on the PA and said, “We got Louis here from London. We gon’ show him how we represent right here in the Upper Level. We goin’ international tonight, man!”
A little later Yayo and I made our way back out into the storm to meet some of the contestants in the freestyle competition. He rounded up the host, a towering ex-con with gold teeth called Westside Al Capone, and a couple of the amateur rappers, and we went into a quieter VIP area. One of the rappers, a goofy kid with splayed teeth, gave his name as Wamp. He said it stood for “Whoop Ass Many Places.” He wasn’t competing tonight, though. “I lost my voice,” he said.
“How did you lose it?”
“Rappin’. I rap all the time.”
“What do you do when you’re not rapping?”
“Rap. Man, I’m twenty-one. I got over three hundred songs wrote.”
Another rapper, called Charlie Wallace, performed under the name LYLC. “It just mean ‘Lil’ C,’” he said, when I asked what it stood for. Charlie had won the competition for the last two weeks running. Twenty-three, nice-looking, wearing a baggy red T-shirt with the slain rapper Notorious B.I.G. on it, he was there with his “manager” (I use the term loosely) Tommy Watts, who was colorcoordinated in beige tracksuit, beige cap, and aviator sunglasses.
Charlie said he worked at a supermarket called Sav-A-Lot, stocking shelves and loading trucks. I was grateful to him for telling me his real job, which another, more established rapper might have regarded as damaging to his mystique. Charlie seemed tired of gangsta rap too. “I just think there’s too much of one concept. Ain’t nothing real. Ain’t nobody talkin’ about anything that can enlighten.”
Then Tommy the manager, seeming to feel he should do some managing, asked me about my project. What kind of book was it? What was it called? Normally I dodged this question, but I was starting to feel the effects of the cognac and I mentioned one of the titles I was considering, May Contain Traces of Nuts. I could see from Tommy’s expression that this was a mistake. “It’s a play on words,” I said. “Because we all like to go a little nuts every once in a while.”
“You think rappin’ is crazy?” Tommy asked.
I changed tack and began saying that my book was a kind of follow-up to a TV show I’d done. I mentioned “cultures” that are “outside the mainstream.” Tommy said nothing. I seemed to be digging myself deeper into a hole. Charlie took pity on me, piping up on my behalf, “Out of the mainstream, like he means Jackson rappers are out of the mainstream compared with a rapper like Ludacris in Atlanta.” Then to me, he said, “But you got to be careful coming from a Caucasian perspective. People are very sensitive about the meaning of words.”
“Especially, as a member of the quote unquote ‘dominant culture,’” I agreed.
But even this seemed a dangerous phrase, and as though to forestall Tommy’s objections, Charlie said, “Quote unquote! Quote unquote!”
The competition started around one thirty. Two rappers at a time went up on stage and took turns improvising verses that insulted their opponents, using the same beat. At the end, whoever got the loudest cheers won the round. The caliber of the competitors was hard to judge, given that the rapping was so fast and raucous many of the words were incomprehensible. In an early round between Brookhaven Pele and Lil’ Tony, Lil’ Tony began, “Well, nigga, first of all, you look like a frog / Long-haired motherfucker, lips hanging down like a dog.” Pele came back with a line about Tony having “shit-locks” in his hair. In a round between Dirty D and Lord Genius Marcel, Marcel began, “My nigga, my take on the rap game is serious / You remind me of my bitch when she on her period.”
Overall, the crowd seemed to favor the louder, more aggressive rappers, even when the words themselves weren’t clearly tailored to the occasion. A big part of it was intimidation. The rapper whose turn it was would jump around his opponent, bring his face close, getting “right up in his grill,” as the expression has it, while the passive party stared off into the middle distance. In round five, “Jeru” or possibly “J-roo” started by shouting, “Be for real, nigga, you ain’t no thug / That shit don’t fit you like OJ’s glove,” before being disqualified. “I done told you three motherfuckin’ times, no touching,” the host said. The final, between Dirty D and Charlie, went to two rounds, but there was no clear winner. By this time, my second cognac was kicking in and I was having trouble following the proceedings. Then suddenly, the competition was over. A draw, apparently. The music came back on: Lil’ Jon shouting, “Get crunk in this bitch.”
I was about ready to leave, but I kept being approached by rappers who’d heard I was a reporter and wanted to give me their phone numbers. In the VIP area, I was interviewing a pair called Two-twelve and Q, both friendly, both looking extremely stoned, when some bouncers dragged a kid outside. Then a little pack of young men chased another man round the corner. I cowered behind the bar, convinced a gunfight was moments away. But the skirmish was over quite quickly and I reflected it was no more violent than the fights one saw in West London on a Friday night. Just as I was thinking this, my gaze settled on a familiar face.
It was Mello, but a different Mello. Gone were the tailored three-piece suit and bowler hat. Now he had on a boxy tan-colored shirt, tan trousers, both pressed and pristine, and a backwards baseball cap. I wondered if he’d seen me. Conspicuous as I was, I found it hard to believe he hadn’t. I went up to him and said hi.
“Louis, man, I been tryin’ to get to you!” he said. “I been on a righteous pilgrimage. I sponsor after-school programs, Little League baseball. I’m the George Steinbrenner of Little League. I’m like the Moses of the Ghetto saying, ‘Follow me out of Egypt.’”
He was oddly incurious about what I was doing there. I’d thought he might say. “So what brings you down this way?” Perhaps he assumed I’d been living in Jackson for the past five years and our paths simply hadn’t crossed.
It was too loud and chaotic to have much more of a conversation. But I took Mello’s numbers, and two days later I visited him at the studio where he was laying down tracks for a new album.
I hadn’t actually given too much thought to what I was expecting from the encounter with Mello. I may have been slightly naive, but since I basically liked him—or remembered liking him—I assumed he might like me too and I imagined that the meeting would be unproblematic, like two friends getting together. I wanted to get to know the real person, to see him at home, to meet his stable of women in less artificial conditions, maybe even meet his family. For some reason I didn’t ask myself why, given that Mello had stayed in character during my entire first visit, he would suddenly want to reveal himself.
The studio was a smart, custom-built facility, with padded doors and blonde wood, vast boards of knobs and switches and recessed TV screens. The control room resembled the bridge of a spaceship. In the corridors were framed photographs of local gospel singers. Mello was standing at the mike wearing a Detroit Lions sports shirt and a backwards baseball cap, sipping an energy drink. “We got a refrigerator full of Red Bull,” he said. “Y’all drink that up there in London? I got some good herb from Mother Earth, too, if you need some! Ha ha ha!” His two front teeth were gold, his face faintly pock-marked. He was in constant motion, and there was a gracefulness to his conversational gestures, the way he bobbed his head and swept his hands.
The track he was recording was called “Stop Lyin’.”
You bustin’ heads to the white meat? Nigga, stop lyin’!
You pimpin’ hoes like Mello T? Nigga, stop lyin’!
You movin’ keys and you movin’ trees? Nigga, stop lyin’!
You say you payin’ off the po-lice? Nigga, stop lyin’!
During a break, I told Mello about my reunion visits. I mentioned I’d heard he’d recorded a track for kids called “If You Try You Can Do It.” Then I asked about the lyrics to this new track, which, truth be told, sounded more like the old pimping Mello than the new positive one I’d heard about.
But Mello glossed the lyrics as a plea for rappers to tone down their music: not to rap about selling drugs if they’d never sold drugs. “I’m tryin’ to tell the kids, they might be focusing on, ‘I wanna be like him.’ But I’m letting them know he didn’t get that car or that video and them girls slangin’ no dope. He ain’t never shot nobody. I don’t want no more thugs or gangstas. I’d rather develop congressmens and doctors.” On a flight of eloquence, Mello went on to decry the system that creates poverty, “Where ten percent of the population runs the ninety.” Then, somewhat confusingly, having just called for more black professionals and fewer thugs, he began lambasting black politicians, lawyers, and doctors as “sellouts.” “But you know, I’m a honky-tonk killer and I’m comin’ to kill the sellout!”
It was too exhausting to take issue with the contradiction, so I ignored it, and asked if he was still pimping. This led to a long disquisition on the nature of pimping, the fact that George Bush was a pimp, that I too was a kind of pimp, that I was pimping every time I went on TV, which culminated in Mello issuing a plea for any women interested in prostitution to give him a call. “So if they some females out there worldwide who really want to go from zero to a whole lotta zeros, they can holler at me.’Cause pimpin’ and hoin’ is the best thing goin’! Ha ha ha!”
I seemed to be back at square one with Mello—a place of highflown rhetoric and boasts that might or might not hide some reality underneath.
Three other rappers arrived: an ex-crack dealer named Donnie Money; another pimp named J-Mack; and Ice Cold, a family man who laid epoxy floors for a living. Donnie put down a verse for “Stop Lyin’.” Then Ice Cold recorded a hook for a new track, about friends who become envious when drunk. A few hours later, their parts done, they left—and then something strange happened. Now that it was just me and Mello, his tone softened. His posturing melted away and he spoke lovingly about his two daughters, aged two and eight—the younger one by Sunshine, the older from a previous relationship with a schoolteacher. He mentioned he’d had run-ins with the law since I’d last seen him, been charged with homicide and making pornography. He spoke vaguely about it all, but I sensed it had scared him. Oddly, the legal problems had come at a time when he was straightening out, he said. His father had died, which had prompted him to think about his life. He’d started coaching Little League, teaching after-school reading programs. “Yeah, baby, I been tryin’ to be a hundred percent square. I just want to be a good father.”
And like that, we began making plans for the coming week. He offered to show me his house, his neighborhood, introduce me to his friends. He said he had a little poster board he brings when he speaks at high schools showing the names and photos of all his friends who died before they reached twenty-one. “I tell them ‘He died at sixteen, he died at eighteen, he died at nineteen. But all of them dropped out of school.’” I could meet Sunshine again too. She was in Chicago but would be back on Tuesday. Only his two daughters were off-limits. “For security reasons.”
Then he disappeared. I tried his cell phone, left messages. No reply. “This is Mello T,” his message went. “You know I’m out there tryin’ to chase that cheddar,’cause cheddar sho’nuff make it better. So just leave your name at the tone and I’ll get right back to ya.”
After a day and a half lounging at my motel, writing up my notes, waiting for him to call back, I made other plans. I arranged with a rapper named Coup Dada to visit one of Jackson’s bad areas, a neighborhood called Wood Street. I’d recently met Coup Dada as part of a musical collective called US From Dirrt. Interestingly, their latest release, I’m a Hater, was a “beef ” record—it contained a dis of the one Jackson rapper to make it big internationally, David Banner. “Mississippi superstar / You know just who you are,” they rapped. They threatened to vandalize Banner’s luxurious Jackson house, specifying that they would send a goon squad to piss on Banner’s couch, then shit in his fridge, before finishing him off “execution-style with a dirty twenty-two.”
And yet US From Dirrt had seemed a modest and obliging bunch, thoughtful, unflashily dressed, just grateful for an opportunity to sound off to a visiting journalist. Coup in particular had struck me as sparky and playful. Dark-skinned and almond-eyed, twenty-something, his hair in a do-rag, he’d acknowledged that much rap was self-destructive. He’d admitted that some rappers became more out-of-control and lawless as they became more successful, seeming to want to imitate their lyrics to buttress their credibility. But then he had added, with a note of ironical indignation in his voice, “But even if what you’re implying is true, that rap is self-destructive, these guys get filthy rich before they self-destruct! So it’s still there for us! This the last great movement for us. This is our political party. It’s a hip-hop party, but it’s our party.”
Coup seemed a sensible choice as a guide around Wood Street since he’d grown up there. The journalist Charlie Braxton tried to dissuade me from going. “Wood Street?” Charlie said. “No, no, no, Louis. No, Louis. No. They shoot cops. You don’t want to go, Louis. They’ll smell tourist on you. You know what they call Wood Street? The area of terror!“ But I went anyway, meeting Coup late one morning at his mother’s house.
Though she’d raised him in Wood Street, Coup’s mother had recently moved to a nicer area, where the only sign of poverty was the age of the cars. A battered Buick with a smashed tail light was in her garage. Inside he introduced her to me as “Ma-Bay,” a tough-looking forty-three-year-old, in gray sweat shorts and sweat top, hair straightened and pulled back severely. She had a gold tooth, which looked odd on an older person. She was a security officer at a local college. Coup said she also used to own a bar in Wood Street.
The house was tidy and sparsely furnished. Candles, inspirational posters on the walls; the lyrics of “Amazing Grace” and a prose poem called “The Miracle of Friendship.” We stood by her dining table, next to the kitchen. She called me “sir” and didn’t ask me to sit down or offer me water. As a white person and a journalist, I realized I represented something. I must have seemed like a social worker or a government inspector.
Ma-Bay downplayed the dangerousness of Wood Street. “It was a good area twenty years ago,” she said. “It’s getting back where it started from. If you not in no gang or anything, you don’t represent anything, you not going to have any problem.”
“I heard they shoot cops.”
“They never shot no police there,” Ma-Bay said.
“That’s ridiculous,” Coup said.
But once we were outside the house, Coup said, “My mom said we could go anywhere in the neighborhood, but that ain’t strictly true. She doesn’t like it when people speak bad about where she from, because that like speaking bad about her, her family.” Then, apropos of his mother, he commented mysteriously, “Maybe we just been speaking to one of the biggest players in the area, no one would tell you.”
This remark set the tone for the afternoon, which turned into a kind of litany of coded answers and circumspection. He wouldn’t tell me his age, though that may have been for the usual show business reasons. He was wearing a T-shirt with a picture of one of his dead homies on it, but he didn’t want to talk about it. Then, speaking about his wife and their four kids, who were living in Kansas City, he said, “She felt it would be better to shield them completely away from it by living in another area than the one I was brought up in. Because I might have made a lot of enemies along the way. Not saying that I have. But I don’t have any of those in Kansas City.
“This is Wood Street. This is the end I can take you to.”
We’d driven onto a rutted road. The only houses I could see were abandoned shotgun shacks with metal chain-link fences round them, and vacant lots where houses had been torn down, overgrown with vines, tall grass, saplings. We parked next to Coup’s uncle’s house and got out.
Wood Street itself ran parallel to a railroad track on one side and a creek on the other. At one end, it was bounded by a road bridge. Cut off on three sides, the neighborhood felt abandoned and stagnant. The houses, or at least the ones that remained, were wooden shacks on brick pilings, leaning and peeling and dilapidated, so broken-down they looked art-directed, like the set of a horror film. Mailboxes on posts at crazy angles, patched-up mesh over the porches, sofas on porches. Still, in the heat, there was a pleasant lazy mood. The only noise was the buzz of insects in the long grass. As we walked, Coup said again and again, “That’s another street I can’t take you to. I can go there, I just can’t take you up there . . . All these streets lead to Wood Street. These niggas gon’ call me and ask who I was with.”
As vivacious as he’d been before, he seemed to have become unsettled by his mother’s caginess. He worried about what it was appropriate to say, feeling it was disrespectful to his neighborhood to talk about the crime and the desperation. “I never seen any drugs in the hood,” he said, bizarrely. “The white man has taught me about hypocrisy. I learned what true mafia-ism is.” For me it was frustrating, since I’d been expecting a kind of ghetto safari. But it was laudable, too, his unwillingness to merchandise affliction. His sense that rap, for all its pitfalls, was a black movement seemed to extend to the hood and its lawlessness too. He felt protective.
On the way back to the car, we bumped into Coup’s uncle, a skinny, haunted-looking man in jeans and T-shirt. I told him I was a journalist interviewing Coup about his music. “My uncle thought I was serving you,” Coup said later, meaning selling me drugs. “Did you see how shocked my uncle was? See how he was smilin’? ‘You rappin’?’”
As we were driving out of the neighborhood, an expensivelooking four-by-four appeared behind us. “Shit, we bein’ tailed,” Coup said. He seemed nervous. I wondered if he was being melodramatic, but I was a little nervous too. There was no question the vehicle was following us. Then it slowed down, stopped, and turned around. Coup’s confidence returned and he said, “Nobody gon’ question Ma-Bay’s son. When the boys realized who it was in the car, now they think I’m serving you.”
Finally, almost out of exasperation about everything he felt he couldn’t say, Coup broke out, “For bling bling, every bling that was on my neck and on my homie’s neck, somebody died for that. Blood was shed for that. And I’m not going to glorify it . . . What you hear in gangsta rap? Our lives is worse than that.” He spat out the “t” of “that.” “So it’s nothing to be glorified.”
It had been a frustrating encounter. I found in my own journalistic attitude and hunger for war stories an echo of the suburban appetite for gangsta rap itself. That ghetto kids should get caught up in the drama of being gangsta seemed eminently understandable when I myself found it so involving, even at third-hand.
Back at my motel, I checked my messages, and found that Mello had called.
I met him down at the studio again, where Ice Cold was recording more tracks for his debut album. We sat at the back while Ice did his vocals. I didn’t like to confront Mello about his disappearance. Something in his manner discouraged direct approaches—a quiet authority which I imagined was one of the things that qualified him as a pimp.
Unbidden, he mentioned he’d been down in Mobile, Alabama, pushing various records he and his “circle” were working on. I took this as a partial explanation for his unavailability. He expanded on some of the themes of our encounter earlier in the week, talking about the tribulations that had been visited on him. “I’m still blessed to be here in the flesh. Hell came to me on Earth the last four years. It’s been a test. It’s like what Job went through in the Bible.” He said he was still “twenty percent” into pimping but he was trying to go straight. “I been playing it under the radar,” he said. “Really my whole thing lately has been surviving. As soon as I get my first record deal, I’m out of everything.” He sounded one other note, to do with our documentary, seeming to say that he felt it hadn’t helped him. He implied that since his career hadn’t been advanced by the show we made, what advantage was there to being in a book? But his manner was so indirect, I didn’t fully understand what he meant until later. We made another arrangement to see his neighborhood.
Then he went quiet again.
By now, I was getting used to Mello’s disappearances, so I didn’t wait around. I made arrangements to go to Atlanta, reasoning I could use the time to meet some of the new stars of the crunk scene.
In particular I was curious to meet David Banner, the subject of US From Dirrt’s dis record. His real name is Lavell Crump, and rather embarrassingly, I’d passed up a chance to feature him in my original documentary back in 2000 in favor of Mello. When I found Banner at the music studio, he brought it up, in a spirit of good-natured badinage. “Five years ago, y’all wasn’t interested in me, I remember that,” he said. A big beefy man, maybe six-feetthree or -four, with an unruly beard, he was putting the finishing touches to his new album, Certified. The track he was working on, which he listened to at deafening volume, went, “This is for the thug niggas / All the pimps and the drug dealers / Thieves and the motherfucking killers.”
Unlike Mello, Banner is someone with whom it is relatively easy to draw the line between persona and real person. On his albums he raps about pimping and stomping bitches, but he is in fact highly educated, a former schoolteacher and student-body president, who is, as he put it, “a semester and a thesis away” from his master’s degree. In between making tweaks on a track where the phrase “that’s why we get crunk in this bitch” was fractionally too low in the mix, Banner lamented the double standard that dictated that rappers should have experienced firsthand the episodes they describe in their raps. “You don’t go to Will Smith and see if he really can fly a flying saucer before he does Independence Day. And besides, the person who really did those things may not be the best storyteller.” And yet even Banner, with his studious bent, wasn’t immune to hip-hop machismo. He hinted that he might have a criminal background that he couldn’t reveal (“I would never tell about the things I really did”) and was a little sheepish about having been a teacher.
I asked whether he’d seen the photo of Young Jeezy with a snowman medallion. Banner hemmed and hawed, presumably not wishing to criticize a peer. Then, moments later, Banner said, “Speak of!” and who should walk in but Young Jeezy himself, wearing a long baggy sports jersey with his name on it—though no snowman medallion. He was accompanied by a tall, older man, his manager, Coach K. He’d come to talk to Banner about a track he was producing for his forthcoming debut album, Let’s Get It: Thug Motivation 101.
This was an unexpected opportunity: a chance to interview the gangsta of the hour. By now, I was a little exasperated with Banner. I had the sense he wasn’t too sure who he was supposed to be, that he felt a responsibility to enact certain gangsta poses and express solidarity with the streets, but that they didn’t fit him that well. I was starting to remember why I hadn’t wanted to interview him in 2000. So I took Coach K’s number and a little later we rendezvoused in the lobby of another recording studio. Young Jeezy was indisposed, working in the studio, so I chatted to Coach instead. He seemed proud that Jeezy had done many of the things he described on record. He said the forthcoming album would include a “book” by Jeezy on the “rules of thugging.”
“They makin’ so much money,” Coach went on. “Jeezy does four or five shows a week. That’s $40,000 a week, just from shows.”
As we talked, a very dark-skinned young man with a brooding, suspicious air passed back and forth through the lobby. Coach introduced him as Kinky, the co-owner of Jeezy’s label, Corporate Thugz Entertainment. He was twenty-four, wearing a plain white T-shirt, baggy jean shorts, and a watch that cost $28,000. Finding out I was a journalist, he relaxed a little—I think he’d assumed I was a policeman. I asked how he’d met Jeezy and he said “boot camp.”
“The army?” I asked.
“Jail.”
“What were you in for?”
“Shit I had no business doing.”
Kinky welcomed the resurgence of gangsta rap. “Jeezy doesn’t talk about the glamour,” he said. “He talks about the struggle. People tired of hearing the fake.”
“Do you ever worry it could go too gangsta?”
“Be no such thing as too gangsta,” Kinky said. “Fuck a nigga! When it come to my money, fuck another nigga! If it ain’t got to do with me or my click, fuck a nigga!”
“That seems a little mean-spirited,” I observed.
“It’s not mean-spirited,” Coach said. “When you come from nothing, you’ve got to look out for your own. Beefs in the hip-hop community are just the same as corporate beefs. Coke beefing with Pepsi.”
It seemed superfluous to point out that as yet no CEOs had been iced in executive drivebys.
The paradoxes of the gangsta rap world were enough to make my head hurt. How odd that of all the worlds I’d covered it was this one, where I was actually a fan of the music, that I felt the most distance and suspicion. I saw the love of gangsta poses as an understandable response to the feeling of disenfranchisement. But to them, I was an outsider. In no other story did I sense so much closing of ranks against me, so much reluctance to criticize any of their own. I compared it with the porn world, where directors, actors, and ex-actors had no problem sounding off on the excesses of the business. Here it was different. Even though I was sympathetic, skin color still got in the way. It was that simple. The trust wasn’t there, because I was white and they were black.
I drove back to Jackson, and two days later Mello called. He was down at a strip club called Babe’s, celebrating his thirty-first birthday. I felt flattered to be invited. I bought some champagne as a gift and headed down. But there was no party. I found him sitting on a stool in a quiet corner, working his way through a bottle of cognac. He was half-drunk, and any misgivings about talking about pimping had vanished. Now his manner was swaggering and unabashed. He gestured at a young blonde stripper named Kay, who he said wanted to join his stable of women. “She call me all the time, but she got to prove she worthy to know me. She fascinated with me. She want to be with me. But if she gon’ be with me, then she got to love money a little bit mo’. Heh heh.” Kay seemed drunk and oblivious to these claims.
“She about to be my number four,” he went on. “I remember at one time I had five living with me and Sunshine. Now I got Sunshine plus two others. I want seven hundred, like Solomon. It ain’t about force with me, it about choice. If she choose me, cool. If she don’t choose me, that’s cool too.”
As the evening wore on, Mello became drunker and more grandiose. “They can’t lock me up right now because God won’t let’em,” he said. “Anybody that could talk was lined in chalk.” He took a sip of his Hennessy. “I’d love to have a place like this. I got some politicians, I’m going to have to either pay’em or kill’em. I’d rather pay’em, but I don’t have no problem with killing’em.” Blown back and forth by crosswinds of rhetoric, he alternately celebrated and lamented his lifestyle. Having just announced that he lived to make his stable of women greater, he said, “This shit is boring to me. This life is boring to me. I want your life, man.”
“I went to bed last night at eleven thirty and did a crossword puzzle,” I said.
“I would love to go to bed at eleven thirty and do a crossword puzzle, man. I would love that. I want to be square and do crossword puzzles, all that kind of shit. But I’m in love with the game.” I was as confused as ever by Mello, but in a moment of clarity my confusion crystallized into a single, simple question. “Do you hate the game or do you love it?” I asked.
“I hate the game, but I love to do it.”
It was either a profound comment on human psychology and the contradictory impulses we all feel, or it was nonsense, I wasn’t sure which. But I reflected that whether someone is being hypocritical or not is, in some instances, a question of style—by other names, it can be called irony or role-playing. Mello was capable of taking up a variety of opposed positions without shame or guilt because it was never clear how serious he was being. His personas came and went like songs on a jukebox, the theme depending on the occasion. But as long as I found him entertaining, I had to some degree surrendered my right to judge him.
I thought about the frustrations of seeing him again. In the end, he had no interest in revealing his real life. For him, our relationship was strictly show business. Given that he was a pimp, someone willing to subject the most intimate parts of human life to the marketplace, I wondered how I could have expected otherwise. The Mello he might have been willing to show me—the swaggering fancy man of the first visit—was cowed by his run-ins with the law. The Mello I wanted to meet—the behind-thescenes man, the husband and father, whose life was presumably domestic and unglamorous—would have undermined his mystique and maybe hurt his career.
And so I was conceding defeat. He might be a bully or a criminal or a model citizen or someone deprived of other choices in life—but I wasn’t going to find out.
The next day, I began my long journey back West. As I drove, I thought of Coup’s remark, “This is the last great movement for us. This is our political party.” Raised in an environment without money or opportunity, gangsta rappers have created a ruthless code of honor. Observing the code means showing no weakness; being prepared to fight for yourself and your circle; never saying too much. That the lifestyle is seductive is shown by the popularity of the records describing it: Whether it’s lived or listened to, at root the appeal is the same. Only the stakes differ. And so we keep on, hating it, loving it.