Can't Stop Won't Stop (48 page)

Radio made the Roxy's diversity look like a Benetton ad. Kid Frost and his
cholos
rolled down to the club in their low-riders, sporting their Pendletons and khakis. There were slumming Hollywood whites and South Central Korean-American one-point-fivers escaping long hours at the family business. Everyone but the hardest brothers left the menacing Blue City Strutters—a Samoan Blood set from Carson that would become the Boo-Yaa Tribe—alone.

When Radio faded, live hip-hop parties spread through the efforts of a popular sound system called Uncle Jam's Army, led by Rodger “Uncle Jam” Clayton who had begun throwing house parties in 1973 in South Central. A decade later, the Army was regularly filling the Los Angeles Convention Center and the Sports Arena. At their wild dances, the Army showed up in army fatigues and bright Egyptian costumes. They stacked thirty-two booming Cerwin-Vega speakers in the shape of pyramids.

Then shit turned real bad real quick.

Dance crews like the Carson Freakateers, Group Sex and the Hot Coochie Mamaz gave way to the Rolling 60s Crips and the Grape Street Boys. Playlists featuring frenetic sensual funk like Prince's “Head” and the Army's own “Yes Yes Yes” slowed down for a new audience that wanted Roger's “So Ruff So Tuff” and George Clinton's “Atomic Dog.” The Freak was replaced by the Crip Walk. American-made .22's were replaced by Israeli-made Uzis. Chains got snatched, folks got robbed. One night a woman pulled a gun out of her purse and shot a guy in the jaw.

Although they had come up in 111 Neighborhood Crip territory, Cube and Dre were not active gang members. Perhaps it was because Cube was being bused out of his ‘hood or maybe it was because he was a jock. As far as Dre was concerned, banging didn't pay.
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But it wasn't hard for them to notice that the streets were changing. The effects of Reagan's southern hemisphere foreign policy were coming home, making millionaires of Contra entrepreneurs, illegal arms dealers, and Freeway Rick. There was a lot of firepower out there now. Since 1982, the number of gang homicides had doubled.
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Forget knowing the ledge. Lots of these West Coast ghetto stars had already leapt screaming over it.

Yet the music on the West Coast wasn't changing. It was still about Prince-style expensive purple leather suits and slick drum machines. The World Class Wreckin Cru was a perfect example. Dre thought Lonzo was corny, but he owed him lots of money. Lonzo not only owned the studio Dre used, he had handed out loans to Dre, sometimes bailed him out of jail for not paying his parking tickets, and even let Dre take his old car.

While Lonzo was still paying off the note, the car got stolen and ended up impounded. At the same time, Dre landed himself in jail once again, just as Lonzo was coming up short and ready to cut him off anyway. Wright saw his chance, and offered the nine hundred dollars to bail him out.
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But Dre had to agree to produce tracks for Wright's new record label, Ruthless.

What the hell, Dre figured. That's why he was now in Lonzo's studio on Wright's dime. He was working off the bond and the fees for getting the car back. Lonzo was out of a car and a DJ. Dre's mercenary willingness to sell his
creativity in exchange for security would prove his downfall over and again.

One of the records in heavy rotation on KDAY was by Russ Parr's local comedy rap act Bobby Jimmy and the Critters, a track called “New York Rapper” in which Parr covered Run DMC, LL Cool J, the Beastie Boys, Eric B. & Rakim, UTFO, Roxanne Shante and Kurtis Blow in a goofy country accent. “New York rappers made the street-hard sounds. L.A. rappers? Buncha plagiarizing clowns,” he rapped, with emphasis on the word “clowns.” By 1987, that shit wasn't so funny anymore.

L.A. rap had hit an artistic dead end; it could carry on its raunchy, cartoonish sound or imitate serious-as-cancer New York. Lonzo was milking a four-year-old cow that was going dry. Meanwhile, Dre working with HBO seemed like an admission of defeat. Cube was tired of being a follower. He had done sex rhymes, he'd done East Coast. Maybe he wanted to show these no-name New Yorkers what Los Angeles was really about. The rap he penned for them was packed with local detail, violent in the extreme.

On hearing the lyrics, HBO refused to do it, saying the track was “some West Coast shit,” and walked out. Dre, Laylaw, and Wright looked at each other—now what? Dre suggested that Wright to take a turn with the track. Wright was reluctant. He was supposed to be a manager, not a rapper. Dre pressed, not wanting to see a great beat and precious studio time going to waste. When Wright reluctantly agreed, Eazy E was born, and they began recording “BoyzN-The Hood.”

The record hit the streets in September of 1987, but Jackson had already left for Phoenix. The single he cut for Lonzo had not done anything. Who knew what this single would do? “The rap game wasn't looking too solid at that time, so I decided to go ahead and go to school,” he says. “I went to a technical school just to make sure that I did what I wanted to do for a living, no matter what.”

But now that Jackson was returning to Los Angeles, it was becoming clear that something had changed. While Jackson was working with T-squares, Wright's hustle and Dre and Yella's radio pull was getting the record off the ground. By the end of 1987, it was the most requested record on KDAY. Wright went from selling the record out of the trunk to swap meet vendors and retailers to a distribution deal with indie vanity label Macola. He had even paid Lonzo $750 to introduce him to a white Jewish manager in the Valley, a guy named
Jerry Heller who had once promoted Creedence Clearwater Revival, Pink Floyd, Elton John and REO Speedwagon.
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A year after they had cut “Boyz,” the single was taking hold on the streets, selling thousands of copies every week.

Jackson was proud of his rhyme. In it, Eazy cruises through town, “bored as hell” and wanting “to get ill.” First he spots his car-thief friend Kilo G cruising around looking for autos to jack. Then he catches his crackhead friend JD trying to steal his car stereo. After having words, JD walks off. When Eazy follows him to make peace, JD pulls his .22 automatic. In an instant, Eazy kills him.

Like nothing has happened, he decides to see his girl for a sexual interlude. But she pisses him off, so he “reach(es) back like a pimp and slap(s) the hoe,” then does the same to her angry father. Later, he witnesses Kilo G getting arrested. Kilo won't be given bail, so he sets off a prison riot.

In “Boyz-N-The Hood,” girls serviced the boys, fathers were suckers and crackheads were marks. It was a seemingly irredeemable sub–Donald Goines pulp world. But then there was the unexpected finale.

Kilo makes his trial appearance and there his girlfriend, Suzy, takes up guns against the state. In the gunfight, Suzy seems bulletproof. The deputies can't stop her. Instead she goes out on her feet, not on her knees, getting sent up for a bid just like her man, barbed-wire love. By introducing this twist, a sly interpolation of Jonathan Jackson's real-life drama, “Boyz-N-The Hood” rose to the level of generational myth.

Perhaps O'Shea had heard the story as a youngster of another seventeen-year-old brother named Jackson, killed by sheriffs and prison guards in a 1970 Marin County courthouse shootout.

As Angela Davis would later remind jurors in her own trial, Jonathan Jackson lost his brother, the writer George Jackson, to the prison system at the age of seven, serving a one-to-life sentence for second-degree robbery. In early 1970, some white and black prisoners at Soledad had a minor fistfight. White prison guard O. G. Miller swiftly ended the fight by firing at three black inmates—all of whom had been known as political activists. Two died almost instantly. Guards refused to allow medical aid, and the third was left in the yard to die. Later that
winter, after an announcement that a grand jury investigation had cleared Miller, prisoners attacked another guard and threw him off a third-floor balcony. George and two others, Fleeta Drumgo and John Clutchette, the ones considered the political leaders of the prison, were framed for the murder. The crime could automatically bring George the death penalty.

George's letters to Jonathan, later collected in
Soledad Brother,
revealed the depth of their relationship. In the letters, he taught the younger sibling about communism, sex, resistance, being a man. But the letters remained much of what Jonathan would know of his brother, and words only hinted at the loss Jonathan was feeling. Davis wrote, “[B]ecause it had been cramped into prison visitors' cubicles, into two-page, censored letters, the whole relationship revolved around a single aim—how to get George out here, on this side of the walls.” In turn, George noticed a change in his brother. In a letter to Angela Davis in May of 1970, he wrote of Jonathan, “[He] is at that dangerous age where confusion sets in and sends brothers either to the undertaker or to prison.”

On August 3, in what many took to be an ominous sign, George was transferred from Soledad Prison to San Quentin Prison, in whose gas chamber he might be executed. Four days later, Jonathan strode into the Marin County Courthouse where a prisoner named John McClain was defending himself against charges he had stabbed a prison guard. Two other prisoners, Ruchell Magee and William Christmas, were also present to testify on McClain's behalf. Jackson marched into the trial chambers with an assault rifle and a cache of weapons, and sat down. When he rose, it was to calmly say, “All right, gentleman, I'm taking over now.”

Jackson taped a gun to the judge's head, took several jurors and the district attorney as hostages, then walked with the three prisoners out to a van in the parking lot. Soon enough, a San Quentin guard shot at the van, and other guards and sheriffs joined in with a hail of gunfire. The bullets wounded the district attorney and a juror. The judge, Christmas, McClain and Jackson were killed.

Deputies immediately began a nationwide search for Angela Davis, who was accused of supplying Jackson with one of the guns. She was captured and sent to prison on trumped-up charges of murder, kidnapping and conspiracy. During Davis's trial, George was killed by prison guards in a deadly
prison-break attempt. Davis, Drumgo and Clutchette were later acquitted of all charges.

Jonathan Jackson's rebellion had been fearless, inarticulate and fatal. George mourned his brother by writing, “I want people to wonder at what forces created him, terrible, vindictive, cold, calm man-child, courage in one hand, machine gun in the other, scourge of the unrighteous.”
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He considered Jonathan “a soldier of the people,” an image that would find a different resonance in the Los Angeles street wars of the ‘80s.

Whether Cube had intended to or not, “Boyz-N-The Hood” recovered the painful memory. Tracking the lives of Compton hardrocks “knowing nothing in life but to be legit,” “Boyz-N-The Hood” became an anthem for the fatherless, brotherless, state-assaulted, heavily armed West Coast urban youth, a generation of Jonathan Jacksons. The impact of “Boyz” had to do with its affirmation, its boast: “We're taking over now.”

And even as these boys unloaded both barrels into their authority symbols, Eazy E revealed their vulnerability. He delivered the rap in a deadpan singsong, a voice perhaps as much a result of self-conscious nervousness as hardcore fronting. Dre mirrored Eazy's ambivalence in the jumpy robotic tics of the tiny drum machine bell. And as if to cover E's studio anxiety, Dre added a pounding set of bass drum kicks to help drive home the chorus:

Now the boys in the hood are always hard

You come talking that trash we'll pull your card

Knowing nothing in life but to be legit

Don't quote me boy, ‘cause I ain't said shit

The kids knew Eazy's mask instantly. They might have quoted his lines in their own adrenalin-infused, heart-poundingly defiant stances against their parents, teachers, the principal, the police, the probation officer.

So Eazy E's mask stayed. The mercenary b-boys were suddenly a group, perhaps even the “supergroup” Wright had talked about. He named it Niggaz With Attitude, a ridiculous tag that set impossibly high stakes. Now they had an image to uphold.

Gangsta rap and postindustrial gangs did not begin in Compton, but a short distance north in Watts. Just like the Bronx gangs, they rose out of, as the ex-Crip warrior Sanyika Shakur would put it, “the ashes and ruins of the sixties.”
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Watts was a desolate, treeless area located in a gully of sand and mud, the flood catchment for all the other neighborhoods springing up around downtown. In the 1920s Blacks had nowhere else to go.

They had been present at the very first settling of Los Angeles in the late eighteenth century, and established their first community one hundred years later. Starting at First and Los Angeles streets in downtown, they spread east and south along San Pedro and Central Avenues, where they began developing businesses.
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While the UNIA and the Urban League had established offices in the city by the 1920s, Los Angeles's Blacks were different—less idealistic, more pragmatic, even a little mercenary. They joined together to break into all-white neighborhoods by sending a light-skinned buyer or a sympathetic white real estate agent to make the down payment. When Blacks moved in, whites moved out. In this way, they won blocks one by one. Sociologists had a term for this process of reverse block-busting: “Negro invasion.”

One Black entrepreneur had even figured out how to hustle racial fear. He told the scholar J. Max Bond:

One of my white friends would tip me off, and I would give him the money to buy a choice lot in a white community. The next day I would go out to look over my property. Whenever a white person seemed curious, I would inform him that I was planning to build soon. On the next day the whites would be after me to sell. I would buy the property sometimes for $200 and sell it for $800 or $900. The white people would pay any price to keep the colored folks out of their communities.
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