SwampDiggers

How 88rising Is Making a Place for Asians in Hip-Hop

Tis — 2018-05-17T09:56:56Z

With artists like Rich Brian and Higher Brothers, Sean Miyashiro's company is an authority on how to create pop-culture crossovers.

A few years ago, Kris Wu decided that he wanted to be known as a rapper. Wu, who is twenty-six, grew up in Canada and in China, where he is famous as an actor, singer, and model. In middle school, he had become a devotee of N.B.A. basketball and, subsequently, of hip-hop. After a stint in the Korean pop group EXO, he became a judge on “Rap of China,” a hugely successful reality show about aspiring rappers. (His catchphrase, delivered in Mandarin, was “Do you even freestyle ?”) Like many Asian superstars, who are mobbed at home yet walk around Manhattan in relative anonymity, he wanted to measure himself against American artists.

In February, 2016, Wu played in the celebrity game at the N.B.A.'s All-Star Weekend, in Toronto. There, he met Sean Miyashiro. A few months earlier, Miyashiro had raised money to start 88rising, a company that he pitched as “Vice for Asian culture.” For decades, hip-hop has been central to young Americans' understanding of what is cool, and Miyashiro knew that, increasingly, this was also the case in Asia. He wanted to document that culture, but he wanted to make things that shaped it, too. That summer, when Wu was working on music in Los Angeles, Miyashiro connected him with the Houston rapper Travis Scott. It wasn't hard to persuade Scott to work with him. “This motherfucker right here,” Scott recalled, referring to Wu, “called me from a long-distance number and was, like, ‘Ayo, I got this joint for you.' And I was, like, ‘Ayo, motherfucker, I seen you in like a hundred movies.' ”

Last October, at the 88rising offices in New York, Miyashiro and Wu were preparing for the release of “Deserve,” the result of the collaboration. On the track, Wu and Scott list the various forms of attention that their women warrant, including a spot on a club's guest list, a French kiss, and the song itself. Wu adopts Scott's signature style, which is melodic, sleazy, and heavily reliant on Auto-Tune. Miyashiro was anxious to see how the single would be received. “It's how to sell a thought,” he said, of promoting the song. “A new perception. That's the opportunity for Kris, and for us as a company.” Asian fans rarely see their stars venture outside their regional hip-hop ecosystems, let alone stand alongside an established figure like Scott. “But, if they see someone that looks like them do it, then it changes the whole perception, just like Obama did for African-Americans,” Miyashiro said. “Now you can really be fuckin' anything.”

Against a backdrop of twentysomethings draped in minimalist streetwear, Miyashiro, who was wearing a fitted shirt with a dark floral pattern and a baseball cap with a fluorescent stripe, looked only slightly more adult. He's thirty-six, but his wispy mustache and sideburns make him look much younger. As he moved around the office, he stopped to peer over the shoulder of an employee who was experimenting with a logo typeface. “I want that to look like a hologram, like on New Era caps,” he told him. Everyone was praised as “fire,” a “badass,” or, occasionally, a “genius.”

In just two years, 88rising, which also has an office in Los Angeles and a small team in Shanghai, has become an authority on how to create Asian and American pop-culture crossovers. The company understands how to sell Asian artists, like Wu, to American audiences. Similarly, it offers a vision of Asian cool to industries—music, advertising, fashion, television—that are desperate to be cool in Asia. Jonathan Park, a Korean-American rapper who performs as Dumbfoundead, has been associated with 88rising since its beginning. “Everybody wants to get into Asia,” he told me. Miyashiro, he added, had been “pulling that card early on and selling people on that Asia dream.”

“There's this kind of contagious optimism about his vision,” Jeremy Erlich, an executive at Interscope Records, told me about Miyashiro. “I think, to a large extent, Western music companies see the huge potential in China and are really focussed on cracking the code.”

On the floor of Miyashiro's office is a neon 88rising logo, which features the number 88 and the Chinese characters for “rising.” In Chinese, eighty-eight means “double happiness.” (To neo-Nazis, the number has come to stand for “Heil Hitler.”) His glass desk is so long that it barely fits in the room, but there are no papers on it. (“Why would we need paper, bro ?” he said.) On the walls are framed photos of 88rising's core roster : Joji, a Japanese-born singer whose graceful and heartbroken music belies his past as a hugely successful YouTube comedian ; Keith Ape, a Korean rapper known for his rowdy, shrill style ; the Higher Brothers, a streetwear-obsessed rap group from China who named themselves for the Chinese electronics giant Haier ; and Brian Imanuel, an Indonesian rapper known as Rich Chigga. Though Wu was probably more famous than all of them put together, it was a world that he wanted to be a part of. “Where's my picture, bro ?” Wu asked politely, as he squeezed behind Miyashiro's desk. He was dressed casually, with only subtle allusions to his trendy tastes—a Supreme x TNF baseball cap, rare Nikes—and was accompanied by his mother, his manager, and a couple of friends.

Miyashiro believed that Wu had a rare chance to penetrate the American rap charts, as long as he was careful. Wu's team had initially wanted him to appear on shows like “Good Morning America.” Miyashiro told me, “I'm, like, ‘Bro, that's not gonna mean shit. That's not gonna do a goddam thing for you, bro.' ” Instead, he had a strategy for getting Wu all the “dope press looks” at hip-hop-oriented outlets like XXL and Complex.

“Deserve” was scheduled to première on Zane Lowe's show on Beats 1, Apple Music's streaming-radio service, and Wu began to record videos on Instagram to promote the song. He looked at himself in his phone's camera and tried to find the best angle. He recited the script, throwing in his own ad-libs. (“Ye-e-eah,” “Love, love.”) It felt a little stiff, so Miyashiro ran through the lines a few times, and Wu mimicked his swaggering intonation.

The next day, Miyashiro sat in a small conference room with a few employees. His assistant projected her computer onto a screen. There were about thirty tabs open. Miyashiro wanted to see the rate at which people were tweeting about the song, which Lowe would be playing in minutes. “Does anybody have Apple Music ?” he said. “Where does Zane Lowe play ?”

Hip-hop Web sites began posting about the song. “Oh, shit,” Miyashiro said. “Pitchfork just fuckin' posted it. That's wild shit. God damn.” It was twelve-thirty. They waited for Travis Scott to wake up, so that he could tweet about the single.

Wu, his mother, and his manager monitored the song's progress on their phones between promotional appearances. They were in an Uber when it reached the top of the charts, and they looked up and screamed. Wu was the first Chinese artist ever to top iTunes' rap charts, and the second Asian, after Psy, whose “Gangnam Style” was a novelty hit in 2012. Wu also became a top trending topic on the Chinese social-media network Weibo.

At 88rising's offices, Miyashiro was too exhausted to bask in this new success. He was overseeing the song's global distribution, its promotion across a range of social platforms, and an arsenal of related memes. He flopped down on the couch in his office and tried to post a picture on 88rising's Instagram account, but it wasn't working. It was strange, he said, because Instagram had verified the account that morning. He found the e-mail and showed it to me. I pointed out that it was a phishing scam ; the account was being controlled by a hacker. “It's fuckin' up my whole vibe right now,” he exclaimed. As some no-name rappers from the Bay Area diverted 88rising's Instagram traffic to their own account, I asked if 88rising had any cybersecurity protocols. “Shit,” Miyashiro said, lightening up for a moment. “We're too hip-hop for that.”

Miyashiro has a hard time explaining what, exactly, 88rising does. We were eating curry at a Japanese restaurant around the corner from the office. “C.A.A. has talent,” he said. “They're an agent business. Vice has a great media platform.” Before finishing his thought, he looked down at his phone and laughed, and asked if he could take the call. The screen read “Migos,” the popular Atlanta rap group. After a short conversation, in which every sentence was punctuated with “bro,” he switched back to cogent C.E.O.-speak. “People from the business world say, ‘Hey, Sean, you should start positioning your company as this new hybrid media company that can play in these different mediums and make it work together.' I'm, like, ‘Yeah, that's what we're doing.' ”

Miyashiro's ascent is a symbol of the current tumult in the music industry. Recording sales are on a permanent decline, but there's still money to be made from catchy songs, particularly if you have a vision for whom to collaborate with, or how to reach new markets. Like a traditional talent-management company, 88rising oversees the careers of a few rappers and singers, and, like a record label, it releases and distributes music. Like a media startup, it produces video content for its artists and other clients. These videos are inventive and polished, ranging from short, viral memes and commercials to music videos and feature-length documentaries. They do basic things in a clever way, from interviews in virtual-reality settings to live performances in Koreatown karaoke bars. (One of the best features the rapper Lil Yachty trying to freestyle over a song by the K-pop group Big Bang.)

Miyashiro was raised in San Jose, California. His father, who is Japanese, worked as a mechanical engineer, and his mother, who is Korean, mostly stayed at home. Miyashiro went to the type of Silicon Valley high school that has a sizable and competitive Asian-American population, and where most students go on to four-year colleges. But he lacked focus. He spent a lot of time hanging out with friends whom he describes as “wannabe” Asian gangsters, looking tough in the parking lots of bubble-tea cafés.

Miyashiro enrolled at San Jose State University, but he would often drive to campus, circle the parking lot, and, if he couldn't find a space, go home. One day, he realized that the university's student clubs staged concerts. He visited African-American fraternities and Asian Christian groups, and began putting on the shows they wanted to see. He also started to throw warehouse parties in Santa Clara. He stopped attending classes, and he turned his work as a campus promoter into a string of marketing jobs in the Bay Area, including one for what he describes as a “social network for hipsters.” Eventually, he helped to launch Thump, Vice's onetime electronic-music site, where he brokered deals for corporate sponsors eager to align themselves with dance culture.

In 2015, Miyashiro left Thump, looking for his next challenge. One day, Jonathan Park, whom he'd begun managing, showed him the video for Keith Ape's “It G Ma,” an appealingly jagged and raw rap song. Miyashiro and Park got on FaceTime with Keith Ape, who was in South Korea, and persuaded him to come to the South by Southwest talent showcase, in Austin, Texas. Soon, Miyashiro was Ape's manager, too. Miyashiro drew on his industry contacts and, for a little less than ten thousand dollars, got Waka Flocka, A$AP Ferg, and Father to record a remix of “It G Ma” with Keith Ape and Park. Around this time, Miyashiro told a friend over dinner at Quarters Korean BBQ, in Los Angeles, that he wanted to build something. That night, the friend connected him to Allen DeBevoise, of Third Wave Partners, who became his first backer. “It was mad easy, bro,” Miyashiro told me. “It was easy as fuck. I'm being dead serious.”

DeBevoise shared Miyashiro's belief that a portal for Asian culture could serve both a long-ignored audience and the mainstream. “I heard his vision, and I said, ‘This is it,' ” DeBevoise recalled. “I was sold, probably, in twenty minutes.”

“One of Sean's strongest qualities is selling the dream,” Donnie Kwak, the 88rising Web site's first editor, recently told me. Kwak had worked at traditional media companies such as Complex and ESPN, and the idea of devoting himself to something Asian was appealing.

The new company had money, but for months Miyashiro, Kwak, and a handful of employees couldn't decide where to devote their resources : videos or essays, short form or investigative features, content production or artist management. They built a couple of Web sites but didn't publish them. Miyashiro was now living in student housing in the Bronx with his wife, a graduate student in virology at Einstein College. He worked out of a Dunkin' Donuts nearby, and took meetings in his car. “It was f— I was about to say it was fire,” he told me, growing solemn. “It wasn't fire. It was what it was. We didn't know what the fuck it was going to be.”

In early 2016, Brian Imanuel, as Rich Chigga, released a video for a rap song called “Dat Stick.” Over a menacing, squelching beat, Imanuel, a scrawny Asian with an exceptionally deep voice, fantasizes about driving a Maserati and killing cops. The song went viral, in part because of how incongruous (in the video, Imanuel wears a pink polo shirt and a fanny pack) and outrageous (he uses the N-word) it was. Imanuel, who was homeschooled in Jakarta, says that he learned English by watching YouTube videos. Miyashiro and Park, who had been following Imanuel on Vine, called him and offered to fly him to South by Southwest to perform. Imanuel said that he'd have to ask his mother—he was sixteen years old. She agreed, but he was unable to get a visa.

At the festival, Miyashiro, Park, and some 88rising employees set up a “shrine”—decorated with plants, Chinese guardian-lion statues, and candles—in an Austin warehouse, where they booked a string of up-and-coming rappers to perform and be interviewed. Behind the camera, Miyashiro asked them about their favorite anime characters, their impressions of Asia, and their reactions to a series of videos by Asian rappers, including Imanuel's.

88rising uploaded its first video to YouTube in May, 2016. It was a clip of the Brooklyn rapper Desiigner's “Panda,” filmed at the shrine, with Chinese subtitles—a cute, if self-exoticizing, way for 88rising to emphasize its Asian identity.

When “Dat Stick” went viral, it seemed like a testament to how easy it had become to make vaguely authentic-sounding rap music. Fans saw it as either a well-executed novelty hit or a well-aimed prank. Though Imanuel was a fluid, nimble rapper, the song didn't fetishize black culture as much as it frolicked within an outlandish, sex-and-violence-obsessed version of it ; it ended up feeling like mockery.

But Miyashiro believed that Imanuel was a kid from the other side of the world who didn't know any better. Imanuel had joined Twitter when he was ten, and he had always been drawn to irreverent humor. As the song grew more popular, he became apologetic about his use of the N-word, which he eventually promised never to use again, and also about his name, which he felt stuck with. Miyashiro did not dismiss the idea that people would find the name Rich Chigga offensive—some of them were on his staff—but, he told me in an e-mail, “this is a global culture whether anyone likes it or not and nobody can stop someone from loving something.”

For his follow-up, Imanuel wanted to release a song called “Hold My Strap.” But Miyashiro was afraid that another dose of gunplay make-believe would permanently entrench him as little more than a meme. Miyashiro felt that it would be smarter to release a video, made to address the “Dat Stick” controversy, called “Rappers React to Rich Chigga.” While people on Twitter argued about whether “Dat Stick” appropriated black culture, the reaction video posed a complicated question : What if other rappers liked “Dat Stick” ? When the video begins, many of the rappers seem confused, even speechless. “He even found a way to say ‘nigga' without saying it,” Meechy Darko, a member of Brooklyn's Flatbush Zombies, says. “They dead-ass serious ?” 21 Savage asks, as Imanuel and his friends wave guns and mug at the camera. But, by the song's end, they welcome him as a colleague. “This shit is fire,” Meechy Darko says. “I see the comedic side,” Cam'ron says, but “what he was spittin' was dope. His flow was tough.” Ghostface volunteers to do a remix with him.

There are other businesses trying to mediate between Asian and American music culture. Zhong.tv, a media company focussed on China's “urban millennials,” offers a more direct portal into Chinese hip-hop. The recently launched Banana Culture is an experiment in merging traditional K-pop management with a media company, and it is linked to the Wanda Group, one of China's largest entertainment conglomerates.

But 88rising is distinguished by its idiosyncratic tone and its up-to-the-nanosecond appreciation of hip-hop's youthful, Internet-driven trends. In the year and a half since “Rappers React to Rich Chigga,” the company has gone from documenting these underworlds to becoming a part of them. The staff began collaborating with new rappers such as XXXTentacion, Ski Mask the Slump God, and Killy. This was good business, and it also lent 88rising, as a predominantly Asian company in hip-hop, a kind of credibility. Its artists often borrow from the idioms of black culture, but in a way that's increasingly detached from the music's originating streets and struggles. Instead, their sensibility celebrates the free flow of the Internet, in which cultural crossovers should be fast, frictionless, and shorn of historical context.

Hip-hop is 88rising's core, but its periphery is always changing. Despite the global popularity of Japanese anime, Korean pop music, and Korean e-sports competitions, 88rising has been judicious about how it interacts with these preëxisting markers of Asian popular culture. Its early videos featured Asian beauty vloggers, electronic-dance-music d.j.s, and a radiantly weird philosopher-bodybuilder named Frank Yang. There are hypnotic videos starring a renowned Japanese mixologist whose cocktails resemble tiny terrariums, and a series in which a sushi chef makes onigiri—rice balls—that resemble the rapper Lil Uzi Vert or the K-pop star G-Dragon. Recently, 88rising began chiselling away at its dude-centric world view, hosting videos featuring the Korean-American dance producer and singer Yaeji, the Korean-American rock musician Japanese Breakfast, and the Japanese pop singer Rina Sawayama. This year, Miyashiro began managing the R. & B. singer AUGUST 08, the company's first non-Asian act.

Miyashiro said that the harshest critics of 88rising are often Asian-Americans. “Asian-Americans my age are typically scared,” he told me. “And when something starts to penetrate, like we are, for whatever reason, the Asian-Americans are most skeptical.” Given the relative scarcity of Asian-Americans in popular culture, it's understandable that expectations fall on those with some degree of clout—witness the anxieties that surrounded the success of the comedian Margaret Cho, in the nineties, or of the rapper Jin, in the two-thousands. Both were scrutinized by fellow Asian-Americans, many of whom were worried that they would bring negative representations to a broader audience. Miyashiro said, “They're, like, fearful of making sure that we don't offend anyone. Making sure that we're staying safe. Making sure we don't appropriate anything.”

He mentioned Niki, an Indonesian R. & B. singer who knew Imanuel in Jakarta. In a video that she had collaborated on with 88rising, the object of her affection is white. “There were these Reddit threads about this guy,” Miyashiro said. “Being, like—I'm not joking—‘What's up with 88rising having this white-male-Asian-female-type fetish shit ?' Some wild shit, bro.” Miyashiro said that, at the 88rising offices, the controversy reminded staffers of the power they had to shape perceptions of Asian people. But he noted that some of the Asian-American men in the office argued that it was up to those who felt emasculated to, as he said, “do something about it and be fuckin' fire.”

Miyashiro's assistant, a twenty-three-year-old from Queens named Cynthia Guo, told me, “I think, growing up, I was always made to feel that Asian culture wasn't cool.” On her desk was a stack of classic Asian-American history books, including Ronald Takaki's “Strangers from a Different Shore” and Helen Zia's “Asian American Dreams,” which she had read in college. When she found an internship posting for 88rising, she said, it was “like a dream come true,” adding, “There was no one brand I could pinpoint as this really cool Asian thing until 88rising.”

Phil Chen, an adviser at Horizons Ventures, an investment firm in Hong Kong, was one of 88rising's early backers. He told me that he had been initially skeptical of the company, because of its narrow focus on Asian and Asian-American culture. “I think the goal with assimilation, or trying to fit into the dominant culture, is you don't try to marginalize yourself,” he said. But, after Keith Ape and Rich Chigga were embraced by non-Asian audiences, he began to see things differently. Maybe 88rising could help Asians feel less “inferior,” he said, about their peripheral status in Western culture. Whenever he finds himself in an Uber in the U.S., he enjoys playing the driver songs by 88rising's artists. “They flip out,” he says. “It's just so fun for me, as an Asian, to see an Asian voice being celebrated.”

Before I started hanging out with Miyashiro, I had never truly understood what it means for “creative” to become a noun. Creatives can make a piece of art or an advertisement, but it's all the same, as long as it makes culture. They work toward outcomes rather than from intentions. (There was a moment when someone mentioned Breitbart, which Miyashiro had never heard of. He was interested in learning if its Web site did video in addition to written pieces.) As much time as I spend on the Internet, I had never felt so attuned to its whims as when Miyashiro would describe an idea so good that it was obviously destined to go viral. And the next time I visited it would have happened—it would be part of the culture.

In late October, Miyashiro was at the office, preparing for the company's annual board meeting. It was dinnertime, but everyone was working late on his presentation. Miyashiro said, “I can't decide whether to come professional or swag the fuck out on them.” He had news : he had just returned from Los Angeles, where he had discussed a partnership with a major record label that would insure much of his company's autonomy. “It's so sick,” he said. “It's the sickest deal ever.”

I asked if 88rising was a profitable business. Miyashiro thought about it for a moment. “In this game, it's more value-based or projection-based,” he said. “I don't even know if profitable means much in this shit anymore. Are you making revenue ? Are you scaling your audience ?” 88rising's fans are a constant preoccupation of Miyashiro's. “They take ownership,” he said. “No one's going to walk around and get a Complex tattoo, or a Vice tattoo. People are getting 88rising tattoos. On their body, bro. That's how we're different.”

Around the time when Miyashiro and his team were working on Kris Wu's single, another 88rising artist, Joji, who was born George Miller, appeared on “Hot Ones,” a popular Internet interview show in which guests answer questions while eating increasingly spicy chicken wings. Within a day, and with minimal promotion, it was one of the top trending videos on YouTube. Joji was formerly a YouTube skit-and-prank comedian famous for his characters Filthy Frank (a squawking, anti-P.C., antisocial nerd with a self-destructive streak) and Pink Guy (a sex-positive Lycra-clad alien with the same predilection for destruction, only he rapped, too). Joji was perhaps best known for his “Harlem Shake” meme, from 2013, which is set to Baauer's song of the same name. The thirty-five-second video begins with Pink Guy and three costumed friends thrusting their hips robotically, as the song rises toward a wobbly climax. When the beat drops, everyone begins dancing wildly, as though trying to convulse out of their clothes. At the height of the popularity of “Harlem Shake,” more than four thousand tribute videos were uploaded to YouTube every day. Ethan Klein, who runs the YouTube comedy channel H3H3, described Joji as the best YouTuber of all time.

But, for the past two or three years, Joji had just been going through the motions of his clownish career, turned off, he said, by the increasingly “toxic” Internet. He had begun recording music that was languid and uncontrollably sad, somewhat reminiscent of the British singer James Blake. But he occasionally wondered if the closest he'd come to committing to a music career were the novelty rap albums that he recorded as Pink Guy.

“Sean pulled me out of that slump,” Joji said. He had come to 88rising to discuss making viral videos, but when Miyashiro heard his demos he suggested that they focus on Joji's music.

Last fall, Joji and Miyashiro were at a studio in Brooklyn, working on a new song, tentatively called “Rising,” featuring Wu, Imanuel, Baauer, and the rapper Trippie Redd. “Bro, it's inspiring shit,” Miyashiro said. But Wu had recorded a new verse for it, which took up nearly half the song, and they had to figure out how to work around it.

Joji's début EP, “In Tongues,” was scheduled to be released the following day. As Miyashiro and the studio engineer discussed ways to restructure “Rising,” Joji bounced between his social-media accounts unconsciously, like an ex-smoker with permanently fidgety hands. “When I was heavy on the Internet, I was checking everything,” he said. “Stats, everything. Because in that world your value is determined by your numbers.” He was earnest, gracious, polite—qualities that his YouTube personae might have mocked.

Joji and Miyashiro brainstormed ideas for viral content to promote “In Tongues.” “When something blows up, and you made it, it's fucking fulfilling,” Miyashiro had told me. One of Joji's ideas for a meme involved a car full of tough “hood dudes” who are sobbing as his latest single plays. “Let's do that,” Miyashiro said. He called a professional meme-maker, who suggested synchronizing the music to short, repetitive clips. “I just need you to tell me your concept for the meme,” Miyashiro said to Joji, covering the receiver. Joji thought about it for a second. “Hard falls. Funny crying. Punching.”

A few nights later, Joji headed to Irving Plaza, for the New York date of Brian Imanuel's first American tour. Imanuel's upcoming single, “Crisis,” featured the grim, deadpan Atlanta rapper 21 Savage, who had been one of the more skeptical voices on “Rappers React to Rich Chigga.” 21's music is fierce, lumbering, and largely joyless, the seeming opposite of Imanuel's bouncy, Internet-honed sense of wit. Now 21 was dancing alongside Imanuel in a video, appearing to enjoy himself. “21 is cool, bro,” Miyashiro told me. “He genuinely likes Rich and us.”

In the first year that Imanuel and Miyashiro worked together, they mostly talked on the phone, which was complicated by the twelve-hour time difference between Jakarta and New York. They finally met last May, in Miami, where Imanuel performed at Rolling Loud, one of the biggest hip-hop festivals in the world. Backstage, Imanuel surprised the rapper Post Malone with a mariachi band that he had ordered using the mobile delivery service Post Mates. The band performed a buoyant rendition of Post Malone's single “Congratulations,” and soon a video of the stunt was trending on social media. Miyashiro told me that the clip initially grew out of a discussion with Post Mates about making a short video featuring Imanuel using the company's app to book the band. But someone standing nearby had captured the entire thing on his cell phone and uploaded it himself, thwarting the plan.

From politics to the pop charts, one of the conditions of contemporary life is our inability to distinguish organic popularity from movements that have been carefully engineered. The work of making something go viral is largely invisible. The entertainment business has always worked this way—an illusion of popularity can beget actual popularity. But, in the Internet age, the velocity of change outpaces our ability to process and reflect on it. When you're constantly dealing with effects, rather than nursing skepticism about causes, the stakes seem much higher. The amateur video had accomplished the initial gag's aims : it got people to think about Post Mates, and it made Imanuel seem like a sweet, endearing kid.

At Irving Plaza, fans arrived six hours early to be the first ones inside. The crowd was young, jubilant, and diverse, heavy on college students in a range of streetwear trends, from futuristic, utilitarian chic to vintage rap T-shirts older than they were. They chanted “Chigga ! Chigga !” before switching to “Brian ! Brian !” “These aren't K-pop pretty-boy motherfuckers,” Park told me, about 88rising's artists. “These are all the outcast, weirdo dudes. I think that's kinda refreshing, because I think every Asian's kinda felt like that, especially in America, whether you're an F.O.B. or a nerd, a weirdo, all these different things.”

Imanuel sat in front of a mirror in his dressing room, flanked by Miyashiro and Joji. He stared at his reflection, dancing and rapping along to the d.j.'s music. He seems comfortable in his own skin, like someone who grew up making faces on Snapchat and Vine. He said that he was feeling a little homesick after being on the road for so long. “When I was thirteen, I was super obsessed with this country,” he said. He had been in awe of the actors in the Indonesian action film “The Raid,” who parlayed its success into playing bit parts in Hollywood blockbusters. He spoke with a soft deference, as though this were the voice he reserved for adults. “I've always wanted to come here. I've seen everything on the Internet, really. It feels like a second home.”

Miyashiro, Joji, and Imanuel had a clubby rapport. The d.j. played Drake's “Know Yourself,” and they began talking about how the chorus—“Runnin' through the 6 with my woes”—had been a perfect impetus for viral videos involving Drake's woes, or running. They discussed memes in the way that a previous generation might have dissected movies or an episode of a sitcom. When Imanuel was ready to take the stage, he removed his hoodie, revealing a T-shirt that featured an illustration of himself. The crowd sang along to all his lyrics and knew all his ad-libs. An audience member held up a framed photograph of Imanuel as if it were a devotional offering. As Imanuel danced and leaped across the stage, his small frame seemed to expand. He had recently turned eighteen, and a few members of 88rising's staff stood in the wings, ready to wheel a giant cake onstage. Joji, wearing a Limp Bizkit baseball jersey, came out and sang a couple of songs from his EP. It had been out for only a few days, but the audience sang along to his songs, too.

Shortly before the holidays, I met Miyashiro at his home, in a part of the Upper East Side where someone wearing a leather jacket with the words “Road to Nowhere” across the back, as he was, really stands out. We waited in the lobby of his apartment for one of his employees to deliver a Christmas tree.

Imanuel, Joji, Keith Ape, and the Higher Brothers were at the end of an Asian tour that had sold out quickly. Miyashiro wanted to do big things in 2018. 88rising had already sold out concerts in San Francisco, Los Angeles, and New York. The staff were developing a television series. They are also working on a crew album called “88 Degrees and Rising,” which Miyashiro described as their version of Puff Daddy and the Family's “No Way Out,” from 1997, which featured the Notorious B.I.G., Lil' Kim, and other artists on the Bad Boy label. 88rising also wanted to look into curating its own festivals, including one in China. Miyashiro was no longer managing the company's social-media accounts himself.

We ended up at a nearby Italian restaurant. “It's so fire, drinking hot soup with you,” he said. He thought that, because I was from San Jose, too, I could appreciate the unlikeliness of his trajectory. “This is some New York shit.”

Another translation of the Chinese homophone for eighty-eight is that it means “fortune and good luck.” I asked Miyashiro how he would know if 88rising had succeeded. “I never have to be filthy rich,” he said. “That's not why we're doing this shit. It's more about : How do we contain this purity of the brand ?” 88rising had become an expression of Miyashiro—his style, his taste, his sense of humor. He didn't promote himself on a personal Twitter or Instagram account. Instead, he poured himself into 88rising. “I'd rather die than not continue this,” he said. “I feel like I'm high all the time, even though I'm sober.”

Miyashiro spent New Year's Eve at home. The next day, at 1 p.m., he posted on 88rising's Twitter account that Imanuel had changed his stage name to Brian. There was a link to an introspective new song called “See Me.” I talked to Miyashiro about an hour later. In late December, Imanuel had announced that his début album, “Amen,” would be coming out in February. The criticism around his name was fiercer than ever. After months of discussion, “he hit me up one morning,” Miyashiro said. “He was, like, ‘Yo, I want to change my name.' This was after we had had a million conversations. He sent me some screenshots of things that really got to him on Twitter. It finally made sense to him.” A couple of days later, Imanuel changed his name again, this time to Rich Brian.

In mid-January, 88rising was finally ready to release the single showcasing Imanuel, Kris Wu, and Joji, alongside Baauer and Trippie Redd. It was now called “18.” In the days leading up to its release, however, 88rising got caught in a social-media war among rabid pop fans in Asia. One of them had circulated an old 88rising image featuring a row of Asian flags, including that of Tibet, as a way of suggesting that the company was somehow anti-Chinese. It was a reminder of the cross-cultural knowledge required to credibly enter any Asian market. Around this time, Chinese censors began cracking down on rap lyrics, targeting some of the contestants who had been made famous by “Rap of China.” Miyashiro decided that “18” wasn't worth the potential drama. He released the single quietly, with only light promotion. Wu and 88rising have not worked together since.

Miyashiro turned his attention to Imanuel's album, and, on February 2nd, “Amen” became the first album by an Asian artist to top iTunes' hip-hop charts. Given the novelty of “Dat Stick,” few listeners could have anticipated the charm of “Amen,” which is filled with moments of teen-age innocence—one track is about Imanuel losing his virginity—and earnest contentment. But Miyashiro had seen it all along. “Brian's a musical genius,” he had told me the first time we met.

Just before the 88rising show at San Francisco's Warfield Theatre, Miyashiro texted to tell me that the reception to “Amen” was “a turning point for us.” A few seconds later, he texted again : “Or another one.” ♦
This article appears in the print edition of the March 26, 2018, issue, with the headline “Hip-Hop's New Frontier.”

author : Hua Hsu began contributing to The New Yorker in 2014, and became a staff writer in 2017.

YouTube & Chill : A Glimpse Into The World Of Lo-fi Hip-Hop

Tis — 2018-05-17T09:56:54Z

A scene without major stars or publicity has become a quiet force in music streaming.

In the corners of YouTube, thousands of viewers are tuned into a radio station featuring an endless loop of a .gif of an anime girl writing in her journal. She's soundtracked by hazy beats smothered in tape hiss, next to her is a chatroom with people from all over the world writing in multiple languages. Thousands of people have come to this stream for microgenre of music : lo-fi hip-hop.

“Lo-fi is short for low fidelity, and essentially means bad quality, but purposefully,” said Vague003, a lo-fi hip-hop artist who has been in the scene for two years and is best known for his beat tape Anime and Heartbreak. “This bad quality makes it stand out, just like overblown bass and distorted vocals make ‘SoundCloud rap' stand out.”

Lo-fi may be a niche genre, but it's become a notable trend on YouTube, the world's biggest platform for music streaming. According to a 2017 Music Consumer Insight Report, 85% of YouTube users—1.3 billion people—visited the website to listen to music in August 2017 alone. Apple Music and Spotify may have ignited the streaming wars, but YouTube's traffic dwarfs their userbases. At the same time, YouTube's Live feature and related video algorithms have helped foster niche genres like lo-fi hip-hop in the last few years.

Searching “lo-fi” or simply “hip-hop” on YouTube shows a handful of live channels the platform hosts. Channels who use their “live” feature rank higher on YouTube's search results. It's a safe bet if you see a 30+ minute video with a thumbnail image of Yu Yu Hakusho, or a title t y p e d l i k e t h i s, it's most likely a user-created lo-fi hip-hop mix. Meanwhile, lo-fi hip-hop has become its own meme thanks to being synonymous with digital streaming fatigue and anime culture.

Most of these channels are run by reserved anime fans—few lo-fi hip-hop channels returned any query for an interview with Genius. Some channels are 24/7 streams, some operate as sporadic pop-ups who stream for a few hours. But all stations find ways to cater to the lean-back listener, someone looking for endless hours of background music as they clean their house, study for an exam, or just want to chill.

“The whole idea [of lo-fi hip-hop] is sonic nostalgia, but not in an overly aggressive or ironic way like vaporwave or retrowave,” said YouTuber Ryan Celsius, whose lo-fi channel boasts 250,000 subscribers. “It's usually beat production that can sound undermixed, containing intended or unintended imperfections with a heavy focus on creative sample use and authentic sounding drums kits. It's usually a tape hiss or some analog distortion set against a simple set of drum loops and an incredible sample selection.”
Lo-fi is short for low fidelity, and essentially means bad quality, but purposefully.

Although YouTube first introduced its “live” feature back in 2011, lo-fi hip-hop radio station didn't really take off until 2017. Chilled Cow's channel was one of the the first 24/7 lo-fi hip-hop stations on YouTube. Today, Chilled Cow remains the biggest lo-fi hip-hop live station with over a million subscribers and thousands of live radio listeners. Their station sports a playlist of over 300+ songs from over 100 different artists, including Soho, mt. fujitive, leavv, jinsang. But hip-hop fans who listen to the channel are likely to hear songs and recognize vocal samples of classic ‘90s rappers like Mobb Deep or The Notorious B.I.G..

Chillhop music is another popular lo-fi destination on YouTube, it has 1.4 millions subscribers but no longer runs a live stream. Operating at a smaller scale than Chilled Cow or Chillhop music are the bootleg boy (640K subscribers), NEOTIC (559k subscribers), nourish (290k subscribers), Ryan Celsius (260k subscribers) and Mellowbeat Seeker (267k subscribers). All of these channels feature unique still frames, rotating playlists, and unique uploads.

Ryan Celsius, a self-proclaimed “𝙰𝙴𝚂𝚃𝙷𝙴𝚃𝙸𝙲 𝙳𝙸𝙴𝚃𝚈,” was the only YouTube streamer willing to comment for this piece—the rest preferred to be cloaked in secrecy. “I started my original channel in 2012 after spending a long time creating music playlists and digging around to find new music on YouTube,” Ryan explained through email. Between 2012 and 2017, RyanCelsiusSounds gained around 10,000 subscribers, but his channel didn't take off until 4/20 2017, after he uploaded a trap/lofi mix titled HIGH AT WORK. “I was experimenting with creating a music live stream. I started the stream on 4/20 last year and it maintained about 20 viewers for a few weeks, but then grew quickly when other channels began also attempting to create 24/7 music streams."
The whole idea [of lo-fi hip-hop] is sonic nostalgia, but not in an overly aggressive or ironic way like vaporwave or retrowave.

Prior to acting as YouTube-operated radio stations, Ambition, Chillhop Music, and other lo-fi hip-hop channels existed as an avenue for SoundCloud reuploads. While SoundCloud rap's aggressive origins blossomed in 2016, lo-fi hip-hop existed on the opposite end of the spectrum that same year. YouTube stations will often source their songs from Soundcloud and then create mixes that can be looped for hours without end. Eventually, rather than upload new hour-long mixes, channels began hosting 24/7 live stations.

A few glances at threads featured in LofiHipHop Reddit show constant arguments about when the genre first took off and who pioneered the sound. While many point to the late Nujabes and J DIlla as the godfathers of lo-fi, BSD.U is widely considered to be the leader of the new wave. As for the genre's major artists, the most influential names that pop up the most in radio and playlist rotation are Nohidea, Eevee, BSD.U, Jinsang, and TomppaBeats.

[Ambition] is arguably the most unique channel of its kind. It's run by a single elusive man (or boy ?) under the channel's alias. The channel description reads “sad boy who posts music,” has managed to garner 16,000 registered users onto a Discord server—a sort of Slack workplace for gamers. Discord offers a more sophisticated chatroom experience than Youtube provides. On it, users will discuss their favorite lo-fi artists, anime shows, weed, and promote their own art. The person behind the channel lurks on the Discord server, occasionally interacting with his community members and announcing new “sad mixes” for “sad boys.” (He declined requests to comment on this story, as did nearly every other lo-fi streamer.)

Even if all the makers of the genre remain press averse, there doesn't appear to be any end in sight for lo-fi hip-hop's growth. Hour-long mixes on the platform have racked up millions of plays within a year, while 24/7 live streams continue to attract thousands of listeners who simply need some type of noise behind their homework or household chores. Lo-fi hip-hop can keep trending upward, so long as the genre works hand-in-hand with YouTube's technology to deliver laid-back vibes to the modern masses.

[Editor's Note—After this piece published, Chillhop Music reached out to Genius to claim they were streaming a year before Chilled Cow and that they previously had a live stream. The article has been updated to reflect that. Genius had not previously reached out to Chillhop Music for comment.]

The Man Who Forgot He Was a Rap Legend

Tis — 2018-01-30T09:46:58Z

T La Rock was one of the pioneers of hip-hop, an old-school legend sampled by Public Enemy and Nas. But after a brutal attack put him in a nursing home, he had to fight to recover his identity, starting with the fact that he'd ever been a rapper at all.

This story is a collaboration between GQ and Epic Magazine.

He was nervous. He hadn't been onstage since the accident. Here he was, 34 years old, a veteran performer, but he felt like an anxious teenager, picking up a microphone for the first time. Would he find the words ? He felt somewhat reassured when he summoned the rhythm in his head. He'd approached the mic a thousand times before, first on street corners and in clubs in New York and later on stages around the world. But he surely never anticipated performing in this venue—the rec room and sometimes synagogue of the Haym Salomon Home for Nursing and Rehabilitation near Coney Island, Brooklyn.

Above the makeshift stage hung a long sheet of butcher paper, heralding the HAYM SALOMON TALENT SHOW in bubble letters. After a resident named Betty finished reading poems from her grandchildren, it was his turn to take the stage. He cut an odd figure up there : a six-foot-three former rap legend in a tracksuit, sweating from nerves in front of a room full of frail senior citizens. He may have seemed like a strange booking choice for Haym Salomon—but in fact, he felt right at home. Because he was home. “Please welcome,” the announcer said, “our very own musical maestro, the one and only T La Rock !”

The crowd waited. Some were asleep in their wheelchairs. A few no longer knew their own names. But those who were alert and awake were in quite a festive mood. They tapped their feet as the music started, waving at their fellow resident.

T had been living at Haym Salomon for some time, recovering from a traumatic head injury. Two years earlier, on April 1, 1994, he had been attacked on the street near his house in the Bronx. By the time he got to the hospital, he had slipped into a coma.

The doctors later said T had transient global amnesia, and when he was moved to Haym Salomon—it was one of the few facilities in the five boroughs that could accommodate his kind of injury—he thought at first that he had wound up in some kind of purgatory hotel. His rehabilitation, the doctors warned, would be a long road.

The other residents were mostly elderly Jews, Yiddish speakers whose families had emigrated from the Pale of Settlement. T was from the Bronx, and he had been a direct witness to the birth of hip-hop ; ten years earlier, his single “It's Yours” was the very first hip-hop recording released by Def Jam, hashed out with Rick Rubin in his dorm at N.Y.U. That song became a hit, inspired a whole new sound in rap music, and placed T at the lead of a seismic cultural force. Many of T's fellow patients knew he was a rapper or singer or something (“That nice boy from the third ﬂoor ? They said he was a superstar.” “Yeah, right”), but this was his first chance to show them.

It was, as they say, a warm room. T looked around and saw that everyone was there : Bernie and Leon, rolling back and forth in their chairs ; Norma and Sophie and Betty down in front ; and on the sidelines, Marshall and Sheila, clapping for him. He'd had to painstakingly re-memorize his rap, a medley of hits from his glory days. At the edge of the stage, a student volunteer started beatboxing, and when T found his way into the rhythm, his confidence swelled. He felt that familiar feeling, the declarative pose of street corners in the Bronx, the self-assurance of a youthful yearning for a place in the world, and as the beat rolled to the edge of the verse it was by instinct that T La Rock reached for the microphone.

I'd heard about T La Rock and his strange fish-out-of-water story from a friend who'd stumbled across an article about him published in The New York Times in 1996, when the rapper still lived in the nursing home. That brief mention made me want to find out more about what his life was like at Haym Salomon. I tracked T down and talked to him at length, along with his family and the former staff of the nursing home, to understand how he had re-discovered himself. There was some irony in T's predicament, since so much of his music was about identity : proclamatory, sometimes prideful, singing a song of oneself. And yet, T could barely summon a self to sing about.

The head injury he'd suffered, an acute subdural hematoma, often leads to severe and lasting memory loss. When he was first brought to the hospital, his doctors had been unsure if he would survive, even as they tried to save him. At one point, T's family was told to call a priest.

The swelling in T's brain affected his hippocampus, the seat of long-term memory, which was why when he finally did open his eyes one day, shocking the critical-care nurse on duty, he was profoundly disoriented, and his mother, Sylvia, who had stood vigil for weeks, leaned over the bed to gently remind him of his name. “You're Terrence Keaton,” she said. “You're 32 years old. And I'm your mother.” Members of his family also stood by his hospital bed, but he wasn't sure who they were. When he saw one of his brothers, T pointed at him and asked, “Who's this ?”

“It's me—Tone,” his brother Anthony said. He was the youngest of the six Keaton kids.

“Where's June ?” T asked.

His mother stayed quiet. She exchanged looks with Tone.

“June ?” T said again, referring to Daniel Jr., his eldest brother. But June had been dead for years, shot on the street in the Bronx.

At one point, the doctors thought T would be permanently disabled, and they tried to put him in a mental hospital. But Sylvia, a sixth-grade teacher, was a determined woman, and she made sure that T was not warehoused in the bowels of Bellevue but went to a place where he could recover. Haym Salomon was on the opposite end of the city from the Bronx, but every day she took the train there—an hour each way—to sit by T's side. For a couple of weeks, he didn't leave his room. When T was eventually taken out to see therapy specialists on other floors, T found a drab building full of pale, creased faces.

“What kind of place is this ?” T asked Sylvia.

“You're in a nursing home,” she said.

“How long will I be here ?” T asked. But Sylvia had no answer.

Marshall, one of the orderlies at the nursing home, first saw T a few weeks into his stay and noted how the resident made for a dramatic sight wandering the halls : unusually tall and more than 250 pounds—a patient like he'd never seen at Haym Salomon, a kosher facility with a rabbi on staff. There were five ﬂoors full of Ashkenazi twilight in that building, with a few Italians sprinkled here and there. The staff wondered how this young guy from the Bronx ended up with them. “The one thing we knew,” Marshall said, “is that he wasn't Jewish.”

It was all a confusing blur for T and hard on his family, especially for Tone, who found it troubling that on each visit he had to tell T about their lives together all over again. His family tried to remind him of all the lost moments—walking to the RKO theater to watch Fist of Fury or sneaking Dad's car out in the middle of the night—but it was a conversation on repeat. The same story, looped. Whenever they saw T, he would take it from the top, back to the distant past, where T's last memory lived. “T doesn't know what year it is,” Tone told his mother. “He thinks it's the 1970s, and we're all still kids.”

The Bronx of the 1960s and early '70s was a multi-ethnic patchwork of communities, a mostly functioning borough like all the others. There were ﬂowers in all the beds on the block. T's parents owned their own two-story home, and all of T's siblings—Anthony, June, Kevin, Nero, and his sister Ellen—had their own rooms. T had a room that faced the street, and he'd lean out the window when his friends came by with their car systems or boom boxes, all dialed up to full volume.

T had his own massive boom box, and every morning he'd walk over to his best friend Craig's house, like a ritual, and direct his Panasonic toward Craig's windows. “Craig, wake up,” his mother would say, pulling her son out of bed. “Clarence is calling.” He was not yet T La Rock then, just T, or sometimes Terry, but his full (and rarely uttered) name was Clarence Ronnie Keaton. T and Craig would sit on the stoop with their boom boxes, 50-watt behemoths that weighed 25 pounds and burned the eight D batteries so hot in the summer that T would have to take them out and run an extension cord through his window.

The boom boxes drove Papa Keaton crazy, but what could he do ? The Keatons were a musical family, and all the kids could play instruments or sing. They were also a tight-knit family. Sylvia didn't think raising six kids was hard, because “every single one of them knew how to act.” Mostly, they wanted to please their mother. Discipline was rarely necessary ; one silent treatment from Sylvia was enough corrective. In the morning, she'd stand at the bottom of the stairs and call all those kids' names in a little singsong recitation, and they'd run down the steps to line up in order, bumping into one another like the Keystone Kops. At the end of the day, she'd open the front door, sing the same song, and wherever they were—riding bikes or playing skelly at the P.S. 104 schoolyard—word got to the Keatons, who all found their way home.
Smith Collection/Gado/Getty Images

In 1975, when T started ninth grade at Adlai E. Stevenson High School, he was both a good student and the class clown. Kids wanted to sit next to him, and teachers liked to call on him. Music was everywhere then : At Adlai Stevenson, T played drums and saxophone ; around the Bronx, T was a quick study in the breakdancing circles that sprang up on so many street corners ; at home, T and his siblings took a tape recorder and microphone and set up their own makeshift recording studio.

T's house was close to 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, where a young DJ named Kool Herc lived. Kool Herc had become a sensation after a wild party he threw in his building's rec room, and it was on his dual turntables that a musical miracle had occurred. He had noticed how much everyone loved the instrumental break. So, he thought, why not extend the break ? He took two copies of “Apache” by the Incredible Bongo Band, put them each on a platter, and overlapped the instrumentals. The crowd loved it. Soon all the DJs in the Bronx were mixing beats, and since they were so busy ﬂipping vinyl, they couldn't talk to the audience anymore, leaving the mic open for friends to get up and start calling out names in rhyme. Thus was born the MC.

T was right there, at ground zero, taking it all in at 14 years old. One of the first breakbeats he heard was Kool Herc reworking James Brown's “Give It Up or Turnit a Loose.” He'd see Afrika Bambaataa at parties at the Bronx River Houses. He knew Grand Wizard Theodore, the first guy to scratch a record. It was a novel art form—the DJs were mesmerizing to watch, all dexterity and intuition. DJs felt proprietary about their style ; Kool Herc used to soak off the labels so no one could see what records they spun. He saw himself as a shepherd, leading the dancers on the ﬂoor like an ecstatic ﬂock.

T would borrow choreography from kung fu movies like Five Deadly Venoms. He was the best dancer on the block ; he could do it all, even standing on his toes en pointe, like Nijinsky. When he wasn't dancing, he watched as MCs became local luminaries on the party circuit. At one party, T told Craig : “I want to get up on that mic.”

He started practicing his rhymes in and out of school. He wrote down lyrics or freestyled over his own “pause tapes,” which were handmade beats he and June made on a double cassette player by recording, pausing, rewinding, and recording again. T's brothers would join in, along with other boys from the block who liked to gather on the second floor of the Keaton house. Every single one of them was scared of Papa Keaton, but they loved and respected Sylvia, who was welcoming, except when she'd have to knock on the kitchen ceiling when things got too loud upstairs.

The first time he got onstage was at Joyce Kilmer Park off the Bronx's Grand Concourse, where Kool Herc and other early DJs and rappers would play to as many as a thousand people. T had several crews during high school, and they saved up money for decent gear : McIntosh amps, Technics 210 turntables, and the indispensable “echo chamber” (just like Kool Herc's). There were parties all over the Bronx then, in parks or community centers or right on the street, where DJs would wheel out their speakers, open up a lamppost, and pull power right from the streetlights.
The Le Garsmeur American Photos

One afternoon, T and his friends threw their own jam in a tiny park they called The Circle. Sometimes they made ﬂyers for their parties, but this one gathered momentum by word of mouth. They put down a makeshift stage and made a roped-off VIP area right on the sidewalk. The fire escapes of surrounding buildings filled up—six, eight ﬂoors of people listening to T's crew. It was a warm summer day, and as afternoon turned to dusk, their amps made the streetlight dim and ﬂicker. T's DJ worked the crowd with his turntables, kicking up the rhythm while sweaty hands crept up skirts and down pants and the bass hit so hard it made your bell-bottoms ﬂutter.

T had only been on stage a few minutes when he looked out and saw a familiar face. It was Tina, an old friend—and fling—from school. Tina could hardly recognize him. She'd only known him as Terry. The guy on stage was someone else, a charismatic kid pacing the makeshift stage with a firm grip on the microphone. T couldn't keep his eyes off Tina, and in the middle of a verse, he handed the microphone to someone else, went under the rope, and walked into the parting crowd straight to Tina. “Remember me ?” he said, putting his arm around her with everyone watching.

“Terrence ?”

“This is me now,” he said, pointing at his sweatshirt, which said DJ MC T LA ROCK. T took Tina back to the stage and lifted the rope for her, and the evening unfolded into a sweet reunion, all blushes and glances and hand-holding as the party kept going into the night. When they found a moment to be alone and Tina looked up at T, he felt a surge of delight at being seen as he was now, a new person. The kiss that followed was the kind only youthful romance can offer. Tina couldn't believe that this was the same boy she had sat next to in science class.

At home, Sylvia brought T books to help him expand his lyrical repertoire : Twain and Shakespeare ; books about history and inventors. This was somewhat unlike the rhyming inﬂuences among his brothers, who listened to Gil Scott-Heron or the Original Last Poets. Papa Keaton watched boxing, so T of course liked Muhammad Ali's playfully combative couplets, but the bigger inﬂuence for him, oddly, was the Hollywood-musical star Danny Kaye.

Ever since he was a little kid, T had watched Danny Kaye movies on TV. He liked Kaye's vaudevillian timing and wordplay and took inspiration from movies like The Court Jester when practicing his own rhymes in the mirror. It was such an obsession that Papa Keaton had to buy T his own television because no one else in the house wanted to see A Song Is Born every time it came on. On Sunday afternoons, while his brothers and everyone else in the neighborhood would be out in the parks, T was the one kid who would look at his watch and say that he had to go home to watch Danny Kaye. Then young T would sit cross-legged in front of his black-and-white Zenith, captivated by the musical stylings of a Jewish song-and-dance man bred in the Catskills.

T's first roommates in Haym Salomon didn't talk much. Leon had been paralyzed by a stroke, and Gary was the stoic type, a former soldier. But T didn't mind ; he spoke slowly himself, though he'd worked with a speech therapist. It felt strange to make sounds that didn't always match what he heard in his head. At least he wasn't delusional, like Gary, who was shell-shocked and would sometimes yell that “the enemy is firing !” and demand that everyone within earshot “return fire !”

Right after the attack, T couldn't move without assistance ; his mother thought it was like seeing him as a baby again, learning to walk. In physical therapy, T spent hours walking on treadmills, working with a balance beam, and using weights to strengthen his legs. That therapy paid off, and by the time he moved to Haym Salomon, he could get out of his wheelchair and into the halls.

T soon became friends with Sheila, the 26-year-old switchboard operator who sat at the front desk. There wasn't much reason for T to be at the front desk, but he started spending a lot of time there, leaning over Sheila's counter with a big smile on his face, pausing every so often to greet visitors.

The Haym Salomon Home for Nursing and Rehabilitation today. Maciek Jasik

Some of those visitors thought this young guy was on staff, and some residents did, too, especially when T started assisting them. He became Leon's daily navigator, pushing his wheelchair through the peach-colored halls. Though occasionally unsure on his own feet, T was soon accompanying semi-ambulatory residents around the home. He called himself the Minister of Transportation. Marshall thought it was funny to see T in his mesh jerseys and black Nikes, towering over lost ladies in their gray gowns—some of whom were truly half his size—as they clutched his arm.

T liked helping the residents, even when they were confused or wanted to circle the halls at a snail's pace. If he found 87-year-old Feyga shuffling her tiny feet down the halls, which he did a half dozen times a day, he'd take her hand and guide her back to her room, nodding as if he understood when she'd digress in Yiddish or Russian. Spasibo, she'd say, which was the one word T knew. “You're welcome,” T would answer.

As T's former life ﬂickered in and out of focus, his thoughts turned to the many residents with Alzheimer's or dementia. He'd think about it at night, lying in the dark, surrounded by the stuffed animals his sister had arranged on his bed. When Gary's foxhole was under attack, keeping everybody up, T would wonder which was worse : being haunted by the terrors of the past or not knowing the past at all.

Sylvia brought in a boom box so T could listen to records, including his own music. When T first heard those songs again, it felt like a discovery. “You know what ?” he thought. “This is pretty good !” But then he had the strange sensation of hearing himself but not knowing the song. It sounded like someone else was using his voice. His mother also brought dozens of photos, which she taped to the wall : There was T in junior high, and Tone, all skinny and baby-faced, and Nero at 18, smiling in his graduation cap. And there was June, who T now knew was dead, although he didn't yet remember what happened. There were pictures of old girlfriends, many of them, and hip-hop colleagues from the Boogie Down Bronx.

Propped on a towel dispenser was T's first LP, Lyrical King. The cover showed him at the height of his career, with his hands on his hips, giving a smoldering stare from beneath a red Kangol. T would sit and look at this picture, almost meditating on it, trying to recognize the confident young man whose enormous necklace bore his name in glinting golden serif.

The visual prompts worked, though not all at once. Sometimes T felt like he was staring at blank spaces. Other times, complete moments re-materialized : entire conversations he'd had, friendships he'd made. Often he'd be struck by just a thought or mood or sense of experience—a phantom visitor from his former life.

Even after other bits of his past returned, though, his memories of the attack remained hazy. Mostly he knew what other people had told him. T left his mother's house to head for the studio. Or to pick up a friend or go to his brother's house or visit a girl—no one is quite certain, although T thinks he was carrying a mixing board. He was on Featherbed Lane, no more than three blocks from home, when he saw a friend getting into it with somebody on the street. The violent-crime rate in the Bronx was near its all-time high—the 40th Precinct reported 39 murders the previous year—but T never got into fights. That night, he thinks, he was just trying to help. Maybe the argument was about a girl. Then he saw that the other guy had friends coming up behind him. Maybe it was two people, maybe three. But one of them had something big and heavy in his hand.

No one knew how long he'd been out when his brother Kevin found him, covered in blood on a stoop. T's face was swollen. He was slurring his words, until he lost consciousness. T always called his mother when he got wherever he was going, but when Tone picked up her phone, it was the hospital instead. The police had little information. His mother wasn't sure they even took a report. T's brothers asked around themselves. There are no mysteries in the neighborhood, they said. But no one ever came forward.

It all seemed so far away from where he was now, sitting on an adjustable bed with his mother and stacks of faded snapshots. Outside, you could see the tower of the Parachute Jump at Coney Island's boardwalk rising above the trees. Every so often, Gary would yell at ghosts. “Stop !” he'd say. “Don't shoot.”

June and T knew they were in trouble. It wasn't yet midnight, but that was past curfew in the Keaton household. “You just got to climb up there,” June said, pointing at a window. T gave June a cocked glance. “Don't worry,” he said. “He won't hear us.” June was only a year and a half older than T, but he knew what was going on beyond their block, and he wanted to expand his little brother's horizons. So they sneaked out to see dancers and rappers from other neighborhoods. And now the door was locked.

June watched T scale easily from the garage door handle to the bathroom window and arc his legs over the sill. It was an artful maneuver, but as T emerged into the hallway, there was Papa Keaton, standing right there, arms folded. “Oh shit,” T said.

T didn't know when he would get yelled at, but punishment would come. There was no escaping the wrath of Papa Keaton. The Keatons trusted their children, but they were also naturally worried about the pitfalls of adolescent life in the Bronx of the mid-'70s, which had become a dangerous place. It had been just a decade and a half since Robert Moses completed the Cross Bronx Expressway, which was meant to unite greater New York and instead destroyed so many Bronx neighborhoods. The Bronx became the nation's defining example of urban decay, with trashcan fires illuminating whole blocks of rubble and gangs like the Black Spades, the Sex Boys, the Mongols, and the Savage Skulls controlling the streets. In October 1977, President Carter stood in the ruins of one housing development and pronounced it a disaster. Reagan later made the same trip and declared that he hadn't seen “anything that looked like this since London after the Blitz.”
Images Press/New York Daily News Archive/Getty Images

T had a bit of mischief in him, but he was fundamentally a good kid. At a time when only one in four students in the Bronx graduated from high school, T always stuck with his studies. And when he was asked to join gangs, he had an honorable way out with music, which was neutral territory. Hip-hop had become a refuge. The city might be in ruins, but there were kids making music amid the fallen masonry and broken glass. Across the Bronx, DJs competed with each other in both style and wattage : The best records had to be played on the loudest system. T liked to get close enough that he could feel the bass on his cheeks.

By the time he graduated from high school, T had developed a strong reputation as a rapper, but since that was not yet a viable career he also enrolled in computer courses and got hired as a security guard at a pharmacy. T liked the job, but his head was full of music ; every Wednesday, he took his paycheck to the nearest record store. T worked on his lyrics all the time, filling notebooks and even carrying around a Dictaphone. He could be seen on the Grand Concourse muttering into the cumbersome machine like a doctor commenting on charts.

T didn't know it then, but his circle was an artistic vanguard, and many of his friends would become some of the great pioneers of hip-hop. He freestyled with Big Daddy Kane over the phone, hung around with Kurtis Blow, and saw Flavor Flav at block parties. When T met KRS-One, he was living in a homeless shelter at the Franklin Armory on 166th, long before he became a local sensation onstage.

One of the most important venues in the Bronx was Disco Fever, on Jerome Avenue. The Fever started as a disco club, until an MC named Sweet G managed to grab the mic and the place lit up. The owner immediately booked hip-hop acts, starting with Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, whose first Tuesday night brought 700 people to the door. Soon everyone was either at the Fever or trying to get into the Fever, which was not easy if they didn't know the doorman, a huge ex-con who had done time in Attica and often guarded the entrance in a fur vest with no shirt. In the back of the Fever was a VIP room, hidden by a fake brick wall for private bacchanalias and outfitted with a panic button that flashed red lights if the cops showed up.

T was tight with the staff at the Fever, and he regularly got coveted spots on the club's stage and in the backroom. He had an effortless charm : “T had the freshest clothes and the best beats,” his brother Kevin said, “and the cutest girls, too.” Ever since T was little and would exchange notes with hearts and arrows with Wendy across the street, he'd had a way with girls. Now he'd grown into a full-blown ladies' man, with women everywhere, sometimes several at once. There was Davina (on 116th Street), Gwen (on Webster Avenue), Terri (the Puerto Rican girl over on University). The only one T's mother liked was Maddie, whom she thought was a great partner for T. Sylvia called them “Mutt and Jeff” and thought it was cute how they dressed alike, in matching Adidas tracksuits and felt Kangols.

T's feats at the Fever started generating invitations to bigger and bigger events, where he earned $100, then $250, then $500 a night. His moonlighting was paying off. T's clothes got fresher, and his braided links got thicker. But that wasn't all he spent his money on. The first time he got a real wad of cash, he got off the subway at Mount Eden Avenue, stopped at the store, and called his mother. “Go stand on the stoop,” he said, “and wait for me.” So she did, and a few minutes later, there was T, walking up the hill in his leather and chains, his arms weighted with grocery bags full of eggs and milk and whole chickens for his mother.
Getty Images/Alain Le Garsmeur/Allan Tannenbaum

Like everyone else, T noticed more and more promoters and producers in the audience at the Fever and other clubs. The first real capitalists of hip-hop were early impresarios like Russell Simmons, who would manage acts and put on shows. The money then was only in live performance. But then a new label called Sugar Hill appeared and, after a string of rejections from rappers, decided to assemble its own recording group. The Sugarhill Gang released “Rapper's Delight,” a single that hit Top 40 charts and sold millions of copies.

It was ironic that the first hip-hop hit was an orchestrated product, like releasing a single by the Monkees before you've heard the Beatles. But that tune rang out across New York like a clarion call, and in that instant, hip-hop transformed into a gold rush. For the first time, it was clear that there was commercial appeal in this new music. And money to be made.

Once hip-hop was being recorded, rappers and DJs were desperate to get their acetates or test presses played, especially at the Fever, where a spot on the rotation would get you noticed. Eventually, an aspiring disc jockey calling himself Mr. Magic bought some late-night time on WHBI, a New York public-access station, and broadcast one of the first hip-hop shows. Mr. Magic soon had plenty of records to play. Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five released a single, “Superrappin',” that ignited their recording career. Then Kurtis Blow became the first rapper on a major label when he signed with Mercury and soon had the first hip-hop gold record. The sun was setting on the days of a local music floating through Bronx parks. The chains went from fake to plated to solid gold.

In Manhattan, hip-hop started appearing at clubs like Negril, Smalls Paradise, and the Roxy, a former roller rink at Tenth Avenue and 18th Street in Manhattan. The Roxy was a living laboratory for the enormous musical innovation of the moment, when uptown and downtown cultures met and New Wave and hardcore and hip-hop were all emerging simultaneously. Above the door was a sign : COME IN PEACE THROUGH MUSIC. On Saturday nights, the wait to get in could take four hours, and you might find Keith Haring sharing the ﬂoor with Mick Jagger. It was after T became a regular at the Roxy that, in 1983, he and Kevin were introduced to an N.Y.U. student and aspiring producer named Rick Rubin.

T began carrying a pen and a notebook around Haym Salomon to record details about his life there that he might otherwise forget : names, descriptions, things he liked about people. His notebook became a codex of observations and anecdotes about the gallery of characters around the nursing home. Along with Leon and Gary, there was Bernie, a former professor who was sharp as could be. Norma, who called T “bubeleh” while demanding pecks on the cheek. Sophie, who had three children and loved Humphrey Bogart. And Betty Ford, who delighted in saying she was not the former First Lady.

Norma, Sophie, and Betty became T's core social group, his own kaffeeklatsch, convening at lunch to watch The Honeymooners or soap operas. T became Haym Salomon's new favorite resident, the guy everyone wanted on their bingo team. He shouted out Jeopardy ! answers and joined the Seder table for Passover. He kept helping out the Haym Salomon staff as well, clearing trays in the cafeteria or delivering food to the rooms of infirm residents. Soon T was fielding requests of all kinds. Extra pillows, missing chess pieces—he'd take care of it. When T first arrived, some of the staff wondered whether he'd be able to recover at all ; now he helped run the place like a beloved local politician or, as T put it, like the inside boss of a rather pleasant, slow-motion prison.

At one point, T realized that his fellow residents were the dead center of the Danny Kaye demographic. His mother brought in a VHS copy of The Court Jester, which he screened one night after putting word out around the home. He served snacks and juice and introduced the film to a full house. By the end, half the crowd was asleep, but the rest loved it.

But some of the best entertainment was the home itself. T noticed how senior citizens, left with nothing but free time and a knack for grievance, could easily revert back to the politics of middle school. Haym Salomon had its own social hierarchy, with cliques and catty chatter. T and his kaffeeklatsch became a clearinghouse for gossip. Bernie might be an interesting guy, for example, but Betty said he was also a horndog.

“Professor Bernie ?” T said.

“Yup,” Betty said. “The guy's a ﬂasher.” Bernie would approach the nurses' station in a state of excitement.

“We call him Fresh Bernie,” Sophie added.

T had caught the attention of the female staff himself. “One look at you and I can tell that you are a stallion,” said Della at reception one day when T walked by. One of the other nurses used to make unannounced “patient checks” on T when he was in the communal shower—enough times that he started asking Marshall to guard the door.

Other than that, T loved the attention. He was a nearly indiscriminate flirt, playfully flattering every woman in the place, young or old. “How's my favorite spring chicken ?” T would say to Norma, poking her in the paunch. “Como esta, mi amor ?” The ladies loved it. “Come here you !” they'd say, demanding hugs in the rec room.

But around Haym Salomon, T's favorite gal was clearly Sheila at the switchboard. She started staying later, after her shift was over, to hang out with him. Sheila was struck by T's smile—it was the first thing she noticed about him—and one day she invited him to lunch. T got a day pass and drove with Sheila to get pasta. They had just one hour, but it was a revelation. He hadn't thought about life outside Haym Salomon in quite some time. And he certainly hadn't sat across a table from a beautiful woman.

Sheila had been a fan of T's music growing up, although she was too shy to admit it at first. Others around Haym Salomon learned about T's past, too. Some staff and residents didn't believe it—until strangers started showing up at the front desk of Haym Salomon looking for the one and only T La Rock. Two women came in looking for autographs, and a guy came by to deliver a demo tape on cassette to “Mr. Incredible,” just like in the old days.

Sometimes T would sit alone on the patio with his notebook, searching for that lost time and documenting his attempts to re-assemble his self. It was a fragmentary catalog of stories about the person everyone said he once was. T started sharing those stories with Marshall and Sheila. This seemed like great progress, even if T often forgot what he'd said already and told the same stories over and over, like he was reciting lyrics.

“You know, when you came in, your chart was bad,” Marshall told T one night. “I never thought we'd be sitting here like this.” It wasn't that long ago that Marshall had to help T bathe, and now they shared a nightly routine as friends. Marshall often worked the swing shift, a quiet time in the home after most of the staff left and residents had fallen asleep, and he and T would wander the halls and joke around, or jimmy open the door to the kitchen to get extra treats. They'd sit out on the patio, enjoying the spoils of their kitchen raids and staying up late into the night, talking about life and love.

“I can't figure out how to be with just one woman,” Marshall said. He was married, but he had a wandering eye back then.

“You need to be careful running around like a jackrabbit,” T said. “You gonna get busted.”

Marshall liked hearing about T's heyday ; he especially liked to hear stories about the women from T's time as a star. They spent long hours talking about their mutual love of hip-hop. Marshall knew T's music, even if T still didn't quite know it himself.

After his mother brought him CDs of recent releases, T wandered the halls of the home with his headphones on, feeling the new rhythms of hip-hop. When T heard those records, he could tell things were changing fast. Production was different. Lyrics were layered, narrative, full of subtext. Public Enemy and N.W.A. had already upended the genre, and the past few years had seen the appearance of a series of revolutionary albums : Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers), Nas's Illmatic, Biggie's Ready to Die. Over on Marcy Avenue, Jay-Z was selling his mixtapes on the street.

One of the hottest new records was Tupac's Me Against the World, which had a track that celebrated all the rappers who came before him : What more could I say ? / I wouldn't be here today if the old school didn't pave the way. Tupac remembered Mr. Magic, Flaaaash, and Grandmaster Caz. He remembered poppin' and lockin' to Kurtis Blow. He remembered all them parties on the block. And he remembered T La Rock.

When T took the train down to Rick Rubin's dorm room in Weinstein Hall at N.Y.U., he didn't know what to make of this odd white college kid with long hair and heavy-metal posters taped to his cinderblock walls. But the two of them got along well, and when they talked about the records stacked in crates next to Rick's couch, T could sense the musical fire Rick carried. Then he heard the beat Rick had made. Oh, my God, T thought, stunned. This dude got something new.

Rick had been thinking about this beat for some time. He figured out how to take a Roland 808—the heaviest-sounding bass machine yet made—and fiddle with the electronics to get an even deeper sound. His sonic goal was to re-create the kick of being in a club, the way hip-hop was first heard, with that heavy thump booming through massive speakers. This was how Rick's beat sounded. And T loved it.
Run DMC

T and Kevin started spending more time in Rick's room, building a song around that beat. The three of them would sit on the couch (Rick had moved his dorm bed into the hallway and pushed the desks together to arrange his DJ equipment) while his roommate tried to do homework. Some of Rick's friends—fellow hardcore-turned-hip-hop enthusiasts calling themselves the Beastie Boys—stopped by to listen. Rick brought in a guy named Jazzy Jay to scratch on the record, and when the song was ready, they booked Power Play Studios in Queens for $45 an hour to record what they had given the title “It's Yours.”

It was hot in the studio, and the booth was cramped—Ad-Rock of the Beastie Boys had tagged along, as did some girls—but when the on-air light turned red and the acetate wheels turned, T knocked out his verses in one take : Commentating, illustrating / Description giving, adjective expert / Analyzing, surmising, musical / Myth-seeking people of the universe, this is yours !

Ad-Rock and the accompanying girls can be heard shouting out during the chorus. Rick mixed the song right then. During playback, T could sense there was something different and new in how the sound came together. “It's Yours” was stripped down to its rawest elements, a disco-less rhythm composed of pure beat, scratching, and rhyme. “Yes, yes, yes !” T yelled with a smile, holding a monitor headphone to his ear. “More bass !” He'd never heard anything like it. He wanted more. “Aw, man, kick up that bass !”

The next day, T was back on the job at the pharmacy. He nearly forgot about his recording. There was no distribution for a homemade rap album then, other than out of the trunk of Jazzy Jay's car. Someone must have bought copies, though, because “It's Yours” slowly started circulating, eventually winding up in the hands of New York's first hip-hop DJs. One day, T was in the stockroom of the pharmacy when the radio announced “the number one requested hip-hop record of the day,” and T was surprised to hear his name. “You're a star now !” his boss said. When T got home after work, the news had hit his neighborhood, and everyone on the street ran up to him. Yo, I heard you on the radio ! You got the hottest track out right now !

Six months after it was recorded, the song had avalanched into a genre-defining phenomenon. When LL Cool J heard it in his room in Hollis, Queens, he decided to send his own demo to Rick Rubin. “It's Yours” was a smash hit at the Fever, where everyone in hip-hop heard it. Russell Simmons was ﬂoored by that pioneering beat, tracked down Rubin, and combined his talent relationships with Rick's producing genius to form Def Jam, which would become the most inﬂuential hip-hop label in history. And it was the sound of “It's Yours” that formed the backbone of albums by LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, and Run-D.M.C. The line drawing of a Technics turntable on the sleeve of the “It's Yours” single became part of Def Jam's iconic logo.
James Estrin/The New York Times/Redux

“Mr. Keaton to the front desk !”

Sheila's voice on the loudspeaker meant it was time for one of their lunchtime excursions. They'd been going out more often, and both looked forward to their frequent outings. They had an easy way with each other and had made a deep connection. Sometimes at lunch, they lost track of time, got back late, and T would have to sneak back in undetected.

Sylvia thought that her son's friendship with Sheila was probably helping T recover. She still came every day on the train, checked with doctors, and brought baked goods for the diligent therapeutic staff on the fourth floor. She'd report back to Papa Keaton, who couldn't make the trip that often because of his own health problems, and the rest of the Keaton family. Their visits, too, had become rarer. T had been at the home a long time.

In a way, T was closer with some of the people in Haym Salomon than he had been with anyone else in ages. After all, he was spending every day with them, talking about their families, the many wonders of their brilliant grandchildren, and, of course, the past.

There was a lot of loss in all those years. Families broken. Friends long gone. People in Haym Salomon tended to steer clear of those difficult personal matters, but sometimes the conversation would stray, like when Sophie talked about her divorce. Her husband, she said, had left her for her sister. “Well, that doesn't make sense !” said one resident who had nosed her way into the conversation. Sophie agreed. No, it didn't make sense, but that's what happened. T could see that Sophie was upset and rescued her by changing the subject. She looked grateful, if still on the verge of tears.

T had even grown close with Leon, his first roommate, who'd had a stroke and couldn't talk. T would sit with Leon, listen to him mumble. “I can understand him,” T told Marshall. “I know what he's saying.”

It was true. T would pass by Leon's room every day and ask how he was doing. Leon was often depressed and would try to push away, but that only drew T in more. “What's wrong ?” he'd ask. Leon would try to answer, but his words were garbled.

T studied Leon's movements and facial expressions. They were able to develop their own sort of sign language. And since the staff struggled to understand Leon, T began translating for him. When Leon needed something, the nurses would get T, who would lean in to hear Leon's mumbles and then explain that he needed more pillows or pain relief or whatever. Eventually Leon's weird noises started verging on words. T knew Leon was making progress when Leon tilted his head to watch one of the female orderlies walk by, turned to T, and said : mashehathaniceath. “Yes,” T said. “She sure does have a nice ass.”

This became Leon's main interest, the curve of the orderlies' asses, which was one gesture he could clearly make. This pastime was one of his few reprieves from an otherwise dreary existence. T noticed that Leon was lonely and had only rare visits from his sister, who seemed to not want to be there. Nor did Leon seem to want her to come. At times, Leon could get violent, as displays of force were the simplest form of public communication. T was called in to calm those situations down. “Come on, Leon,” T would say. “It can't be that bad.”

He had never really seen depression before Haym Salomon, but there was a lot of it around the home. It was hard to say who was the worst, but Leon was a tough case. One night, Leon and T were talking, such as they could, and Leon managed to communicate that he was feeling suicidal. He couldn't move, couldn't talk, couldn't do anything for himself.

T was struck by Leon's agony. He didn't want anyone to feel that way. He told Leon that he understood being in pain, but that it was just a momentary feeling. Leon was unmoved, so T just kept talking. It might be hard to believe, T said, but there's value to living, even like this. You are better alive than dead. Eventually, T saw Leon's mood changing. And his own. He felt a happiness rising just by saying these words. “You have a purpose,” T said, at which point he was crying himself. “Even if you don't always know what it is.”

This was one of the things that Sheila liked about T, that he was such a good listener—both with the residents and with her. As they spent more time together, they both felt they could open up more. “I had your 12-inch,” Sheila told him one day, revealing her days as a teenager who loved his music. “The one with the red-and-black turntable.” Yeah, he said, that was a limited edition : “You had to really look for that one.”

Once when they were out, someone recognized T and asked for an autograph. When he held his pen to the paper, T had a sudden shiver—he was transported back to a hundred moments like that from a decade earlier, to a time when T was a star and he had fans out in the world, fans like Sheila, who was just 14 when she put together enough money to be first in line at the record store to get her hands on the song that was rocking the whole city.

On July 4, 1984, Def Jam had a release party for its first hip-hop record. The venue was carefully chosen. “It's Yours” had become a kind of crossover hit, especially in New York, where the song was in heavy rotation, and Danceteria was a multi-format club, a place where you might find Grandmaster Flash and Jean-Michel Basquiat in the audience together and Madonna on the stage.

Run-D.M.C. were at the party that night, and the Beastie Boys played a set, though they hadn't recorded a full album yet. When it was T's turn to perform, he ran to the stage, white Kangol on his head, white gloves on the mic. He heard his track, all bass and hi-hat, and was overwhelmed by the enthusiasm of the crowd, already screaming, “T La Rock !” Before he even started his lyrics, he thought : I can't believe they all know my name.

A few weeks later, T finally quit his job at the pharmacy to focus on his hip-hop career. His plan was to start writing more tracks with Rick Rubin. In the meantime, though, Rick had also signed LL Cool J to Def Jam, and T felt that sort of stole his thunder. LL's sound was drawn directly from “It's Yours,” but the new rapper was younger and hungrier, and Rick believed he could make him a star. Which he did.

T felt like he was being replaced. So when he got an offer to become one of the first rap acts with Sleeping Bag Records, a disco label that was embracing hip-hop full force, he took it. (The co-founder of the label would later help distribute Jay-Z's first record.)

T put out an EP for Sleeping Bag called He's Incredible, only half of which he wrote down before freestyling the rest in the studio. For Lyrical King, his first full-length LP, T teamed up with a visionary producer named Kurtis Mantronik for a few of the songs, including the single “Back to Burn.” The label couldn't press records fast enough.

T started touring overseas, playing sold-out shows in places he'd only read about in school : Amsterdam, London, and Stockholm. It was there that T met Cristina, a blond and blue-eyed beauty whom he called his “little Swedish meatball.” As usual, T had an effortless way with women and was easily smitten himself. T and Cristina fell so hard for each other, she followed him to the airport and they both cried at the gate, right in front of his whole crew, who were all yelling at T because the plane door was closing as he ran back for one more hug.

Back home, he told his mother he was in love, but she didn't want to hear it. “Ma, this is important,” he said. “If you're not talking about Maddie,” Sylvia said, “I don't want to hear about it.” When Cristina came to New York, she and T had to hide out from Maddie. “You've been running around with the ladies all your life,” Sylvia said. She thought T would get his wits about him and slow down.

But T had become a bona fide star. He was accustomed to walking on stage with Run-D.M.C. in front of 15,000 people. When he would show up on the old block, all styled up in his jacket and gloves even though it wasn't cold, people sometimes thought he was strutting. Oh, here comes Mister Top of the World, they'd say.

It was strange for T to think about how far he had come. And his old friend Craig thought the same thing the first time he saw T on stage, when he came back to New York for college break one summer. Not more than a few minutes after Craig started driving back to the city from the airport, he heard T's voice coming through on WBLS : Do you like it ? Do you want it ? Well, if you had it, would you flaunt it ? At first Craig couldn't believe it. Then he heard the song again and stopped the car. Oh shit, that is my man T on the radio ! Next came an announcement about where T was performing, so Craig went, and sure enough there was T, a young star commanding the stage with his tight pants and matching jacket and his name flashing across his belt.

After the show, Craig found T at the side of the stage with the other hip-hop honchos. Craig could see T acting the part of the big-timer, but when he saw Craig, T broke the façade and smiled like a kid again. He brought his old friend into the VIP room, where there were drinks and girls and record execs and a monitor displaying the sold-out show. Craig was stunned by the whole scene. So was T. Of all his friends and the musical Keaton brothers, T never thought he'd be the one to get famous. “This is all just so crazy,” T told Craig. “It's like I'm dreaming.”

“Where are we going ?”

T was trailing behind June, like he often had. But he felt confused.

“Just follow me,” June said.

They were in a strange place. A different part of the city. T had been there for weeks, walking the streets. It wasn't foreign, but it wasn't home. He'd been going to sleep, waking up, looking for something to eat. It wasn't no fog or nothing scary. It was just regular days. Then June appeared.

“Come with me,” he said. “There's a shortcut.” June started walking, and T followed.

“But where are we going ?”

“Don't worry,” June said. “I know the way.”

They walked several blocks, winding this way and that. They passed beneath trees, they stood in the shade of brick towers. T wanted to go another way, but June insisted. He told T that he was in pain. He wanted to check it out. T realized they were at a hospital. Elsewhere, T was in a hospital, breathing with a ventilator, comatose. As the doctors told T's mother that her son might not survive, he was with June, her other son, the one who was murdered, navigating a realm of the lost. June said he was hurt. It was like a page turning, one scene into another. A doctor came, and June had to leave. But he reassured his little brother.

“Stay here,” June said. “It will be all right.”

“Okay,” T said. And when June left, he sat down on the bed, laid himself down to fall asleep, but instead, he woke up.

He was in a hospital bed, still in the ICU. There at his side was his mother. She'd been there since his injury, since Kevin found T, covered in blood, since Tone got the call from the hospital. And now here he was, suddenly awake. T couldn't move yet. There were tubes. And machines. His mother called the doctors. They looked at him with surprise. Sylvia cried. He asked where June was, but his brother had been dead a long time. “I just saw him,” T said. “He told me to come here.”

Nearly two years after T woke up in that ICU, his recovery felt like a near miracle. He still sometimes repeated himself, or had lapses in short-term memory, and a few times he had gotten confused on outside trips, like his first venture onto the subway, when he walked to the station near Haym Salomon and climbed the stairs to the elevated platform like he had his whole life, but got spooked by the sound and the steel. It felt foreign, he told Sheila later, almost futuristic, like he was on a spaceship.

But soon T began to wonder when he would be able to live on his own again. “Why am I still here ?” he asked Sheila one day. “That's a good question,” she said. T had become content at Haym Salomon. His life had settled into a routine : watching soaps, marking the Jewish holidays, presiding over a social circle in which members occasionally died. At times, he nearly forgot he was waiting for something else.

In truth, T worried that he was not ready to leave. Out there, he had been T La Rock, and he simply wasn't sure how to face the world as someone else. And as who ? Both his identities—Terrence and T La Rock—had been erased, and he was reconstituting them piece by piece, like a puzzle. That's how he described it to people : Imagine you're putting together a puzzle, a giant jigsaw puzzle of yourself, but the pieces don't always fit. With great effort, he had pieced quite a bit together. But the picture taking shape on the puzzle was no longer the same as the one on the box.

Because as his memories came back, something strange started happening. After being so desperate to remember his life, T was stumbling across things he'd rather not recall. He realized he'd been not just a ladies' man but a Lothario, with so many overlapping women that he'd developed a system of codes with friends as an early-warning system so he wouldn't get caught cheating. As these memories returned, T sometimes didn't want to believe them.

“Did that really happen ?” he asked his mother. “Yes,” she said. “That's all true.”

It all came back to him : the frantic cloak-and-dagger of infidelity, the accompanying anxiety and guilt. Loving all the ladies is different in real life than it is in song.

“But I would never do those things,” he protested to his mother.

“But you did.”

One memory deceives another. Those pictures on T's wall were not just a glorious history to relive. They were also a record of life's complexities and T's mistakes, big and small. By the time of T's injury, Maddie and Cristina and all the rest of the women from T's youth had moved on, and he was, in fact, alone.

“In a way, you're lucky,” Marshall told him. “A terrible thing happened, but you get to do things new.” If you think about it, Marshall said, how many people get a chance to wipe the slate clean and live a better life ?

T took Marshall's words to heart. He thought about how some people would be happy to exchange, revise, or erase their lives altogether. At first he'd been troubled to find that his memory was complicated and contradictory, but then he accepted that this ambiguity contained a choice. He didn't have to be entirely defined by the deeds of the past. Ever since the injury, he'd been trying to figure out who he was—until he realized he could decide who he would be.

Since it was the Fourth of July, T decided on a patriotic tune to close out the show. He had become the de facto musical director for the latest Haym Salomon extravaganza. After the triumph of T's performance at the synagogue in the spring talent show, the staff had enlisted his help for their Independence Day tribute to Irving Berlin.

T worked on it for weeks, researching the life of Berlin and his contribution to the American songbook. He developed the set list, picked out the big musical numbers, and rehearsed some skits. When the big day arrived, there was a good turnout in the rec room. T had made ﬂyers and distributed them around Haym Salomon : SPECIAL EVENT. REFRESHMENTS WILL BE SERVED.

There had been only a boom box for the talent show, but this would be a proper pageant, with a live band—guitar and piano and even a brass section—to accompany the cast of singers, assembled from the residents and employees, all in matching red, white, and blue. As the show started, they all looked to T for guidance. “Don't be nervous,” he prepped them. “The crowd is on your side.”

T opened with a few jokes and then ran the band through the program—“A Pretty Girl Is Like a Melody,” “Anything You Can Do”—and landed on the grand finale, “God Bless America.” The crowd couldn't quite manage a standing ovation with all the wheelchairs, but in the scheme of Haym Salomon entertainment, the show was a roaring success. Afterward, there was a cast party of sorts, with virgin drinks in Dixie cups. “That was so good !” said the activities director. “We might have to take our show on the road !”

Not long afterward, T finally approached the social workers to take a serious look at “transition.” They brought in a housing agency to help him start looking for apartments. Not the Bronx, he said. It wasn't that he was worried about safety there. “I just feel like that time is over,” he said. Maybe he could make a fresh start in Manhattan ?

T was never one for good-byes, and he wasn't looking forward to the ones that were coming. When he told Marshall he was leaving, there was a moment of confusion.

“Like, leaving to visit someone ?”

“No, leaving Haym Salomon. I'm going home.”

Marshall found himself a little choked up before he could say : “Yo, man, congratulations !” They talked about how it was a strange thing to have become friends under these circumstances. And yes, they would of course stay in touch. With Sheila, the conversation was more difficult. He knew they wouldn't really see each other after he left. Whatever they had together would stay in the halls of this place.

T wanted to avoid a big public farewell, but on his last morning at Haym Salomon, the walls were hung with colorful crepe paper and everyone came out to see him off. T's kaffeeklatsch was in full effect. Leon and Bernie, naturally. Even Gary managed not to dive for a foxhole.

“Why are we celebrating ?” a patient asked.

“Because T is leaving.”

“Then I'm not celebrating !”

T's mother helped him gather the records and other mementos from his room. The photographic history he'd created on his walls fit into a few boxes, which they carried out the door.

T moved to an apartment in Washington Heights and set up a studio in his bedroom. At first he was anxious about being out in the world again. He stayed close to his new home, seeing almost no one other than his family.

Then, not long after he left Haym Salomon, he was invited to an old friend's birthday party, a big hip-hop bash. T worried he might not recognize people. Or even worse, they might not recognize him. But within a few minutes in the club, he was getting plenty of love. When the host saw T, he said, “This is such a great birthday present just to see you.” As word spread that T La Rock was in the house, the shout-outs from the stage started. LL Cool J, Chuck D—they all paid their respects from the mic.

When I met T, he still lived in Washington Heights. He'd become a fixture in the neighborhood, known by all. Everywhere T went, he was stopped constantly by friends or neighbors or the guy at the bodega or just some adoring children. At times it seemed as if cartoon bluebirds were about to alight on the brim of his hat.

That hat, of course, said T LA ROCK. As did much of his clothing. The walls in his house are full of mementos of T in his hip-hop prime. T loved telling stories about that time. It had been nearly three decades since T's last commercially successful album, and yet there remained an enormous emotional gravity in T's mind toward his life as a star.

On the one hand, it makes sense : Hip-hop is a vast self-mythologizing narrative, and T had been there at the beginning, bright and hopeful at the dawn of a new art form. He lived through something incredible. But perhaps legacy can get in the way of life. At times, it seemed as if T inhabited an interpretive center devoted to his former self. I wondered if holding on so hard to this historical idea of T La Rock came at the expense of the new T La Rock, or Terrence, or in any event the delightful guy of the present who can't walk down Fort Washington Avenue without being overwhelmed with smiles and waves and hellos.

Then one day I realized I was misjudging T's perspective on the past. I was sitting with him at a restaurant near his house (where, unsurprisingly, the owner came out to give T a hug), talking with him about his time at Haym Salomon, filling in details. We were covering familiar territory, but small details of the story were changing. On the one hand, that wasn't entirely unusual ; learning about T's life was less like picking up a lost book than embarking on an archaeological excavation, where discoveries were made in layers. But something else struck me. “The thing is,” T said, “when I tell you all this about back in the day, I'm not the same exact person, so you're getting it through my eyes now.”

I saw that the T I'd been spending time with was not the same T who danced on Featherbed Lane, or asked Rick Rubin for more bass, or stood onstage with Run-D.M.C. “A lot changed at Haym Salomon,” T told me.

Imagine starting over, not just with a new job or a new home but with a neuroplastically new you, a mind reborn. Once T discovered there is no single self, preserved in mnemonic amber, but a collection of conﬂicting selves, he could choose which selves he wanted to live with. He told me he liked to think he'd re-balanced the composition of Terrence and T La Rock. “It's a balance,” he said, “that I will always be looking to improve.”

Today T performs pretty often, sometimes to big crowds. There is a strong following for old-school hip-hop, and a circuit for performances. Last summer, T was invited to a show called The Golden Era at the New Jersey Performing Arts Center. On the bill were many old friends and veterans of Disco Fever : Kurtis Blow, Soulsonic Force, Slick Rick—and T La Rock. It was a summertime concert that played to a cheering throng of deep fandom, like a fetish ball for New York circa 1983.

Before T's injury, he was already past his prime—the title of that Tupac song from 1995, the one that pays homage to T, is “Old School”—but he wouldn't have wanted to admit it. Here, that identity could be embraced. Being old-school allowed T to celebrate the past. No one can be a young star forever, even if you're the biggest star in the world, and part of life is managing the ongoing reconciliation of past deeds and present wisdom. Or maybe that reconciliation is wisdom itself.

When T arrived onstage in Newark, he looked like a natural. Hat on, ﬂat brim, mic in hand. It was early evening. The crowd had heard from a bunch of acts already but put up a huge cheer when T appeared. He hadn't stood in front of this many people in a long time.

It was, as they say, a warm room. When the song rolled to the edge of the verse, T didn't miss a beat. He knew all the words, and the crowd did, too. T looked out at his fans and grinned. Among the many things he had forgotten was that he was, in fact, remembered.

Joshuah Bearman is a writer and a contributor to This American Life.

25 years later, Dr. Dre's ‘The Chronic' remains rap's world-building masterpiece

2018-01-18T11:00:53Z

As sulfurous tendrils of smoke and ash swirled in the air above Cahuenga Boulevard, the studio started filling with a swap meet's worth of televisions and stereos. The looting had begun, swiftly fanning out from the intersection of Florence and Normandie all the way to up Frederick's of Hollywood. Reginald Denny battled the reaper in the ICU. Rodney King vainly attempted to keep the peace. The police chief was AWOL. The mayor seemed powerless. But inside Solar Studios, Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg perfected perfection, rolling up “The Chronic” while America's second-largest city crumbled into scorched earth.

Released a quarter-century ago this month, Dr. Dre's debut solo album sold almost 6 million copies domestically and became immediately canonized in pop culture. It certainly didn't invent gangsta rap, but it was the first to alchemize it into the dominant soundtrack of American party music. It sold a million Chicago White Sox hats and size-44 khakis. It codified G-Funk, the languid palm tree thump that became the defining sound of Los Angeles rap. It introduced the addictive slang and drawl of Snoop Dogg, helped clear the path to marijuana legalization and offered an answer to the eternal question of “did what's his name get at you ?”

Before hip-hop's Hippocrates became a headphone billionaire, he was nearly destitute. Apart from the west San Fernando Valley home that he'd purchased with “Straight Outta Compton” money, the 27-year-old former N.W.A. sound architect was flat broke and fighting legal turmoil on multiple fronts. In the year leading up to “The Chronic,” disturbing headlines overshadowed his music : a punch by Dre shattered another producer's jaw ; MTV News reported on a shooting that left four bullets in his leg ; he totaled his car ; and his house burned down.

In May 1992, Dre left a music industry convention in New Orleans in handcuffs after allegedly participating in a brawl that left a 15-year-old stabbed and four police officers wounded. None of this even accounts for his attack on rapper and “Pump it Up” host Dee Barnes — a brutal assault that indelibly stains his legacy.

Among the most interesting music alternative history scenarios is this one : What if Interscope Records co-founder Jimmy Iovine had never entered the picture ?

We instinctively remember the Dre of bulletproof myth, but there was a time when doors slammed in his face. Maybe that's melodramatic exaggeration, but in a 1993 Rolling Stone profile, the mastermind behind N.W.A.'s panzer-attack sound recalled : “I needed a record to come out. . . . Ruthless [Records] spent the year trying to figure out ways not to pay me so that I'd come back on my hands and knees.”

(The dispute between Dre and his former N.W.A. partner Eazy-E is familiar to anyone who saw the 2015 movie “Straight Outta Compton.”)

Ruthless business honcho Jerry Heller countered that Dre earned $85,000 in that calendar year. What's unequivocal is that Dre's ironclad contract frightened off almost every prospective label, at least until Iovine swooped in flush with Gerardo and Marky Mark money. By then, the artwork, video concepts and the album itself were almost fully formed. When the dust of negotiations finally settled, Eazy-E wasn't lying when he later bragged, “Dre Day only makes Eazy's payday.”

After recording the first half of the record in Dre's home, the nascent Death Row Records established a nerve center in a Hollywood that had lapsed into pure Babylonian decay.

Even if you disregard the riots, the George H.W. Bush-era recession left the Walk of Fame a hardscrabble corridor of chintzy souvenir stands, drug bazaars and sex trafficking. Snoop Dogg missed rent payments for a $500-a-month apartment that he shared with seven people.

Only three years earlier, Dre bragged about not smoking weed because it caused brain damage. Then Snoop Dogg popped into the picture — bringing the finest sticky icky and his 213 Crew from Long Beach's Eastside — and introduced a younger, more lighthearted and Technicolor element that contrasted with N.W.A.'s carnivorous aggression.

As the initial manifesto, “Nuthin' But a G Thang” proclaimed : “Compton and Long Beach together, now you know you're in trouble.” As much as “The Chronic” is a psychedelic and sinister warp of the Parliament and Funkadelic records that constantly rotated on Dre's childhood turntable, it is the sound of Long Beach, too : the ecumenical hymns of the Baptist church turned into filthy harmonic gospel by Snoop, Nate Dogg, Warren G and Daz.

If there is an unsung component to the record, it is the hidden hand of Pomona, Calif.'s Cold 187um, the producer for Ruthless Records group Above the Law and whom many consider the rightful co-inventor of G-Funk. Yet if it was originally a communal idea to render the “Funky Worm” and old Bootsy Collins bass lines into swaggering, tear-up-the-BBQ rap anthems, it was Dre's golden ear that understood how to turn a beat into a fully formed universe.

“The Chronic” is a masterpiece in world-building. Kanye West famously said that the album “is still the hip-hop equivalent to Stevie Wonder's ‘Songs in the Key of Life.' It's the benchmark you measure your album against if you're serious.”

It's Frank Gehry constructing the Guggenheim, the '96 Chicago Bulls, the soundtrack to infinite kickbacks and stickups, beloved equally in the streets and suburbs, West Coast to East.

If you ask rappers and producers about Dre's genius, they generally offer one of two platitudes. The first invariably alludes to his “ear,” that ineffable auteur quality shared by Kanye, where the gifted one sifts through a roomful of clashing ideas and instinctively points to the right one and says, “That's it !”

The other is the notion of perfectionism. Outside of Phil Spector, few figures in music history are as notoriously rigid as Dre.

In a 1992 profile in the Source, the author shadowed the Death Row crew for the session that yielded the “$20 Sack Pyramid” skit. Even for such a nominally insignificant moment on the album, Dre presided with dictatorial authority, commanding the D.O.C., Snoop and Daz to alternate between humming and whistling, as they attempted to approximate the ideal parody of the Dick Clark game show theme song. The writer recalled Dre mumbling to himself, “I gotta get that first one,” a phrase that only he understood, as he cryptically navigated the smoked-out conclave of his mind.

If you lived through the '90s, the skits inevitably remain scrawled in the resin of your memory. They're profane and infinitely quotable. Meanwhile, each song could receive its own essay. Even when it's Snoop sibilantly spitting venom at Eazy-E, Jerry Heller or any other constellation of anonymous villains, it's compulsively listenable. No one ever rapped more effortlessly, adroitly toggling between sneering menace and lackadaisical chill. As for Dre, he wasn't lying when he said we'd never met another producer who could “rap and control the maestro.”

“Dre Day” is one of the most vicious dismantlings in history, complete with an immortal video featuring a pathetic Eazy-E caricature and Dre flashing a laser scope on Heller, then assassinating him.

“Let Me Ride” could boom over the pink sunset fade-out of every Los Angeles heist flick from here until the state slides into the sea. With only a minor tweak and some live instrumentation, “Nuthin' But A G Thang” turned an old Leon Haywood sex jam into an entire subgenre.

If those world-conquering singles are the movable limbs, the heart and marrow of the album belong to “Lil Ghetto Boy” and “The Day The N----z Took Over.” The former flips a Donny Hathaway civil rights spiritual into a tragic meditation on the terrifying karma of Marine Blue and Piru red L.A. It was a reminder that every party could be shot up, every Crenshaw cruise could became fatal at the wrong intersection. With the latter — a frenetic sirens-flashing deception of the L.A. riots — Dre captured the raw nerves and intractable frustration that defined an era and a city that felt like the world's funkiest power keg.

This was “The Chronic,” a fragrant reminder of a time and place, but an idea rooted in something unseen, that silent tumorous reminder that at any time this experiment could go up in flames.

Voir en ligne : https://www.washingtonpost.com/ente...

Lil Peep : Emo-Rap's Goth Angel Sinner Talks His Rapid Rise

2017-11-17T16:30:35Z

Backstage at the O2 Academy Islington in London, Lil Peep is standing in just his blue Calvin's declaring that he's “Definitely on drugs.” His tall and pale frame is emblazoned with a puzzle of ink work that includes his infamous gothic font ‘Daddy' chest tattoo, the curling ‘Cry Baby' above his right eyebrow and the giant ‘L☹️VE' across his belly ; they're not so subtle indicators of Peep's character : the humorous nihilist with a heart.

Born in 1996 as Gustav Åhr, the self-styled ‘ugly, cute and dying' ‘GOTH ANGEL SINNER' (as his Instagram and Twitter bios respectively describe him) has been making a name for himself with his benzo-fueled angsty emo-rap-rock that's heavy on the three d's – depression, drugs and death. The Peep I meet today is the “Benz Truck (гелик)” version, drawling words, almost comatosed. He's clearly exhausted from touring and promo, which goes some way to explaining why he's so maxed out right now but, to be frank, I've also never interviewed anyone that seems to be this high before (at one point he leans his head back and closes his eyes and I'm pretty sure he's fallen asleep).

Originally from Pennsylvania but raised in Long Island by his mom (his dad walked out of the picture when Peep was very young), he dropped out of Long Beach High School and finished his diploma at home through computer courses that he says his mom – a first grade teacher – mostly completed for him. Peep's philosophy on school is in line with the Rick Sanchez approach to education, Peep says that “If you don't like it, drop out.” He started getting his face tattooed to make sure he “Wouldn't ever be working behind a desk somewhere.” Peep ran away to Los Angeles when he was 17 ; things were fucked up but music and his crew Gothboiclique – a collective of like minded individuals, including his bff Lil Tracy, who make mellow emo rap – were his salvation.

The Lil Peep hype is a no brainer. Between his music, his look and his attitude, he's a triple threat-perfect package for instant intrigue and controversy. The army of Peep worshippers queuing outside tonight's venue quickly dispel any misconceptions that the Peep phenomenon is purely confined to the virtual world. But that's no surprise to him.

“I always knew that it was going to happen, and it happened so quick because it just comes very easily to me,” Peep casually explains. “Not to be that guy but it's just so easy, I can do all this stuff in my sleep, it just comes naturally.”

Having totally sold out his first tour and now this current second tour of double capacity venues, Peep says that in places like Russia, “It's insane, I'm like Justin Beiber out there. Russia is also one of the biggest scenes for metal and shit like that, dark shit, and everyone's listening to hip hop nowadays,” he further breaks down. “The dark spin I put on it – on some of my music, not all of it – is very appealing to them. When I look at my insights, my statistics and shit, it shows me I'm definitely most popular in Russia. The fact that they show me so much love means a lot to me.”

In both his music and in interviews, Peep has been open about his mental health struggles with anxiety, suicide attempts, and drug use and abuse. Asked when he last cried, he says “I cry a lot, I get stressed out, I get overwhelmed,” but he thinks he's gotten used to the pressure he's now under and that “attention is dope” but only if you're using it for the right reasons. “There's no point in getting a bunch of attention and you know, wasting it,” he muses, “You got to do something important with the attention you get.”

Peep seems to speak genuinely from a place of deep sincerity when it comes to mental health issues – particularly when he's tweeting stuff like, “I used to not have friends. Be patient don't kill urself there's people who u love that u don't even know yet.” But the really confounding thing is that this sincerity and openness often comes with a side order of ‘LOL' that also works to undermine it. It leaves you questioning whether or not you're being trolled. Perhaps Peep laughs about things like suicide because that's all he can do, maybe the LOL is just a gut reaction to personal suffering. Laugh or die.

“I'm just a weirdo. I just put LOL because I'm like… If I've tweeted ‘I want to kill myself today LOL,' that's probably because I was laughing at myself because I wanted to kill myself because I'm a loser. I'm not trolling anyway, I go through a lot of shit and all the shit I write about in my music is real.”

Case in point is his recent coming out as bisexual. Peep tweeted, “yes I'm bisexual,” with no real context or follow up on the declaration. When I ask if it was a genuine coming out he says, “I think people knew before and they were like ‘yeah we know bro.'” The nonplussed disclosure is refreshing ; maybe it's not a big deal to Peep since he seems to take life as though he's got nothing to lose. It's cool that he hasn't courted controversy and tried to capitalize on coming out (see the much-blogged about controversy around Tyler, the Creator's Flower Boy album), though in this case you might feel he should own the importance of it.

Do people read too much into the things he says ? “I wake up and I'm like what the fuck is this shit ? And I have to delete all these horrible things I've said and I'm like what am I talking about ?” Does he regret doing that kind of thing ? “I don't regret anything ever. No regrets.” What about the people that don't get what he's about ? “Keep trying.”

LSD, acid, mushrooms and weed are Peep's preferred drugs, although he says “Weed's not a substance it's just a beautiful plant.” At one point he was taking more than 20 Xanax a day to deal with anxiety, but now he's down to just one to help keep him steady as “regular old peep.” He says no one has ever had to intervene when he's started abusing drugs, instead he goes cold turkey and uses weed because ”Weed is all the help you need in this world.”

Latest release Come Over When You're Sober Part I is just the tip of the Lil Peep release schedule iceberg. He's got Come Over When You're Sober Part II in the bag (both parts were recorded at the same time, Part II is a bit darker), a collaborative album with Makonnen finished and another in progress with Fish Narc. He's been cooking up something with Clams Casino and The BasedGod himself, Lil B, wants to work with him. All this and he remains unsigned, taking a page out of Chance the Rapper's music business playbook.

“I didn't take my music seriously because I didn't like it, and now I like it so I take it very seriously… I'm not signed to a label, I just have really good management. Every label ever is fiending for the Peep right now. I need $15 million, then we can talk, that's my starting price.”

Then there's the Lil Peep look. Today he rocked up shirtless in a glittering Wan Hung jacket, his hair a dirty pink mohawk. He looks like the human embodiment of a MySpace profile. He's been shot by Mario Testino, walked in shows at Milan Fashion Week for Marcelo Burlon ; Tumblr is awash with pics of him in MXDVS garments and he's even starting his own clothing label. It seems like Peep is fast tracking his way to becoming a style icon. Does style cost money ?

“No, I said this in an interview with GQ already, now you can get the best style or whatever at fucking Walmart and the gas stations and shit. That's where they have the dopest shit. It's what you do with it, if you have confidence in what you're wearing.”

As we wrap up our brief chat – because Peep is on strict orders to rest his voice after going hard on stage in Manchester the night before – I ask him what his spirit animal is. “Oh, I'm a monkey. I was a monkey in a past life. I don't know what kind of monkey I was, all I know is I was a monkey. I'm a hundred percent positive.”

A monkey with a penchant for face tattoos and downers that is.

The Rowdy World of Rap's New Underground

2017-06-23T11:57:43Z

The lo-fi rap that thrives on SoundCloud teems with unruly energy. Can it survive the mainstream ?

SEATTLE — One night this spring, the rapper Lil Pump, 16, with braces on his teeth, was asleep — or something like it — on the couch in the upstairs green room at the Columbia City Theater here, his blond and pink dreads dangling in front of his face and a pair of Gucci high-tops slung around his neck.

In walked his longtime friend and fellow rapper Smokepurpp, 20, in a loosefitting plaid shirt over a Nirvana T-shirt, wondering, “Who got Xanax and Percocet ?”

In the high-ceilinged, brick-walled main room, around 300 fans were bouncing off one another, waiting for the show to begin. They were young — the bar was effectively closed, and a woman was selling cans of Sunkist and Minute Maid Lemonade from an ice-filled tub.

Eventually Lil Pump roused himself and sneaked out the back door. When he finally made it to the stage — joining Smokepurpp, who had been scheduled to go on after him — he was received full-throatedly, rowdily, sweatily. Perhaps a little too much so : Someone in the crowd said something Lil Pump didn't take kindly to, and he replied with a kick to a young man's head. Soon, the front of the room was a royal rumble, sending combatants from the stage to the floor, and some on the floor running for the doors.

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Afterward, back in the green room, Lil Pump, with bloody scratches on his face, excitedly checked out footage of the scrap on a friend's phone, telling him to send it to a popular hip-hop gossip blogger, then let out his signature shout, “ESKEDDDDDDDITTT” — “Let's get it,” stretched out to the point of absurdist comedy.

It was just another unpredictable, bruising night in the world of SoundCloud rap — a swelling subgenre that takes its name from its creators' preferred streaming service — which in the last year has become the most vital and disruptive new movement in hip-hop thanks to rebellious music, volcanic energy and occasional acts of malevolence.

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Lil Pump, left, and Smokepurpp at the Roseland Theater in Portland, Ore., in March, on the first night of their tour organized by No Jumper. Credit Kyle Johnson for The New York Times
Its stars are internet celebrities, fashioning themselves into outlandish characters in the anime that is modern hip-hop : the theatrical Florida tag team Smokepurpp and Lil Pump (who perform solo, and also together as Gucci Gang) ; the anguished heartthrob Lil Peep ; the problematic outlaw XXXTentacion. The aesthetic is high-end streetwear meets high fashion, with face tattoos, hair dyed in wild colors and a prescription-drug ooze. The music is low-fidelity and insistent, throbbing with distorted bass, like trap music reduced over a hot fire to its rawest component parts.

At its best, it has an almost punklike purity, emphasizing abandon over structure, rawness over dexterity. “It sounds so unpolished, so youthful,” said Roger Gengo, whose website Masked Gorilla has cataloged this scene since its infancy. He likened the aesthetic to “all the punk and grunge bands I grew up on. I get why people call it SoundCloud rap, but I call it grunge rap.”

It is, in some ways, a logical retort to the smoothness of Drake-era major-label rap, which has long ceded most of its sharp elbows and street bluster. (Indeed, XXXTentacion has made Drake a target of his social-media diatribes.) It is also something of a natural sound for the streaming era, which rewards gut-level accessibility and sonic consistency.

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Audience members at the Roseland Theater in Portland at the Smokepurpp and Lil Pump tour in March.
Credit Kyle Johnson for The New York Times
These artists — and hundreds more like them — have gathered primarily on SoundCloud, the streaming service most oriented toward music discovery, and the one with the lowest barrier to entry. That has meant a new ecosystem of rising stars, who ascend quicker than ever — releasing songs that get millions of listens, booking nationwide tours, selling merchandise — without traditional gatekeepers.

Not all hip-hop counter-movements seep into the genre's mainstream, but SoundCloud rap is growing fast, and major labels are hovering. A few rappers — Lil Pump, Smokepurpp and Wifisfuneral among them — have recently signed deals. And the scene has a breakout hit, “Look at Me,” by XXXTentacion, which recently climbed from SoundCloud ubiquity to No. 34 on the Billboard Hot 100 and is in rotation on hip-hop radio.

The open question is how much of this renegade energy — from the songs, which have more in common with hardcore than hip-hop, to the fistfights, to the drugs — will survive during the bumpy transition into the mainstream.

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The rapper Smokepurpp in Portland in March. Credit Kyle Johnson for The New York Times
The song Smokepurpp was set to perform just before the show-ending rumble is called “Ski Mask,” and its video encapsulates everything that is so titillating about this scene. It's a surrealist soft-focus street adventure taking cues from low-budget science-fiction films and first-person-shooter video games. At one point, Lil Pump stomps across the screen, machine gun aimed into his own mouth — an extreme image to go along with extreme music.

smokepurpp (lil water) - "Ski Mask" Video by smokepurpp
“When people laugh at us, we laugh with them ; we know it's funny,” Smokepurpp said before the Seattle show. “We did this so you guys can react like that.”

Smokepurpp's tour with Lil Pump was organized by No Jumper, which in the last couple of years has become The Paris Review of the face-tattoo set, its long-form video interviews considered a first step toward credibility for oodles of SoundCloud-rap would-bes. Adam22, a lanky, heavily tattooed BMX biker who is No Jumper's owner and chief interviewer, played den father on the tour.

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Smokepurpp and Lil Pump during their set at the Roseland Theater. Credit Kyle Johnson for The New York Times
“It's so far beyond what any thinking person could consider to be 100 percent real,” he said of the theatrical imagery deployed by Smokepurpp and Lil Pump, who are, he said, “so aware of what makes a song popular or what makes a tweet go viral that they have completely redefined the idea of what it is to be a rapper.”

This penchant for meme-first exaggeration — inflating characters until they become larger than life — is a hallmark of the scene. “When I first met all these kids, these kids looked 10 percent punk,” said Jimmy Duval, one of the scene's key producers. “As the sound got bigger, their image got bigger with the sound.”

That reckless energy is often transferred into the crowds, which skew young, male and white, and frequently feature mosh pits. “You go to a show, and it's a punk rock show,” said Tariq Cherif, one of the founders of Miami's Rolling Loud Festival, which booked several of these artists to play in May. “They wanna rage, they wanna sweat, they wanna scream.”

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Lil Peep gets a snack in New York in April.
Credit Chad Batka for The New York Times
But sometimes, as at the Seattle show, the extreme behavior spills into the real world. Ski Mask the Slump God was attacked onstage while performing in Los Angeles. On social media, Lil Pump bragged about crashing a new Porsche and, after reaching one million followers on Instagram, celebrated with a Xanax-shaped cake. The current XXXTentacion tour has been riddled with problems : One night, he was attacked onstage by a rival ; another, he punched a fan ; at another, Wifisfuneral stage dove only to find himself on the receiving end of a beat down, landing him in the hospital.

XXXTentacion was arrested twice in 2016, including on a charge of aggravated battery of a pregnant woman. While he was in jail — he was released in March — “Look at Me” became the scene's breakout hit, making him the movement's troubled and troubling poster child.

His public behavior since his release has toggled between earnest interactions with gobsmacked fans captured on social media — something many SoundCloud artists excel at, communicating directly to their audience in their language — and less savory choices, like tweeting the apparent home address of a rival, or saying impolite things about Drake's mother in retribution for Drake seeming to have borrowed his “Look at Me” rhyme patterns on a recent song.

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The crowd at the Roseland Theater in Portland at the Smokepurpp and Lil Pump tour in March. Credit Kyle Johnson for The New York Times
Before he went to jail, he was on the same popularity level as many of his generational peers, but now, seemingly in large part because of his outlaw reputation, his fame is growing the fastest. On his current tour, while a potential criminal trial looms for the aggravated battery charge, he is performing to more than 1,000 people a night ; online, T-shirts, skateboard decks and iPhone cases with his mug shot abound. In one example of cross-promotion, XXXTentacion was handed the keys to SoundCloud's Snapchat during Rolling Loud, but a representative for the streaming service declined to further detail how the company had directly worked with these artists. (XXXTentacion's representatives declined to make him available for an interview.)

Though these rappers operate on the fringes of the hip-hop mainstream, they are not without antecedent. They are the bad-boy junior league of the genre's emerging psychedelic era, inheritors of experimentalists like Lil Uzi Vert, Young Thug and the internet-rap hero Chief Keef. And in some ways, this is a regional scene passing for an internet phenomenon : Most of the crucial artists and producers hail from the Miami area. The sound's aesthetic lineage is traceable through several of that city's micromovement stars over the last few years — Spaceghostpurrp and the Raider Klan, Denzel Curry, Yung Simmie, Fat Nick and Pouya.

It's a sound attributable to a handful of rappers, but an even smaller number of producers. “Everything is literally made with me not even getting out of my bed and a kid coming and getting on the mike and screaming or rapping,” said Ronny J, producer of Smokepurpp's “Audi,” among others (and who recently signed with Atlantic Records as an artist). Mr. Duval made the original beat for “Look at Me” almost two years ago for a different rapper. “No one had ever pushed it that far — that was very extreme,” Mr. Duval said of the song's distortion. “Now these kids are all coming to me, and they're all like, ‘I need that sound.'”

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Smokepurpp greets fans at the Roseland Theater in Portland in March. Credit Kyle Johnson for The New York Times
Whether a sound this jagged can survive in the less forgiving waters of the rap radio mainstream remains to be seen. “Even though it's big, it's still an outlier sound,” Mr. Duval said. “No drastic sound like this can last.”

The rappers, too, are finding that a little streamlining goes a long way. As Smokepurpp's online hobby has become a potential career — he recently signed with Alamo Records, an imprint of Interscope, which also signed Wifisfuneral — he has had to shift his priorities. “Back in the day, it was probably more 85-15,” he said, describing how he split his attention between image and music. “As of now, it's more like 60 percent music, 40 percent image.”

Drugs, he said, had a purpose : “I do Xannies cause they actually relax me,” he said, referring to Xanax. “People think I just do it for fun.”

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The rapper XXXTentacion, whose song “Look at Me” has become a breakout hit, in his mug shot.

A few weeks later, he was in Alamo's New York office, looking more lucid. The label's founder, Todd Moscowitz, said he had given Smokepurpp some advice, reminding him that if he wanted to elevate to the next level of success, he would need to rely on drugs less.

As part of his plan to shift Smokepurpp closer to the mainstream, Mr. Moscowitz moved him into a New York apartment and put a team — graphic designers, merchandise experts and blogger — to work. Mid-interview, Mr. Moscowitz called a representative of Chief Keef to offer $10,000 for a verse on Smokepurpp's coming mixtape. Out in the office, Smokepurpp looked over artwork for a new single in which he recreated the funeral coffin photograph of the shock-punker G. G. Allin, who died of an apparent drug overdose in 1993.

With increasingly outlandish reference points, and thanks to the direct fan contact afforded by the internet, this scene is evolving rapidly. It has room for woozily melodic rappers like UnoTheActivist ; rock-influenced sing-rappers like Trippie Redd ; and even Matt Ox, a white preteen rapper from Philadelphia whose breakthrough video, “Overwhelming,” was full of fidget spinners.

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Fans reach out and touch Lil Peep at Webster Hall in April.
Credit Chad Batka for The New York Times
“Each year — each half a year — barriers are stripped away from hip-hop,” Mr. Gengo said.

That's clearest in the rise of Lil Peep, who over the last 24 months has evolved into something like the scene's Kurt Cobain, with several astonishingly gloomy and diabolically melodic releases, and a body that is in constant flux : hair dyed one color after another, an anarchy sign and the word “crybaby” tattooed on his face.

“When I talk about understanding the meme,” Adam22 said, “he gets it.”

Lil Peep, who is white, started as a more straightforward rapper, but his recent releases, particularly the excellent “Hellboy,” have skewed more toward modern, forward-sounding emo.

“I'm not a SoundCloud rapper anymore — I'm off of that,” he said in New York in April, before playing a transfixing set in Webster Hall's Marlin Room, on a stage that included the sagging bed from his Los Angeles apartment, the one on which he's made much of his music. His songs find a middle ground between hip-hop bluster and emo's bulked-up anxiety, a blend that feels eminently of the moment, and inevitable.

Just before the beginning of the interview, he'd pulled a Xanax out of a prescription bottle with the name scratched off and taken it. A half-hour later, he was in slow-motion, insisting, “I go as hard as I can when I'm anxiety-free.”

Gothboiclique, Underground Rap Meets Emo Revivalism

DrNoze — 2017-05-03T08:22:00Z

Rap / Rock genre cross-pollination is nothing new in popular music. From Run DMC and Aerosmith, to the Judgment Night soundtrack, to…shudder…Limp Bizkit ; it's well-traversed terrain and, if done disingenuously, can quickly tumble into the realm of corniness. That being said, telling people that I think the next big thing to pop out of LA is “melodic-emo-trap” has gotten me a few side eyes. My elevator pitch goes something like “It sounds like Future meets MxPx.” The next incarnation of rap-rock has arrived, but it doesn't quite sound like either.

Goth Boi Clique proudly wears their hearts, and influences, on their sleeves. They are the intersection of retro Emo (the most popular recurring monthly in LA right now is “Emo Nite” at the Echoplex), and 90s Memphis-goth-rap-revivalism that currently dominates the underground rap scene.

They are a generation raised on Myspace music and Datpiff.com, delicately woven together by Soundcloud messages and group chats, where face tats are normalized, and Built To Spill is as important as Lil B. In a downtrodden song about lost love you might hear phrases like “we were supposed to glo up together.” Samples aren't restricted to soul loops ; in this world you'll find chops of The Postal Service, The Microphones, or American Football.

GBC's members come from vastly varied corners of the country – Scranton, Virginia Beach, Long Island, and Orange County – but the center of it's universe seems to be the filthy crash pad loft we met at on skid row in DTLA. Some members are poised to hit critical mass with their cult-like followings (Lil Peep), or have fans following them from previous endeavors (Wicca Phase was the lead singer of Tigers Jaw), while some have influenced hugely popular rappers without releasing a tape yet (Lil Tracy).

“NO ONE'S REALLY DONE SHIT LIKE THIS. IT'S LIKE EMO RAP AND MELODIC TRAP.” – HORSE HEAD

THEY ARE A COLLECTION OF MUSICAL MERCENARIES, ALL EXPERIENCED IN THE TRAPPINGS AND MISGIVINGS OF WORKING IN LARGE GROUPS.
Every GBC member has a history with a previous crew that didn't quite work out. They are a collection of musical mercenaries, all experienced in the trappings and misgivings of working in large groups. For now they've found solace, support, and a common goal in Goth Boi Clique. Their first compilation tape, Yeah It's True, released this summer is a magnificent springboard into the deep rabbit hole of albums, crossovers, and collabs they've been making for the last few years.

I sat down with 3 of the group's members, Horse Head, Lil Tracy, and Cold Hart to talk about their origin story.

How would you describe the Goth Boi Clique sound ?
Horse Head (HH) : Hmm…melodic, emotional, trap…we have like…
Lil Tracy (LT) : So many mixtures.
HH : We have turnt music too, and it's sort of nostalgic, but it's new too…no one's really done shit like this. It's like emo rap and melodic trap.
(all three drift off into laughter trying to give their sound a genre)

I wouldn't necessarily qualify you guys as rap music, but I think a lot of folks would instantly label your music as that. Since I assume you all grew up on the internet and your sound is such an amalgam of different influences and styles, I'm wondering if rap was your first musical influence or something you got into later ?

OUR MUSIC IS LIKE EARLY 2000'S KIDS GROWN UP CAUSE LIKE…ALL THAT SHIT INFLUENCED ME. – COLD HART
CH : It was mine. My first album I ever bought was 50 Cent's “Get Rich Or Die Tryin,” out of some dude's trunk when I was like 8. But our music is like early 2000's kids grown up cause like…all that shit influenced me. After that it was like Ozzy Osbourne, then I got into emo music, Soulja Boy, and everything in between.
LT : Yeah I used to listen to Soulja Boy, and OJ Da Juiceman, Gucci Mane, Yo Gotti, Young LA…
HH : Did you find out about Lil B after that shit ?
LT : Yeah I didn't even know Lil B was that dude from The Pack. And then got into weird shit like The Helio Sequence…
HH : Like Built To Spill, stuff like that. We used to listen to this band The Wild Nothing a lot. I grew up listening to KROQ, and my dad showed me stuff like Nirvana and Blink-182. I always liked pop stuff that's what I was really into when I was young. Blink is one of my favorite bands of all time and definitely still a major influence. In terms of rap music I always liked mainstream shit like Nelly and 50 Cent. But I got into underground hip hop in high school which got me into making beats.

How many people are officially in GBC ?
Cold Hart (CH) : 10…right ? Or like…
HH : I dunno the exact number but it's basically…
CH : Everyone in the group chat.
HH : The three of us, and Wicca Phase, Døves, Official…he's a mysterious entity. Yawns who does a lot of our merch designs and DJs.
CH : and then Mackned
HH : JP Dreamthug, who doesn't really make a lot of music anymore…
CH : He's just the homie that's been down since day one.
HH : And Peep. Lil Peep, he's the latest addition.
CH : Last addition.
HH : Yeah probably final addition.

YOU CAN'T HAVE A CREW WITH LIKE 30 PEOPLE IN IT AND HAVE 3 PEOPLE IN THE SPOTLIGHT. – HORSE HEAD
Did you find there to be power in numbers with such a big crew ?
CH : No. (laughing)
LT : It's like the opposite.
HH : It causes a lot of confusion when there are more people, and it leaves less room for everyone to shine. You can't have a crew with like 30 people in it and have 3 people in the spotlight. Everyone else is gonna feel some type of way if they aren't getting their shine or you're not making music with them.

When did the idea of GBC start to form ?
HH : I think it was like you and Wicca Phase had already made it up right ?
CH : Yeah, in 2013.
HH : And Ghost was in it too right ?
CH : For a little bit, yeah. He was this kid from Sweden.
HH : He was this kid that made really dope music but he just like stopped and disappeared. We only knew him online but I used to talk to him and work on music with him a lot. But I think it was basically Wicca and Coldh4rt originally.
CH : Yeah I found out about [Horse Head's] music and started talking to him, and we just had the same type of music so we made a crew.
LT : I only got in cause I wore the shirt. (everyone laughs) I wasn't even in Goth Boi Clique, I was just cool with Horse Head, we lived together and I just used to wear the Goth Boi Clique shirt every…single…day.

“IT CAUSES A LOT OF CONFUSION WHEN THERE ARE MORE PEOPLE, AND IT LEAVES LESS ROOM FOR EVERYONE TO SHINE.” – HORSE HEAD

Tracy, How did you link up with Ariel Pink ?
LT : There's this girl named Sarah, and we have the same birthday. We had kinda like a birthday party together and Ariel Pink is her friend and he was there. I've always been a fan, like an actual fan.
CH : That song he made when he was like 11…
LT : BRO HE PLAYED ME THAT ! Personally ! Like I was chillin with him and he played me that ! But yeah we ended up collab'ing. And then the song he sent me, when I sent back my part, he was like “this is like amazing.” And I was just like…(trails off to surprised laughter)
HH : That's what he said ? I didn't even know that.

AT FIRST IT WAS JUST LIKE A SONG WE MADE CALLED “GOTH BOI CLIQUE,” THEN IT WAS A CREW. – COLD HART
So Cold Hart when you and Wicca Phase started recruiting more members who did you reach out to first ?
CH : It was just me and him at first, then Horse Head and (frequent production collaborator) Nedarb Nagrom after that. I knew of your beats too.
HH : And Mackned around that time too. We basically all linked up around that time and it was weird cause our music just went together. Like none of us really knew eachother, I knew Cold Hart's beats. Actually I knew you cause of your song with Lil Shark.
CH : Oh yeah…”Awesome”…Lil Shark was like an 11 year old rapper. But yeah at first it was just like a song we made called “Goth Boi Clique,” then it was a crew, then I met Horse Head and Ned, and then after THRAXXHOUSE it got more official.
HH : It used to be kinda loose and we just started adding everyone we fucked with, but after a while we started to narrow it down and focus mostly on the vocalists.

I want to give people reading an easy way to get into some of the standout members of GBC. So what's a good starting point to get into Lil Peep ?
LT : Hellboy or Crybaby.

A starting point for Wicca Phase ?
CH : The GBC album (Yeah It's True) or Secret Boy. Secret Boy was hard as fuck.

Where should people start for you Cold Hart ?
CH : The OC Season 1
HH : …or like Missed Calls if you wanna dive deep. He has mad tapes though.

Tracy what should people check from you ?
LT : I don't have any mixtapes yet.
HH : His shit's all over the place. Listen to “Desire” on the GBC album, or listen to “Wait Hollup.”
LT : Yeah it's mostly just singles.

Where should they start with you Horse Head ?
CH : Romantic
HH : Yeah my 1st album Romantic that I produced myself. Or I made this EP called Lock and Key. To me that's one of my favorites. Some of my old shit I don't really fuck with.

Who else ?
HH : Mackned just dropped American Boy…and then definitely check out Døves…he has an EP with Wicca Phase called Døves Cry Springs Eternal and that one's soooo fucking good ; like that's one of the best GBC records.

Being that the group is so spread out throughout the state and country, how do you guys stay in contact and make moves together ?
HH : Now we're seeing each other a lot because things are picking up and we're getting more opportunities but…
LT : I don't have a phone.
CH : Me neither I just have wifi.

You don't have a phone ? How do you keep in touch with these guys ?
CH : Carrier pigeon.
LT : I don't like phones.
HH : They're a burden.
LT : I'm trying to get a Samsung. They need me right now.
(The conversation quickly erodes into side conversations as the clique returns to being friends and forgetting they were being taped.)

Hip-Hop's Unlikeliest Icons : Promethazine Codeine Syrup Manufacturers

2017-04-13T09:42:29Z

Inside the recording studio at Screwed Up Records & Tapes, William Gibbs lights up a Black & Mild and pauses to consider how long he's been sipping. Next to Gibbs—who's better known as Will-Lean, a member of the legendary Houston hip-hop collective Screwed Up Click—is a tall, white Styrofoam cup. The concoction inside mixes Faygo Redpop, a strawberry-flavored cream soda, and promethazine codeine cough syrup, a prescription pain reliever and cough suppressant that's also the main ingredient for any number of similar cocktails referred to as “drank,” “purple stuff,” “lean,” and “sizzurp,” among other names.

Gibbs decides he's been sipping since the mid-'90s. “I feel like I'm checking myself into rehab or something,” he says as he ponders his history. “I don't get high. I just drink it for the taste. It tastes as good as a motherf-----. Shit don't do anything for me anymore, but I still do it.” He's made good headway on his Redpop, and his relaxed vibe reflects it—the effects include numbness, lethargy, and euphoria.

“If you have Actavis or Hi-Tech, those are like the Michael Jordan of sipping drank”
In the parking lot out front, on West Fuqua Street in the South Park neighborhood of Houston, someone is tossing chicken legs, boudin sausage, and rib slabs on a grill. This isn't just any Wednesday afternoon on the South Side : It's the 16th anniversary of the death of Robert Earl Davis Jr., better known as DJ Screw, the main popularizer of “chopped and screwed,” the technique that helped put the Houston hip-hop scene on the map. Davis would slow down the tempo of a song to make it seem as if the music were unfolding in slow motion, layering in new beats and scratches. He died in November 2000 of a “codeine overdose with mixed drug intoxication,” according to the autopsy report, just as the styles he helped pioneer were becoming synonymous with the slower pace of Southern cities. To many, the music spoke of everyday life, which for some people included drinking drank. Artists such as Lil Wayne and Justin Bieber have since celebrated its high, spreading its fame and boosting recreational consumption.

The rising visibility of promethazine codeine syrup also made the pharmaceutical companies that manufacture and sell it part of some communities' everyday vernacular. Users and dealers might not know how these companies did last quarter, but they all have opinions on who puts out the sweetest, most potent sip. “Right now, these motherf-----s drinking anything. They got green shit, yellow shit, red shit,” Gibbs says. “But most people are drinking the Hi-Tech red, Wockhardt green, and Qualitest. Those are the choices you have right now.”

Bottles of promethazine codeine cough syrup produced by Hi-Tech Pharmaceuticals Inc. and Wockhardt Ltd. subsidiary Morton Grove Pharmaceuticals Inc. sell on the streets of Houston for $750 to $1,000 a pint, say the users, dealers, and experts who were interviewed for this story. If you have some extra scratch, there's syrup from Actavis (now Allergan Plc), the king of the market until the company stopped selling the product in 2014. As recently as nine months ago, the remaining pints of Actavis syrup could fetch anywhere from $2,500 to $3,000, says Ronald Peters, a retired professor of behavioral sciences at the University of Texas Health Science Center in Houston. “It's the caviar of drugs,” says Peters, who's been researching the cultural influence of cough syrup since the mid-1990s.

“If you have Actavis or Hi-Tech, those are like the Michael Jordan of sipping drank,” says a user who will identify himself only as Scooby. The taste is distinctive, he adds : “The syrup could have been named the Magic Potion Bottle, and I would have known which pharmaceutical companies were making money.” Scooby, who says he's 33 and unemployed, started sipping when he was 15 and still does on occasion. “It was embedded into our head to sip drank,” he says. He recalls that friends and neighbors would sit around a local swimming pool, holding Styrofoam cups.

Inside Screwed Up Records & Tapes.
Photographer : Todd Spoth for Bloomberg Businessweek

In 2016 promethazine codeine syrup was prescribed about 4 million times in the U.S., according to data compiled by Bloomberg Intelligence, and brought in $15 million in sales—a slight decline from when Actavis was on the market. These figures are curiously small relative to the syrup's cultural influence, but enough reaches the illegal market to keep it in the public eye. Last year, according to the Atlanta Journal-Constitution, investigators in Georgia found that technicians at Emory University Hospital Midtown in Atlanta had diverted 110 gallons of promethazine codeine to the street from 2008 to 2013, leading to a $200,000 fine. (The hospital told the newspaper it had systems in place to prevent such thefts, which it had strengthened in the wake of the revelations.)

It's difficult to know how big the illegal market is or how many of the estimated 2.1 million Americans addicted to prescription opioids are abusing promethazine codeine. The quality of addiction and overdose statistics varies from state to state, and measuring codeine abuse has been a lower priority than monitoring opioids such as oxycodone, hydrocodone, methadone, and fentanyl, whose use has exploded in recent years. But in 2011, the most recent year for which data are available, codeine (in all forms) was the reported cause of 11,000 U.S. emergency room visits, according to the Department of Health and Human Services. A 2013 study of more than 2,300 college students in the Southeast found that at least 6.5 percent had taken drank. That same year the U.S. government's National Institute on Drug Abuse said promethazine codeine cough syrup had become “increasingly popular among youth in several areas of the country.”

In the two decades since promethazine codeine was first reported as a substance abuse trend, pharmaceutical companies have rarely acknowledged, let alone taken steps to combat, the illegal market. By contrast the companies most closely associated with the broader opioid epidemic have occasionally been called to account for their practices and have defended themselves publicly. For example, the maker of OxyContin, Purdue Pharma LP, in 2007 pleaded guilty to charges of misleading regulators, doctors, and the public about the addiction risks of its product ; Purdue has since said that it reformulated the drug to give it “abuse-deterrent properties” and that it's funding programs to help prevent pharmacy robberies.

Despite drank's currency in pop culture, the syrup companies have largely managed to avoid such controversy, leaving experts and users to speculate on whether they regard the illicit market as a problem or an opportunity. “There ain't no difference between what happens with these pharmaceutical companies and what happens with McDonald's,” Gibbs says.

Promethazine codeine cough syrup began its rise in 1952, when a company called Ani Pharmaceuticals applied to the Food and Drug Administration for approval of what was originally known as “Phenergan expectorant with codeine.” The formulation paired promethazine, an antihistamine developed in France in the 1940s, with a painkiller that had been in use for more than a century. After a winding regulatory path, promethazine codeine was declared safe and effective by the FDA in 1984.

Dr. David Corry, chief of the Immunology, Allergy, and Rheumatology section at Baylor College of Medicine in Houston, says the idea is to block with one drug the major symptoms of allergies. “The codeine covers the cough ; the promethazine covers everything else.” The problem with the combination, he adds, is the severe side effects, which include “altered mental status.”

A Select Drankography

“You can find me on them Screw CDs talkin' about / ‘Purple Stuff' Purple stuff ! (Purrrr-pullll) Purple stuff”

Purple Stuff
— Big Moe (of Screwed Up Click)

“Mama leave 'em with a trace of Mo-E / And promethazine and yeah the codeine fiend”

Me and My Drank
— Lil Wayne

“Forty dollars for just one ounce ounce, plus / Tussionex is how it's pronounced”

Sippin' On Some Syrup
— Three 6 Mafia

“Two cups of the muddy, I swerve on 'em / Actavis, Actavis wait on it / Actavis, Actavis wait on it”

I Don't Play About My Paper
— DJ Khaled

“Dibble dabble with the lean / Hi-Tech with the cream soda / As I whipped the yola / Lambo red, Coca Cola”

Yamborghini High
— A$AP Mob

“You know, I'm on one / Two white cups and I got that drink, it could be purple, it could be pink”

Trust Issues
— Justin Bieber, covering Drake

Drank has been around almost as long as promethazine codeine. In the 1960s, according to author Lance Scott Walker, who's written two books on Houston's hip-hop culture, the city's blues musicians began experimenting with a mixture of cough syrup and beer. After the FDA declared promethazine with codeine effective, users had a buffet of choices. Actavis was the first company to get a formulation on the market, labeling it Prometh With Codeine Cough Syrup. Wockhardt followed not long after with Promethazine Hydrochloride and Codeine Phosphate. By 2013 at least seven pharmaceutical companies—Actavis and Wockhardt, plus Pharmaceutical Associates (now defunct), Hi-Tech (now owned by Akorn Pharmaceuticals), Nostrum Laboratories, Tris Pharma, and Amneal Pharmaceuticals—had received approval for at least 27 different promethazine codeine products, according to FDA records.

The first company to market was also the first to recognize publicly that some people were using its product recreationally. Over the years, Actavis's Prometh With Codeine formulation and its distinctive orange-and-white label had remained largely unchanged, and the liquid became the “purple standard” on the streets. Or the pink standard, rather : It was known, as the hip-hop artist 2 Chainz pointed out in a 2016 interview with WorldstarHipHop, for turning pink when mixed.

As Actavis was gaining in popularity, artists of varying degrees of celebrity were name-checking it or being otherwise associated with it—most crucially, 2 Chainz said, Bieber, the megafamous Canadian pop star. In early 2014, TMZ had published multiple anonymously sourced reports on Bieber's alleged drank abuse, including one saying that he was a “fan of Actavis prometh with codeine cough syrup.” (Bieber has never responded to the allegations, although TMZ later reported that people close to him said he'd stopped sipping. A representative for Bieber didn't reply to a request for comment.)

That spring, Actavis pulled the product altogether. “Actavis has made the bold and unprecedented decision to cease all production and sales of its Promethazine Codeine product,” a company official told TMZ, adding that the attention “has glamorized the unlawful and dangerous use of the product, which is contrary to its approved indication.” Asked to comment further, an executive with Allergan directed Bloomberg Businessweek to Teva Pharmaceutical Industries Ltd., which purchased Allergan's generics business last August. A Teva representative said the company was “unable to comment on the historic products as it relates to decisions of the legacy Actavis.”

“To me, these were some ethical people who knew they were making a lot of money on the syrup”
In August 2015, Wockhardt became the second company to publicly address the issue of recreational use of promethazine codeine syrup, following a controversy related to a syrup put out by its subsidiary Morton Grove. Three days after the Chicago Tribune published an article highlighting how the local suburb of Morton Grove, where the subsidiary is based, had become synonymous on social media with purple drank, Wockhardt issued a statement about what it called the “disturbing practice” of unapproved use of its syrup. “While some may attempt to glamorize it, prescription drug abuse is a public health problem,” the company said. “We will continue to work with law enforcement and others to deter the unauthorized use of prescription cough medicine.”

The acknowledgment that the syrup was being used recreationally was something, but to date, Wockhardt, which didn't respond to multiple requests for comment, doesn't appear to have taken any public steps to prevent abuse. And with Actavis out of the picture, the users and experts interviewed for this article say, Morton Grove and Hi-Tech gained market share.

Peters says that, based on his research with users, dealers, and pharmacists, Hi-Tech's Promethazine HCI and Codeine Phosphate Syrup CV was likely the highest-selling promethazine codeine product on the streets of Houston in 2015. That same year, Hi-Tech's parent company, Akorn, an Illinois-based generics manufacturer, introduced a second promethazine codeine formulation with the unwieldy name of Promethazine Hydrochloride, Phenylephrine Hydrochloride and Codeine Phosphate Syrup CV.

As yet, Akorn hasn't publicly acknowledged off-book use of its promethazine codeine cough syrups. But Peters says he believes the company tacitly recognized their street value last year, by changing its packaging from plastic bottles to glass ones, which he says results in a more bitter-tasting syrup. (Akorn didn't respond to requests to address the assertion.) He adds that the street value for Hi-Tech has dipped slightly since the change in bottles, but that “it's still really wanted and one of the biggest sellers on the street market.”

Peters developed his expertise during the 1990s, when he researched drank and hip-hop culture while getting his doctorate in health promotion research and development. He went from high school to high school, witnessing kids share Sprite bottles full of drank and sometimes pass out in class. That led him to investigate the companies that produced and sold the syrup. He noticed a pattern of financial success that moved from one company to the next, as brands changed hands and public attention to drank increased. Actavis, he says, “passed the baton to the next company.”

Gibbs in front of a mural memorializing DJ Screw.
Photographer : Todd Spoth for Bloomberg Businessweek
He says he believes that, with the packaging shift, Akorn might have been showing genuine concern about the recreational market. “To me, these were some ethical people who knew they were making a lot of money on the syrup,” Peters says. David Ferguson, a professor of medicinal chemistry at the University of Minnesota who studies the pharmacology of widely abused drugs, takes a more skeptical view. “If people believe these companies are fighting the good fight to remove or end diversion or the illegal trafficking and sales on these products, I think they would be naive,” he says. “These are big markets.”

Calls and emails to other promethazine codeine syrup manufacturers, in addition to Akorn and Wockhardt, weren't returned. An exception was Endo, the parent company for Par Pharmaceutical, which sells Qualitest's promethazine codeine product, another popular syrup. “[P]atient safety is a top priority for Endo and we are committed to providing patients with approved products that are safe and effective,” wrote Heather Zoumas Lubeski, a senior director for corporate affairs. “While it is not among our company's leading products, promethazine with codeine remains a viable treatment option for physicians and patients when used as prescribed.”

Dr. Corry, of Baylor College of Medicine, questions whether promethazine codeine should still be an option. “There are more effective options around today that have greatly reduced side effects,” he says. “Usually, the ultimate use for promethazine codeine will be recreational. There really is no medical use for this kind of combination.” He adds : “I would be in favor of the FDA looking at banning it.”

The FDA has been scrutinizing codeine anew since 2013—requiring, for example, that warnings be added to labels highlighting the risks to children—but it has yet to publicly tackle the dangers connected to recreational use of promethazine codeine syrups. “The FDA's actions in this area are based on the latest safety data available,” Sarah Peddicord, a press officer for the agency, wrote in an email. “The agency is currently evaluating all available information to determine whether additional communication and/or regulatory action is needed.”

On the enforcement side of the equation, promethazine codeine has been overshadowed by other prescription opioids. Doug Coleman, special agent in charge of the Drug Enforcement Agency in Arizona, worked cases related to promethazine codeine in predominantly black neighborhoods throughout the U.S. for a year around 2003, tracking the manufacturing and prescriptions that would go out for the syrup. He says the DEA focuses on larger-scale investigations involving organizations or “dirty doctors.” “If it gets down to the street level, where let's say somebody takes a couple bottles of this product and they're distributing around the lower levels, then we really don't get around to it so much,” he says.

In the summer of 1992, DJ Lil Randy was riding around Houston in the back of a friend's car when he was handed a bottle of Boone's Farm wine. Inside was promethazine codeine cough syrup. He loved the taste, which he compares to fruit punch. “We weren't really mindful about the drug part of it at first,” he says. “It was strictly the taste that got us. After that, it kinda became an everyday thing.” He pauses, lowering his head for a moment before continuing. “If I had known then what I know now, I don't think there's any way I would be talking about it on a mixtape,” he tells me. Drinking syrup, he says, “went from a fad to a population to a community.”

There was a time when it seemed as if you couldn't listen to a track from a Houston hip-hop artist, DJ Lil Randy included, on a mixtape or on 97.9 The Box, the city's premier hip-hop radio station, without hearing at least one reference to syrup. As Screwed Up Click's popularity was on the rise in the late '90s, Randy's dependence grew into addiction. He was in jail for possession of codeine in 2000 when his best friend and co-pioneer, DJ Screw, died. When Randy was released after a three-year stint, he says, he sobered up and began learning about the effects of abuse on the brain and kidneys. “As long as promethazine codeine stays in the hip-hop, impoverished, and less fortunate communities, it's not going to be addressed by these companies,” he says.

Scooby, the unemployed user, says that after spending a fortune over the years, he's weaned himself to the point that he rarely sips. He expresses skepticism about the companies but says he hopes they might publicly recognize the drug's effects : “People need to sway them that what goes on here is legit. I don't think they want to hear people like me.”

Outside Screwed Up Records, a few people get out of a car to snap photos of the mural of DJ Screw. Inside, Gibbs takes a sip from his white cup. Sitting back in his chair, he offers no indication that he'll slow down on drank, despite his protestations that he's essentially immune to the buzz. Far from hoping the companies will stem the flow of syrup into poor communities, he says they should acknowledge the role that he and others in hip-hop have played for their products. “I feel like they should break off a check or at least drop off a couple of cases,” he says, laughing through the smoke from his Black & Mild. “We'll keep it confidential.”

The Break Presents : $uicideboy$

DrNoze — 2017-04-09T14:08:18Z

If a survey went around asking general hip-hop fans who some of the biggest duos and groups in hip-hop are right now, most answers would be pretty similar. Rae Sremmurd and Migos would be typical answers for a majority of people, but a duo that should also be mentioned is the $uicideboy$.

The duo from New Orleans, made up of $lick and Ruby Da Cherry, are one of the fastest growing acts in hip-hop right now. They've built a rabid fan base that flocks to anything they do or drop. Their SoundCloud is insane, with multiple projects and songs that have millions of plays. For their last three projects, Eternal Grey, Radical $uicide and Grey Sheep 2, each song has over 1.5 million plays on SoundCloud.

Their most recently released song, “You're Now Tuning in to 66.6 FM with DJ Rapture (The Hottest Hour of the Evening),” which premiered on XXL last week, hit a million plays in under a week. The views on their videos are also insane with quite a few hitting the seven-digit range. But why aren't people talking about them more ? For right now, $uicideboy$' only focus is making great music.

“We got a lot of stuff this year,” Ruby Da Cherry tells XXL while in New York City. “We're doing a tour in Asia, Europe, Australia, Canada. We're doing a bunch of different, shorter projects ; just touching different genres. We're going to be doing a punk EP with live instruments that we write and record ourselves. We don't like being put in a box. Even though in the core its rap music, we can do so much other stuff.”

$lick adds, “Our debut album, I Don't Want to Die in New Orleans, is coming out in December.”

Before their international tour kicks off and they hit the Lollapalooza stage at Chicago's Grant Park in August, get to know $uicideboy$ here on The Break.

Age : Ruby Da Cherry, 26 ; $lick, 27
Hometown : New Orleans

I grew up listening to : $lick : “I was always into rap. I got introduced to Three 6 Mafia when I was 8 when I was riding with my uncle. He played U.N.L.V.'s ‘Drag Em ‘N the River,' Three 6 Mafia's ‘Slob on My Knob' and ‘Tear da Club Up' and after I heard that I got obsessed. And besides that it was Cash Money, No Limit, you know the hometown heroes. Then when the Waka Flocka Flame age came in I got obsessed with that and Gucci too.”
Ruby Da Cherry : “Our moms are sisters so we were both raised on Cash Money really, ‘Tha Block Is Hot,' Big Tymers' records, Juvenile. Then as I got older I wasn't allowed to listen to rap anymore because apparently it influenced me in a bad way and then I got into punk rock, which was so much better. [Laughs] It was actually even worse.
“I listened to a lot of Misfits, Leftover Crack, Slayer and then from there I got back into rap when Lil Wayne started poppin' again. I wasn't feeling Tha Carter but then he came out with Tha Carter II and then the mixtapes. Then I got subwoofers in my car and I was like it's back to rap. I was listening to some Curren$y, some Souls of Mischief, some Pharcyde, OutKast is my favorite group ever. I took it back and tried to dig deep for old New York shit, old West Coast shit. $lick shed the light on me as far as new school rap goes.”
$lick : “I made that transition because of the production. I got obsessed with Shawty Redd, who I claimed is the pioneer of the shit now. ”
Ruby : “We missed [saying] one, who is our biggest role model, Kanye West.”
$lick : “Late Registration made me want to become a producer”
Ruby : “The College Dropout made me think that rap still has a chance. I started making music when I was 7 I started playing the violin. Then I moved to drums when I was 10 then I picked up playing in bands when I was 13. I played the guitar, piano and bass. I was playing in punk bands, metal bands, emo bands until we started $uicideBoy$. $uicideBoy$ is so much less stressful than bands.
“When I was in bands I was the person that was kind of leading the group, I book the shows, I make the design for the T-shirts, I write the songs and they would just follow my lead but still try to question my thinking. I'm saying I know everything but I had experience. When [me and $lick] linked up we were both listening to each other ideas and it was way easier, so I said fuck bands and just ran with this.”
$lick : “I started DJ'ing at age 14. My parents bought me this cheap ass $99 turntable set. You had to press the button to put the CD in [laughs], But when I upgraded my equipment, I started getting residencies at different clubs and shit. At 19, I got super obsessed with T-Pain, I never heard Auto-Tune before. I seen the interview where he was talking about how he made ‘I'm Sprung' and ‘I'm in Love With a Stripper' with GarageBand with all pre-set sounds, made the beat, did the vocals then mixed it later.
“That night—I was selling pills at the time so I had a stack of money—I went to Best Buy and got me a laptop. I still have the same white laptop till this day. I started making beats on GarageBand, shitty as fuck. Then I just kept making beats and you know, I had to get a job to pay the bills. Did that for three years and got fired for getting my hands tattooed and that's when Ruby and I linked up. At that point it was a crucial turning point in our lives.”
Ruby : “We were both ready to give up. This was 2013. I just graduated college and for a graduation present my parents helped me pay for T3I [camera], which is like $600. I had dabbled in video editing but I didn't know how to do it too well so I used [$lick] as my guinea pig. He was making mixtapes for fun and beats for other artists because he was signed to a label for that as an in-house producer.
“He would make projects on the side for fun and I really fucked with it. I could see the progression. So one day I called him and was like, ‘Yo, this one track off your mixtape is hot as fuck, let me come shoot a video for it and get some practice and I'll put it out there for you.' Sure enough we made the video and it was fire for our first video. We put it out there but after we did that we were like, ‘That's so fucking fun. Let's do that again.'
“And we started shooting more and more and at this time I was started to get confident about rapping. I rapped but was so self-conscious about it that I never wanted to release anything. I always had to work with people inside groups because I was so self-conscious to stand on my two feet because I didn't believe in myself. Long story short, I finally told him, ‘Can you record me ?' He did and I liked the way it came out. He featured me on one of his songs and it just sounded so good, the both of us together and we started the group.”
My style's been compared to : Ruby : “Not too much anymore but when we were coming up, the main artists that we always got compared to—and till this day we haven't listened to their music, no offense I think they are great—was Bone Thugs-N-Harmony. We're way bigger Three 6 Mafia fans. The triplets style.”
Slick : “As far as style, we never want to put ourselves in a box ever.”
Most people don't know : Ruby : “I'm a huge nerd. I collect action figures, I have like 700 collection of DVDs. I'm a huge movie buff. I'm a huge comic book nerd. Star Wars nerd ; I have like a shrine of like old vintage Star Wars stuff. I'm a big Batman fan.”
$lick : “I was a straightedge kid but I was still a savage. I was running drugs on my bike when I was 13 for this neighborhood dope dealer. One night, I was dropping a package off like I usually do, when all the lights shut off and two people came from behind me with one having a shank. One had a razor—the kind you push up and shanked me at my side. They took all the dudes dope. I got two letters when I was a kid for playing ball. I thought I was going to be a ball player, never thought I would be a rapper. I got a letter from the Pittsburgh Pirates and the Florida Marlins. I played shortstop.”
Ruby : “Another fun fact is whenever we used to hang out together and we get in trouble with our parents, especially $lick's parents, we pissed inside a Coke bottle and put it in the fridge and hope that his dad would drink it.”
$lick : “My dad would drink Coca-Cola every night [laughs].”
Ruby : “We're saying with our little tiny dicks at 8 years old we would piss in a Coke bottle because that's the way that works.”
$lick : “My dad woke me up in the middle of the night and beat the fuck out of me [laughs].”
Ruby : “Fun fact I'm the only kid out of my peer group that smoked crack just for fun. I smoked crack on a Friday and was like this is pretty fire. I smoke crack on Saturday and was like this is crazy then I smoke crack on a Sunday and said I'm never doing this again [laughs]. Just kidding, mom.”
$lick : “I remember when you told me that on [AOL's] AIM.”
My standout records/moment to date have been : $lick : “For me, the moment was selling out The Novo in L.A. and performed in front of 2,500 people. And also getting to where we're at without any fucking help, besides Pouya.”
Ruby : “My favorite record, and the record that means the most to us it ‘Low Key' because I'll just say this we both fucked up and did something we weren't supposed to do and were feeling really bad in the studio and we made this crazy song. I think that's probably the most vulnerable and the most emotional song we've ever made.
“As far as moments, one was when we went on our first tour that we booked ourselves, which was at the end of 2015. The first show was San Antonio. We played there a couple of months ago and there was like 70 kids in there. We go back, I'm thinking we'll have 150. They go inside and I go back to the car to change clothes. I hear the song start, ‘Paris,' and I'm like, ‘Fuck.' I'm running up to the venue and the door guy like $5 and I'm like, ‘Yo, I'm playing. I'm supposed to be up there.” He doesn't believe me and I run past him into the crowd. I'm pushing in and finally I run onstage and literally after $lick finishes his verse he hands me the mic and it goes fucking nuts.”
My goal in hip-hop is : Ruby : “To be the biggest artists of all-time.”
$lick : “To have a cultural influence. Non-egotistically, we feel like we do and we see that already.”
Ruby : “Not saying we're the best artists of all-time already but we feel like music lost its balls. You think about The Doors, Jim Morrison, Kurt Cobain, Public Enemy, N.W.A, there's nobody pushing the boundaries anymore. There are nobody standing up for anything anymore. It's all, ‘I got a diamond chain and I fuck your bitch.' That's fucked up. Why don't we say some shit that will better the world instead of fight each other over materialistic bullshit ?”
I'm going to be the next : $lick : “Kanye West. To have ‘Ye's cultural influence and still be able help others. Ultimately, I can sleep good at night to know that I helped [a number] of people.”
Ruby : “We just want to make a footprint in the world because when you die and dead and gone, you want to be remembered. That's how you live on.”

Read More : The Break Presents : Suicideboys - XXL | http://www.xxlmag.com/news/2017/04/suicideboys-interview-the-break/?trackback=tsmclip

Des Versions au riddim

2017-01-30T15:52:15Z

En 1967, Ruddy Redwood, selector du sound system jamaïcain Supreme Ruler of Sound, passe, sans le savoir, le morceau On the Beach des Paragons amputé de la piste vocale : la première version, instrumentale, est née. Moins de vingt ans plus tard, en 1985, Prince Jammy reçoit le titre de King pour le morceau Under Me Sleng Teng, chanté par Wayne Smith, un des plus grands succès de l'histoire de la musique jamaïcaine. En moins d'un an, Jammy sortira plus de trente morceaux sur le même riddim, Sleng Teng, tandis que ses producteurs concurrents le reprennent plus d'une soixantaine de fois. En 2008, le riddim Sleng Teng dépasse les deux cents reprises. En une génération, de 1967 à 1985, la reprise – apparue sous la forme d'une version instrumentale involontaire –, se retrouve au cœur même de la création musicale en Jamaïque, à travers la distinction entre riddim et tunes, le premier engendrant une multiplicité des secondes. Cette situation est le résultat d'une double évolution – multiplication des versions et émergence du rythme comme fondement de la création musicale –, qui répond à l'usage essentiel de la musique jamaïcaine, la danse ; mais qui apparaît aussi comme le résultat des structures de production de l'industrie musicale jamaïcaine, orientée vers la sortie de singles, par des collaborations musicales sans cesse renouvelées, et, surtout, prenant place dans un contexte de très grande contrainte économique.