The Plot Against Hip Hop

by Nelson George

  The awards taping ended at five p.m. and D skipped the official after-party and ended up in the Hollywood Hills, at a sexy purple-themed house, for Prince Rogers Nelson’s semiannual post–awards show house party. By getting there early, D avoided the cars stacked up on the soon-to-be-impassable canyon roads and got a leg up on the glittering, gifted, gassed-up gaggle of black star power who would be arriving after their courtesy appearances at the BET soiree. Even better, D was not working. He was just another guest.

  So he sat cross-legged on the floor as Mavis Staples sang “I’ll Take You There” with Prince on bass, D’Angelo on keyboards, and some talented kid on guitar who D didn’t recognize but greatly enjoyed. It was the most fun he’d had in a very long time. Just good music played by exquisite musicians for fun (and reputation) at a impressive place full of famous people, none of whom D was obligated to give a damn about.

  Then his BlackBerry buzzed in his jacket pocket. It was a text from an unexpected source: Come to my house 4 a special after party. Amos. This was followed by a Malibu address. He hadn’t seen Amos Pilgrim since that night with Amina so many months ago. It seemed like a cool thing to do.

  CHAPTER 26

  ALL OF THE LIGHTS

  Amos Pilgrim’s house was on the beach out in Malibu, a few doors down from David Geffen’s and a stone’s throw from producer Brian Grazer’s. From the Pacific Coast Highway, the house was obscured by a nondescript long, tall, white fence, as anonymous as beachfront property can be. Seven security cameras discreetly lined the wall with only two covering the entrance. Other than that, you’d never suspect that a sprawling three-story Colonial house sat behind the wall, a bit of sturdy New England construction bordering the Pacific.

  Inside, Amos’s walls were decorated with an impressive collection of African art, along with the odd African-influenced Picasso or other unusual painting hung in between. There were no gold or platinum records or framed posters or anything to suggest that Amos Pilgrim’s career stretched back to the age of soul or that he’d advised most of black entertainment’s power brokers on career moves and tax shelters. After the celebrity muscle of Prince’s house party, this event was more low-key, but hummed with the subtext that this was an event for movers and shakers. Amos was deep in conversation with some older white dude who had something to do with cell phone contracts in Asia, so D wandered over to a window and stood there, transfixed, watching the Pacific lap up against the California shore.

  As Marvin Gaye’s Here, My Dear album played quietly in the background, D smiled to himself and sipped mint tea. It had always tripped him out to be near the Pacific Ocean. He’d often gone to Coney Island as a kid and now, somehow, he’d made it from one end of America to the other, a journey very few of the people he grew up with would ever make. Hell, D thought, some of the folks I grew up with never left Brownsville, much less made it out of Brooklyn.

  Yet there he was, sipping on some high-quality herbal tea with Marvin Gaye crooning in the expensively decorated home of a legendary black man. This had to be someone else’s life.

  “You a tea drinker, huh, D?”

  There was Amos Pilgrim, standing arm-in-arm with a gorgeous Asian girl in an aqua slip dress with matching heels and dangling gold earrings. D didn’t want to be disrespectful, so he did his best to look at Amos, though the contrast between him and the young lady made it extremely difficult. Since D had last seen Amos, he had put on some weight. He had a scruffy white beard and a patch of bald skin on top of his head surrounded by a crown of graying hair. His eyes were sleepy, his lips red and thick, and his clothes expensive but seemed a sloppy fit. If this wasn’t his house and this fine-ass girl wasn’t on his arm, you’d think Amos was, perhaps, a well-paid gardener. Compared to their meeting at Hip Hop Honors, he looked unhealthy.

  “I don’t drink much alcohol, sir.”

  “So I hear. Well, welcome to my home anyway,” he said. Then he followed D’s gaze and chuckled. “This is Vanessa. She’s what I like to call a black-a-pina.”

  “Stop that, Amos,” she scolded him gently, then explained that her mother was Filipina and her father was black. “Amos came up with that name. I don’t like it too much but Amos thinks he can categorize everything and everyone.”

  “Maybe I can’t,” Amos replied, “but I do like to try.”

  “I hear you,” D said back, more because he wasn’t sure what to say next than because he understood what Amos and Vanessa were getting at.

  Amos chuckled and said, “You know, we should talk.”

  “Any time you’d like.”

  “Fine. Let’s sit down right now. Vanessa, make sure these people are okay while I go have a chat with D. You good with that?”

  “Only if you two come back.” She kissed Amos on his bald spot, smiled at D, and moved away.

  Amos took him by the arm and guided him out of the room. D felt the eyes of many at the party on them, probably wondering why Amos was being so chummy with a bodyguard when there were so many more important people anxious for quality time with their host. D was wondering the same thing.

  They turned into a long hallway of polished wood and paintings. “You know who Romare Bearden is?”

  “I’ve heard of him. This is his work?”

  “His Migration series.” There were about ten paintings on each side of the hallway. Inky black figures against verdant green backgrounds. “Bearden wanted to capture the journey of our people from the South to the North. We went from a rural people to an industrialized race. Northern factories needed unskilled labor and they recruited us, D. It changed us too. Never been the same since. Never will be the same again.”

  “My parents came from Virginia and took the Greyhound bus to New York.”

  “Mine went from Mississippi to Chicago. But I became myself out here in Hollywood, D. Made a pretty good life for myself in this place.”

  “No doubt.”

  “And all I’ve ever wanted to do was to make sure as many of us as possible could follow my example.”

  “That’s what everybody says, man. They say you give back.”

  “That’s good to hear. What else have you got in this world, really, but your reputation?”

  They came to a large metallic door and Amos entered a security code into a wall panel. There was a clicking sound and Amos pushed the door open to a room that looked like a funky bar from the era of platform shoes. In contrast to the more refined ambiance of the rest of the house, this den was all red and black, like the label on the Johnnie Walker bottles set up behind the red leather–trimmed bar on one side of the room. On the other side was a wall of framed photos, large and small, of Amos with Curtis Mayfield, Muhammad Ali, young Jesse “I Am Somebody” Jackson, Don Cornelius, a slender, very sexy Chaka Khan, and a bunch of other bushy-haired, bell-bottomed folks D didn’t recognize.

  “This is who you really are, isn’t it?” he asked in a tone that suggested he’d been let in on a secret.

  “Guess you could say that, though the rest of the house is me too. They just reflect different parts of me. Have a seat.”

  Amos sat behind a battered old dark wood desk and D took a seat across from him in a lumpy black leather chair, which felt like an artifact from the no-money-down furniture stores in every ghetto he’d ever seen. The contrast between the elegant and the tacky in Amos’s home was so stark that D wondered for a moment if the old man was schizophrenic.

  “I knew Dwayne Robinson,” Amos said, which immediately brought D back to the here and now. “He was a nice guy and a damn good writer. His was a loss that affects everyone who loves black music.”

  “Yeah,” D agreed and nodded, though suddenly he felt very cold. He could feel that Amos was gonna tell him something about Dwayne’s death, something only a person with his wealth and contacts could know. The idea scared D.

  “You probably didn’t know that Dwayne did some work for me.”

  D said he didn’t.

  “Yeah. First it was a bio or two for some acts I was i
nvolved with. He even wrote a speech for a black congressman I was supporting. But the main thing he did for me was this.”

  Amos reached into a drawer, pulled out a pile of papers, and tossed them on the desk. D picked them up, looked at the cover sheet, and then put them down, as if they were cursed, which, in a profound way, they were. It was a clean, freshly printed version of the Sawyer memorandum.

  “I commissioned it and had Dwayne come on board to help shape it. Think I paid him the most money he’d ever made at that point. More than he got for writing The Relentless Beat, for sure.”

  “Why is he dead?” D stood up, his voice and body language menacing, all his reverence for the man evaporated in that instant. D wanted to ask, Why did you have him killed? but that might be premature or, hopefully, wrong. Yet he damn well knew Amos had the answer to Why?

  “Figured you’d want to get right down to it,” Amos said, seemingly not at all stressed by the other man’s anger.

  D figured there were probably eight cameras on him and two retired Mossad operatives ready to come down from the ceiling. So he just stood there waiting for more, steeling himself for the worst.

  “To a degree, you could say Dwayne got himself killed, but I’m not gonna blame him for having a conscience. He just made a couple of dangerous people uncomfortable. Just like you have.”

  “If you brought me into your fucking museum to threaten me, fuck you. I don’t scare easy.” Now D didn’t care about the cameras or the security team on their way to snatch him up. He’d kill the fat old bastard if he had to.

  Amos stood up with his palms outstretched in a calming gesture. “I know how fearless you are, D. That’s why you’re here. I know you’re gonna face this head-on. That’s what you’ve been trying to do, but you didn’t know enough to do it right. If you died of that virus you got, that would be one thing, right? But if you died over something you didn’t totally understand, well, what the fuck would that be? A waste, right? I don’t want you to waste another moment of your life.”

  D knew this was prime-quality bullshit. No wonder this fat little black man had so much juice. He could really run his red lips. “All right,” D nearly shouted. “You commissioned the memorandum. You hired Dwayne. You obviously knew Malik and he worked for you too. So why does a twenty-year-old pile of paper get people killed?”

  The portly businessman sat back down behind his desk and gestured with his hands for D to do likewise. Slowly D backed down, but tried not to plop into the seat. He wanted to ease in slowly, with control. Instead, he almost tripped moving backward into the leather chair.

  Amos didn’t laugh (though it did seem to amuse him) cause he had a long story to share. “What I’m about to tell you,” he began, “will change everything you think about hip hop and, maybe, your life.”

  D sighed and slumped deeper into the worn leather chair.

  CHAPTER 27

  THE SCENARIO

  Right after Run-D.M.C.’s hit with ‘Walk This Way,’ I commissioned the Sawyer Group to create a detailed report on the nature, marketability, and long-term potential of hip hop culture. It took them eight months, but soon as that document came across my desk, I read it cover to cover. Your man Robinson had a nice, very direct prose style.

  “At the time I was in a unique position in the industry. I’d carved out a place as the black person white boys at the record labels looked to for recommendations on new executive talent and for who producers/songwriters should make label deals with. If a black attorney or young junior exec at the black music department was ready to take a leap, or if an up-and-coming producer was thirsty for his own distributed label, they came to me and I made sure someone at Sony, RCA, Warner Bros., or PolyGram was aware. If there was a deal to be made, I’d put it in motion. Sometimes I negotiated the whole thing; sometimes I just took a piece and played the background.”

  “You were what, the black godfather of R&B?”

  “Call it what you will. But I had a lot of influence and I used it wisely.”

  “How’d you get to be that man?”

  “Money. I was a generous contributor to both Democrats and Republicans in Cali and around the country. I gave to Jesse in ’84 and ’88, and I gave to Ronnie in ’84 and to Bush I in ’88. All the labels’ corporate parents were in bed with politicians for their other businesses. I had the ability to speak to both sides. My rep for having influence trickled down to every level of the record game.”

  “But you didn’t believe in anything, did you?”

  “No, young man, I believed in everything. I was for civil rights and for free-flowing capitalism too. I could feel both affirmative action and supply-side economics. I wasn’t ashamed to call Orrin Hatch or Teddy Kennedy my friend. I saw the flow of history and was pragmatic in floating down that river.”

  “And hip hop scared you, didn’t it?”

  “The rough part of being in LA is that sometimes you can’t see past the 5 highway. It didn’t scare me, but it did surprise me. And all the other corporate gate keepers out here too. But I was determined to catch up. The fact that it had an explicit, and implicit, political edge, that it had produced Chuck D and KRS-One, and was engaged with the Nation of Islam and the antiapartheid movement, made my antenna stand up. It was connecting the dots in a way that R&B hadn’t since the ’70s.”

  “And that worried you?”

  “It worried all of us.”

  “Us?”

  “All the black folks who mattered. All the black folks who’d given our sweat and, in some cases, lives to open the few doors that were already open. This wasn’t gonna be the Panthers again—smart young brothers with some good ideas who lost themselves in macho shit. This time we were gonna give them direction.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Well, through my contacts in the GOP I got wind of the fact that one of the researchers of the Sawyer memorandum, a Malik Jones, was actually an undercover FBI agent working the angle that hip hop was a convenient cover for arms transportation, drug smuggling, and other illegal forms of interstate commerce. So I got in touch with Malik, who by then was living in Ladera Heights, and made him an offer.”

  “Be your eyes and ears.”

  “Yes.”

  “He’d feed you info and you’d use your contacts to help him seem more credible in the industry. It doesn’t sound so bad on the surface. But obviously it got out of hand.”

  “Yes.” A long pause. “Two things happened. The first was that Malik began to like playing gangsta more than playing record mogul. Right alongside his pals in the Rampart Division, he began to be seduced, just like everyone, I guess, by the fucking splendor of gangsterdom. Suge Knight had been my bodyguard at one point. I hooked Malik up with Suge during the time that, at my suggestion, we began moving Dr. Dre over to Interscope.”

  “Cause you were down with the Interscope crew.”

  “Just doing business. You see, I’d been a part owner of Macola Records, who distributed almost all the West Coast rap in that early period. That guy who owned Ruthless began acting like he was actually running things. Tried to renege on a deal we had for ownership of Ruthless and a bigger piece of the NWA pie. So I had Malik and Suge pull NWA away from Ruthless. Everyone thinks it was about Suge and Eazy. It was really about a business deal gone bad.

  “Anyway, I became a silent partner in Priority, who signed Cube once he left NWA. My main goal was to control, one way or another, Ruthless’ assets, which was basically Dre and Cube.”

  “But putting Malik with Suge and the whole West Coast gangsta rap scene eventually bit you in the ass.”

  “I got the marks here on my right butt cheek.”

  “Okay. What was this other element you mentioned?”

  “I had my hooks into the emerging West Coast scene when that was about to blow. But you can’t really claim hip hop—at least you couldn’t at that time—without a New York presence. It was still the core of the culture—it was still where hit acts were being created. Malik, though he was fr
om Jersey, was now too West Coast–identified to work as a source/agent back east. On his recommendation we approached Eric Mayer, a very able, street-smart guy from Englewood who was a Jersey state policeman at the time. He’d been something of a wigger before the term even existed. And he was Jewish.”

  “How did that help?”

  “The New York record business, from the corporate offices on Sixth Avenue to the indie labels downtown, was either owned or corun by young Jewish guys. Shit, Russell Simmons didn’t have a bar mitzvah but most folks who knew him back then swore he wore a yarmulke under his fishing cap. All his partners were young Jewish guys. So I needed someone who could roll with them, get their confidence, and learn their secrets and vulnerabilities. Eric was perfect. He really was the suburban kid seduced by the culture. By his first summer on the job Malik was reporting to me that Eric was in the mix, he was playing basketball in the Hamptons with Russell. So now I had well-connected operatives on both coasts. But where Malik became too gangsta, Eric went native too. He saw East Coast hip hop as his true calling. Though it was in some weird neocon-meets–old school way I still don’t understand. And over time he started his own marketing company, started throwing his own events …”

  “And you lost control.”

  “I wish it was that simple. For six years or so, I had both Malik and Eric listening to me, feeding me info while I helped them make strategic moves. We guided Death Row to Interscope. We helped Russ and Lyor move Def Jam to PolyGram after the Sony deal went sour. You wanna know why Suge never went after Russell like he did Puff? Cause between Malik and Eric, I made sure that didn’t happen. I was making so much dough off both, I didn’t need the grief. We even gave seed money to that Gibbs in New York who sets up MCs with brands. We were the silent hand of capitalism behind hip hop’s growth in the ’90s.”

  “What happened to the politics?”

  “You tell me. The political acts started making bad records. Simple as that.”