Warren was nervous. He had played the music for his famous stepbrother a few times, and each time he passed, telling Warren they needed to get their shit together if they wanted a real shot. Their demo enjoyed some minor underground buzz, but they still couldn’t get anyone to sign them. Warren put the tape in and played “Gangster’s Life.” “What is this shit? It’s banging,” Dre asked, stumbling in from a nearby room.
“Dre, this is me, Snoop, and Nate,” his stepbrother told him. “This is what I’ve been trying to tell you about!”
Dre was impressed—especially with Snoop, who had a cadence similar to Slick Rick’s smooth melodic flow, but incredibly laid-back and warm. He invited them to come to the studio and when an excited Warren called Snoop to tell him, Snoop refused to believe him.
“I said, ‘Nigga, stop lying.’ And someone said, ‘Hello?’ And I said, ‘Who’s this?’ And he said, ‘It’s Dre. Man, that shit was dope. I want to get with you. Come to the studio Monday.’ ” Snoop recalled.
Like Dre, Snoop grew up loving old R & B, funk, and soul and was the class clown during high school. Snoop gleaned his nickname from his affinity with Peanuts comics as a child. While he was Snoopy at home, he started running the streets and eventually floated into petty drug sales with friends in the Rolling 20 Crips. The streets weren’t kind to his friends from his football days: out of twenty-eight of them, twelve were killed, seven were behind bars, and three were strung out on crack.
Dre and Snoop clicked immediately, and he continued to invite them back to SOLAR and even let Snoop crash at his Calabasas home. Dre had barely any furniture in his place—“Jerry and Eazy were trying to starve me out, and they weren’t paying me my royalties or anything like that,” he admitted. Dre at least had a makeshift studio in his bedroom. One night, fooling around in the studio, Dre put on Sly Stone’s “Sing a Simple Song,” and longtime collaborator Colin Wolfe came up with a bass line with a jazzy feel similar to the A Tribe Called Quest record he was listening to heavily. Dre constructed a beat around Wolfe’s melody and samples from the Sly & the Family Stone record, adding in a note from Undisputed Truth’s 1975 cover of “(I Know) I’m Losing You” and some piercing piano keys he and Wolfe played.
Dre came up with a loose concept for the verses, giving Snoop instruction before taking a break for the gym. Build on the words, “Tonight’s the night I get in some shit, Deep cover on the incognito tip,” he said. When he returned Snoop had mapped out lyrics using his own arrest for slinging drugs as inspiration.
Dre turned the recording into a duet, building on the film’s theme of killing an undercover cop. Before they knew it they had a refrain that was equally chilling and catchy, with its reference to the California penal code for murder that became wildly popular among thugs, both authentic and pretend. “Yeah, and you don’t stop, Cause it’s 1-8-7 on a undercover cop.”
“Deep Cover” was the first time listeners heard Dr. Dre on his own, no N.W.A behind him. The record also introduced the first of a handful of emcees that would go on to shape and define hip-hop under Dre’s tutelage as he eased into a new role: Label mogul.
WHO GOT THE CAMERA?
Rodney King’s white Hyundai Excel came to a stop in front of an apartment complex on a busy street in Lake View Terrace. It was 12:30 a.m. on March 2, 1991, and the unemployed construction worker had just been given chase by the California Highway Patrol, a squad of Los Angeles police, and a helicopter after he was clocked speeding at about 115 miles per hour on the Foothill Freeway. The twenty-five-year-old was recently paroled after serving a year in jail for robbing a convenience store of $200 and assaulting the clerk. Fearing a speeding ticket could send him back to jail—not to mention the forty-ounce bottles of 8 Ball (Olde English 800) malt liquor and weed he’d indulged earlier that night while watching basketball with his homies—he kept driving. Now he had several patrol cars behind him and a police helicopter loudly circling overheard, attracting tenants to their windows and balconies.
For a second, no one moved, and then a shout from an officer forced King out of his vehicle. Officers claimed King acted erratically when he exited the vehicle, laughing at the helicopter lights and grabbing himself when instructed to put his hands up. Police swarmed him. Officers assumed, incorrectly, that he was high on PCP, a drug officers believed gave users near-superhuman strength. One officer shot him with a Taser, sending a searing electrical surge through his body, but King rose to his feet unfazed. The commotion awakened George Holliday, who thought to grab his Sony camcorder—it was still brand-new in its box—and went to his terrace. Holliday hit record on the chaos unfolding ninety feet away. The footage comes into focus as King, on his knees and surrounded by about a dozen cops, receives ten ferocious blows from one officer’s baton.
Feeling the blows, the liquor, and the weed, a dazed King tries to stop the beating before falling to the ground. Two officers target his legs, slapping them with the batons to subdue him. Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! Crack! A dizzying amount of blows were delivered to King, who laid connected to the Taser and never fought back. As he writhes around in pain, officers continue their assault. King is hit across his back, struck in the head, and has his neck stomped on as passing cars slow down to see what’s happening, and nearby residents watch in horror from their balconies.
“Please stop. Please stop,” King pleaded from the ground before he was hog-tied and dragged, facedown, to the side of the road, where he was left alone—the officers milling about as shocked and disgusted citizens spoke to each other from their apartments.
“That is sick!”
“It looked like they were trying to break his ankles.”
“It’s enough cops over there to fight an army.”
King was transported to Pacifica Hospital of the Valley where doctors were unsettled by his injuries: Eleven broken bones at the base of his skull, a shattered eye socket and cheekbone, a broken leg, a concussion, numerous lacerations to his face, injuries to both knees, and nerve damage that left his face partly paralyzed. None of the officers reported they saw anything go wrong, unaware there was a video recording of the incident. “I haven’t beaten anyone this bad in a long time,” Officer Laurence Powell typed into the computer in his squad car. Later it was revealed Powell sent a dispatch earlier in the night describing a domestic disturbance involving blacks as “right out of Gorillas in the Mist,” referencing the Sigourney Weaver drama about naturalist Dian Fossey’s work in Rwanda studying mountain gorillas.
The day after King’s beating, Holliday took his tape to local news station KTLA and sold it for $500 after he was dismissed by his local precinct and ignored by CNN. Holliday’s footage, and King’s injuries, contradicted what officers had written in their reports. The tape became a sensation, with networks airing the footage “like wallpaper” as a CNN executive vice president was quoted as saying. It confirmed fears from blacks across Los Angeles that an encounter with the LAPD, which had a reputation for being prejudiced (the four officers were white), had the potential to end in violence, humiliation, or, worse, death.
“Did you see that shit on the news?” Cube remembered being asked one night in the studio. He had been busy recording and hadn’t yet seen the tape. Cube took a break from the booth and ran to the television and the middle of the beating was playing on the screen. “I just kept thinking, ‘These dirty motherfuckers.’ ”
Outrage ripped across LA, as well as the rest of the country. Hundreds rallied outside Parker Center, LAPD’s headquarters, demanding the dismissal of the officers involved and calling for LAPD chief Daryl F. Gates to resign. Gates had proven particularly unpopular among black citizens for how he had militarized the police force during Reagan’s War on Drugs. “Stop police brutality,” one protestor’s sign read. “LAPD = KKK,” another stated. Powell and three other officers were charged with assault with a deadly weapon and use of excessive force after four days of grand jury testimony (charges against King for driving
while intoxicated and evading arrest were never pursued).
Mayor Tom Bradley also called for Gates “to remove himself,” which he refused to do. Mayor Bradley then ordered a comprehensive probe into the practices and procedures of the LAPD. Among the findings in the 228-page report? From 1986 to 1990, the city paid out more than $20 million in judgments, settlements, and jury verdicts for excessive-force lawsuits and in the same period more than 10 percent of the 1,800 officers against whom an allegation of excessive force or improper tactics was made were gross offenders. Racial bias was rampant in the department, with an LAPD survey agreeing that prejudice on the part of officers toward citizens contributed to a negative interaction between police and the community, and that bias often led to use of excessive force. The report also showed how often incidents involving racial slurs from white officers against minority colleagues were frequently ignored.
The culture of racism was so prevalent, officers were comfortable enough typing disparaging messages on computer transmissions between squad cars:
“If you encounter these Negroes, shoot first and ask questions later.”
“Sounds like monkey-slapping time.”
“I’m back over here in the projects, pissing off the natives.”
“Everybody you kill in the line of duty becomes a slave in the afterlife.”
A year after the beating, opening statements were made in the trial of the four officers charged with beating King. It was the first time the two sides formally presented their versions of the incident after months of debate and pretrial hearings.
The trial had the makings of a spectacle. The initial judge was removed for showing bias and it was decided to change the venue to Simi Valley, a sleepy town in neighboring Ventura County that was notably more white and conservative than LA, so the jury wouldn’t be influenced by the extensive coverage of the case.
During the trial Eazy-E found himself in the center of controversy. A few weeks after the footage of King’s beating had ignited the nation, Eazy suggested King record a remix to N.W.A’s hard-core anthem, “Fuck tha Police.” “We were criticized a lot when we first released that song, but I guess now after what happened to Rodney King, people might look differently on the situation,” he said. “Not all cops are bad, but this kind of harassment has been going on for years in the ghetto. I think we’ll probably call our new version ‘F— tha Police, the King Remix.’ ” But he also publicly disparaged King, who had more run-ins with the law after the beating, including being arrested for solicitation: “[He’s] all fucked up, man! Rodney King so fucked up he wouldn’t know his own goddamn name!” Eazy also evoked King’s beating by LAPD and made light of Dr. Dre’s vicious assault on Pump It Up host Dee Barnes, joking how Barnes “was fucked up worse than Rodney King!” Eazy then drew the ire of blacks and hip-hop fans when he lent his support to Theodore Briseno, one of the officers being tried.
Eazy met Briseno through his lawyer. The unlikely pair made the front of the Los Angeles Times, with the paper identifying the rapper as a “supporter” in an image. Indeed, he was quite sympathetic to Briseno, attending the trial almost daily and frequently standing next to the embattled officer, and even helping to support Briseno’s family. The general consensus was that this was an open-and-shut case; the video was quite damning for the officers. Eazy, however, disagreed. “Sure, I’ve seen that little stomp Briseno does on the video, and I’m not saying it’s justified,” he said. “But we don’t know what it was about, do we? It could have been him just trying to tell Rodney, ‘Stay down, man, stay down.’ Who’s to know?” The hip-hop community, still perplexed by Eazy’s decision the year prior to attend a Republican luncheon with President Bush, was irate over his support for the cop. “Eazy-E is a sellout,” Geto Boys’ member Willie D said. “He got everybody all riled up about police injustice with ‘Fuck tha Police,’ but evidently he wasn’t sincere. I guess maybe he should have called that song ‘Fuck Bein’ Broke,’ because that’s all Eazy-E seems to care about. He ain’t about nothin but money.”
After two weeks of testimony, the jury—which included no blacks—was dismissed to begin deliberations. Seven days later, a verdict was reached. All four men were acquitted on all charges except one count of excessive force against Officer Powell. The judge declared a mistrial, since the jury couldn’t reach a consensus. A year later a federal jury found Officers Stacey Koon and Powell guilty of violating King’s civil rights and sentenced them to two and a half years in prison. Again, the officers were acquitted.
WE HAD TO TEAR THIS MUTHAFUCKA UP
“This is for Rodney King!” a young black man shouted after cracking a bottle of 8 Ball over the head of David Lee, whose father owned Pay-less Liquor and Deli. The young man and his friends had gone to the Korean-owned convenience store known as “Mr. Lee’s” around South Central to grab some bottles of Olde English 800 about an hour after the verdict was announced. When they got there the men decided to steal the malt liquor, scooping up as many forty-ounce bottles as their arms could carry. Lee was struck in the head when he attempted to stop them from leaving the store without paying. The men tossed some of the bottles through the store’s windows before fleeing.
Mayor Bradley condemned the verdict in an emotional public address. “No, our eyes did not deceive us. We saw what we saw. What we saw was a crime,” Bradley said. “We will not tolerate the savage beating of our citizens by a few renegade cops.” He urged the city to stay clam and refrain from violence but his comments were perceived by many as a tactful call to action for black citizens who were enraged not just about the case, but years of racial tension and police brutality that the footage had exposed. It was a breaking point for black Angelenos and less than two hours after the jury handed down its verdict, the city was on fire.
“It’s a hellish night in the City of Angels,” one newscaster said.
LA turned into a war zone, with scenes that looked like an apocalyptic thriller. Cops were unprepared as Gates was at a house in ritzy Brentwood campaigning against police reform when the unrest began. The intersection of Florence and Normandie, three blocks from the incident at Mr. Lee’s, was the flash point of violence. A group of guys took baseball bats to a white man’s car. An Asian man driving home from work was beaten and robbed after assailants got his car to stop, leaving his business attire soaked in blood. Fidel Lopez, a self-employed construction worker, was dragged from his truck and savagely beaten by a group of black men—a car stereo was smashed over his skull, his ear nearly severed, his pants pulled down to his knees so his assailants could spray paint his genitals black and douse him with gasoline. Lopez was saved from certain death when black reverend Bennie Newton intervened, hoisting his Bible in the air and warning rioters, “Kill him, and you have to kill me too.” But there was no one to help Reginald Denny when he was pulled from his eighteen-wheeler and pummeled in a gruesome attack by members of the 8-Trey Gangster Crips. The assault on Denny was broadcast live by a news helicopter and became a jarring symbol of the mayhem. Denny was kicked and beaten with a claw hammer before Damian “Football” Williams took a cinderblock and crushed it on his head at close range, knocking him unconscious and fracturing his skull in ninety-one places—Williams even did a little victory dance afterward. The 8-Treys were linked to a police ambush where three officers were shot and injured, and authorities believed the gang looted clean a gun shop near Western and Florence Avenues. Although gangs did a great deal of looting during the riots, members of rival Crips and Bloods sets in nearby Watts had actually declared a truce to end violence the day before the riots (it didn’t last long).
A lack of police presence made way for the increasingly brutal violence and mayhem to occur, although two blocks away from the madness unfolding at Florence and Normandie, there was a platoon metro division that refused to dispatch officers out of concern that the optics would exacerbate the sentiment behind the riots. When cops finally did show up, they were pelted with rocks and bottles, taunted by mobs of angry, disenfr
anchised blacks furious that, despite a video recording and national outcry, police officers still managed to get away with the types of brutality they had been complaining about for years. Knowing they were just as much a target of violence, and lacking shields or bulletproof vests, responding officers withdrew from the area. Retribution for Latasha Harlins was undoubtedly at the forefront of some who went into Koreatown to pillage shops and target Korean shop owners, who fired guns at thieves and exchanged gunfire with looters, as cops largely abandoned the area to instead protect Beverly Hills and West Hollywood. “Burn baby burn,” a man screamed as buildings were set ablaze.
Sir Jinx was working with Kool G Rap at a studio in Atwater Village, a cute neighborhood nestled between Griffith Park and Glendale, when the verdict came down. It was supposed to be an off day, but G Rap was writing and Jinx was going through beats. In the room adjacent to his, Tupac Shakur was at work on his Strictly 4 My N.I.G.G.A.Z . . . album. The TV was off so they had no idea what was unfolding across LA until a few of his homeboys burst through the studio carrying hats, stacked one on top of another, and armfuls of liquor. “I know they ain’t got no money,” Jinx said. “So I’m like where did y’all get this stuff from?”
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