Decoded (15 page)

B
ack in the 1990s, before file-sharing became the real disrupter in the music industry, bootlegging was the worst threat. There is no analogy between bootlegging and anything that happens in the streets, unless you count niggas going up in stash spots and straight robbing you. As an artist, you’re in the position of having to guard your work from everyone. No one can answer you when you demand to know how your album was leaked in the first place.

So you become paranoid. Is it the engineer in the studio, his assistant, the owner of the studio? Is it the label, the processing plant? I always had some sympathy for our die-hard fans, the ones who were just looking for a way to get their hands on records they couldn’t otherwise afford. Back when it was really rampant, I always threw away a hundred thousand units in projections to bootlegging, knowing that bootleggers were so resourceful that they could never be completely beaten, no matter how careful you were. It’s almost quaint to think about that now, since digital pirating accounts for many times as many copies as any bootlegger ever managed to get out on the streets. And back then, it was rare for the bootleg to dramatically beat the release date for the legit album.

But when
Vol. 3 … Life and Times of S. Carter,
my fourth album, hit the streets more than a month before the official release date, I was totally at a loss. This was really too much. I was flipping out on Def Jam staff, accusing people of having something to do with the bootleg copies on the street. I just couldn’t believe how flagrant it was, and how much more damaging it could be than the usual low-level bootlegging. I wanted to know how my shit got out.

People kept giving me the same name as the source of the bootlegging. It was someone I knew, someone I never would have suspected. One night I went to Q-Tip’s solo album release party and at some point in the night, I ran into the guy everyone’s been telling me is behind the bootleg. So I approached him. When I told him what I suspected, to my surprise, he got real loud with me right there in the middle of the club. It was strange. We separated and I went over to the bar. I was sitting there like, “No the fuck this nigga did not …” I was talking to people, but I was really talking to myself out loud, just in a state of shock. Before I even realized what I was doing, I headed back over to him, but this time I was blacking out with anger. The next thing I knew, all hell had broken loose in the club. That night the guy went straight to the police and I was charged with assault.

I went to the Trump Hotel on Central Park West and holed up, tracking coverage of the incident in the media. After a couple of days I called my lawyer and turned myself in at the precinct. That’s when I realized how serious things were, not because they threw me in the Tombs, but because they started setting up a press conference. The district attorney had his publicist on the phone, the cop that was assigned to do the perp walk with me was combing his hair and fixing his collar; it was a complete show for them. The hilarious thing, if any of this can be considered funny, is that the Rocawear bubble coat I was wearing when they paraded me in front of the cameras started flying off the shelves the last three weeks before Christmas.

AT ANY GIVEN MOMENT SHAWN COULD LOSE IT

When I was holed up in the Trump Hotel, my entertainment lawyer, Michael Guido, came by and taught me an old college game he used to play, Guts. My whole crew learned how to play. It’s a high-stakes game, and I like to watch how people react under the game’s pressure. It’s revealing. Guts is deceptively simple. You’re dealt three cards. Aces and pairs are high. Once you’re dealt your three cards, you have to decide whether or not to stay in. The best hand wins the pot, so it is essential to do a quick analysis, read your opponents, and, most importantly, be decisive. It’s a game that rewards the kind of self-possession and clarity that quiets your fight-or-flight reflexes. Gambling like that makes you aware of how often your immediate emotional impulses are to do something really stupid because it feels good for a moment. Like what I did at the club that night.

There are some lines in “Streets Is Watching,” a song off my second album, that capture the situation. The song’s first verse starts off:

Look, if I shoot you, I’m brainless

But if you shoot me, then you’re famous—what’s a nigga to do?

And the second starts:

Now it’s hard not to kill niggas

It’s like a full-time job not to kill niggas

The streets can start to make you see the logic in violence. If a thing surrounds you and is targeted at you, it can start to seem regular. What may have once seemed like an extreme or unacceptable measure starts to seem like just another tool in your kit. Even after I left the streets, I was still under the kind of pressure that made me sometimes act without thinking. But when you slip and give in to that pressure, in an instant you can throw your whole life away. I had to learn to keep my mind still so I could think clearly and sometimes hold back even when my heart is telling me to go in.

On the other hand, you have to know when you need to step up and act, even when it might seem reckless to someone on the outside. Knowing the difference between recklessness and boldness is the whole art of gambling. But in the end you’re just rolling the dice.

As distracting as my indictment had become, I knew that the next single off the album, “Big Pimpin’,” was a gem, even if it wasn’t a conventional single by any stretch of the imagination. I asked UGK to get on the track with me because I was a huge fan of their music, even though a lot of my East Coast fans didn’t really know who they were. I’d always loved Southern hip-hop, and UGK combined great Southern bounce with sneak-ily complex rhymes and delivery. And they were funny as hell. Timbaland went wild on that track; he used pieces of North African music, horns that sounded damn near like geese. It didn’t sound like anything else on the radio at the time, but I knew it was time to double down.

I rallied the troops and I told my staff to get us on MTV’s
Making the Video,
which hadn’t been on a rap set before. I got Hype Williams to direct it. I’m notoriously tight with video budgets, but for “Big Pimpin’,” I put out a million dollars. We headed to Trinidad for carnival, then booked a mansion in Miami, got the biggest yacht we could find, and hired hundreds of girls from the top agencies. We went Vegas with niggas on that one. But to me, it felt like a sure bet. When we released the single for “Big Pimpin’” in the first week of June 2000, it made up for the bootlegging, the indictment, everything. It was my biggest single up to that point.

WITH ENOUGH BAIL MONEY TO FREE A BIG WILLY

The contrast between the million-dollar extravagance of the “Big Pimpin’” video and the potential of being behind bars for years behind a mindless assault wasn’t lost on me. Both were about losing control. “Big Pimpin’” is a song that I wrote in the middle of all the madness, a time when I might have been at my most paranoid and hedonistic. It’s a song that seems to be about the purity of the hustler’s thrill—pleasure cooked down to a crystal. The lyrics are aggressive; they’re about getting high off that thrill, fuck sharing it or saving some for tomorrow. Break taboos, live without limitations, spend money like it’ll never run out, fuck bitches, and bounce, forget about catching feelings. Jump out the plane and don’t think about how you’re going to land. But there’s a couplet at the end,

that shows that even when you’re out of control, you know that it could end at any moment, which only makes you go harder. If the price is life, then you better get what you paid for. There’s an equal and opposite relationship between balling and falling.

The winter before my case, Puff and Shyne caught a case behind that shoot-out at Club New York, and just as I was being indicted, their case was being prepared for trial. The way Puff and Shyne’s trial unfolded was unreal. The district attorney’s office spent a lot of money on prosecution and it went on for more than a month. Less than a block from where Puff and Shyne were being tried, the guys accused of bombing the World Trade Center in 1993 were on trial. There were barricades in front of their courthouse. It was a major trial, important to the city, the whole country, but no media were there. Meanwhile Puff’s courthouse was swarming with cameras and reporters; the local papers were writing about what Puff’s mother was wearing to court. It was un-fucking-real. Of course Shyne got convicted, but the D.A. had put on that spectacle to get Puff. When he walked I knew they’d be even more aggressive about getting a conviction in my case, making an example of me where they’d failed with Puff. So I settled and took probation. No way was I going to allow myself to be a sideshow for the state.

But more than that, I realized that I had a choice in life. There was no reason to put my life on the line, and the lives of everyone who depends on me, because of a momentary loss of control. It sometimes feels like complete disaster is always around the corner, waiting to trap us, so we have to live for the moment and fuck the rest. That kind of fatalism—this game I play ain’t no way to fix it, it’s inevitable—feels like realism, but the truth is that you can step back and not play someone else’s game. I vowed to never allow myself to be in a situation like that again.

Life Is Slowly Taking You from Who You Are (1:21)

[
Chorus: Bilal
]
I know I shouldnt’ve did that
¹
 / I know it’s gon’ come right back / I know it’s gon’ destroy everything I made / It’s probably gon’ get ya boy sent away / But this game I play, ain’t no way to fix it / It’s inevitable that I’m / Falling / [
Jay-Z
] Said where I would stop before I even started /
When I get to one brick,
²
then the Game I will depart with / Got to one brick then I looked to the sky, like /
Sorry God, I lied, but give me one more try
³
 / Got to two bricks, new cars, new whips
⁴
 / But niggas never learn till they end up in the newsclip / The irony of selling drugs is sort of like I’m using it / Guess it’s two sides to what “substance abuse” is / Can’t stop, won’t stop, addicted to this new shit /
Brand new convertibles, I’m so ruthless
⁵
 / Front row, fight night—see how big my tube is? /
Fuck HD, nigga see how clear my view is?
⁶
 / (FALLING) / But there’s a price for overdoing it / Doin it this big’ll put you on the map /
Stick-up kids is out to tax
⁷
 / Plus the FBI Boys with the cameras in the back, DAMN! / I know I shouldnt’ve did that / I know it’s gon’ come right back / I know it’s gon’ destroy everything I made / It’s probably gon’ get ya boy sent away / But this game I play, ain’t no way to fix it / It’s inevitable— / Now you’re / (FALLING) / When you should’ve fell back, / Now you’re / (FALLING) / Right into they lap /
Falling, they applaud and they screamin’ at the screen
⁸
 / “Damn, you fucked up!” like your favorite movie scene / Godfather, Goodfellas, Scarface, Casino / You seen what that last run did to DeNiro / When he can’t beat the odds, can’t cheat the cards /
Can’t blow too hard, life’s a deck of cards
⁹
 / Now you’re tumbling, it’s humbling, you’re falling, you’re mumbling / Under your breath like you knew this day was coming / (FALLING) / Now let’s pray that arm candy / That you left your ex for stay “down” and come in handy /
Cause come January, it gets cold
¹⁰
 / When the letters start to slow, when your commissary’s
¹¹
low / When your lawyer screams “Appeal!” only thinkin ’bout a bill / When your chances are nil, damn, gravity’s ill … / [
Bilal
] I know I shouldnt’ve did that / I know it’s gon’ come right back / I know it’s gon’ destroy everything I made / It’s probably gon’ get ya boy sent away / But this game I play, ain’t no way to fix it / It’s inevitable— / That you’re / (FALLING) / [
Jay-Z
] And you can’t get up /
All you do is push-up, pull-up, sit-up
¹²
 / Locked down, the town now belongs to the Squares /
Who say they won’t make the same mistakes
¹³
that got you there / And ya arm candy’s sweet on ’em /
And the woman that you left for this heffa got a college degree comin
¹⁴
 / Bad news keeps coming / Hard to keep something on your stomach / You’re sick ’bout what your life is becoming / (FALLING) / Bunch of used to’s, has beens bragging bad ’bout all the new dudes /
Talking tough on the YouTube bout what you used to do
¹⁵
 / But that’s old school to the new crew / They’re doing numbers like Sudoku / They’re the new you / And its damn near inevitable they’ll experience deja vu too / Fight, and you’ll never survive / Run, and you’ll never escape / So just fall from grace, damn … / [
Bilal
] I know I shouldn’t’ve did that / I know it’s gon’ come right back / I know its gon’ destroy everything I made / It’s probably gon’ get ya boy sent away / But this game I play, ain’t no way to fix it / It’s inevitable that I’m / FALLING