“LA is on fire,” they told him. “Turn on the TV.”
Jinx, G Rap, and Tupac decided to go see it for themselves. They piled into Jinx’s Honda Accord and drove down Los Feliz Boulevard and south into South Central. Pac was strapped with a nine-millimeter, which he shot up into the sky as the car raced down the street passing burning cars. They got to Crenshaw and stopped in the middle of the street because traffic had come to a standstill. Cars were left in the middle of the road. “People were out everywhere, mad. The first place we stop was Tempo Records. We just went inside the motherfucker and it was on fire,” Jinx said. “People was running in and stealing movies so we went in. People found Tupac and he’s signing records that they stole.”
The day the riots broke out, Ice Cube was moving from Baldwin Hills to a new home in the Valley with his wife, Kimberly Woodruff (they had just tied the knot a few days earlier after years of dating). With the movers doing their thing, Cube headed to Harrison-Ross Mortuary in Compton to pay respects to a homie that had gotten killed. “Some of the homies were like, ‘Cube what you doing out here? It’s getting crazy. You need to go back.’ ” As the violence fired up in South Central he went around checking on people, starting with his parents.
“Just crawling through it, it was crazy looking at everything that was happening and trying to get through,” Cube recalled. “From there I watched it from afar until the peace treaties and I wanted to be involved.”
The images of strips of LA glowing amber as smoke billowed from dozens of fires were shocking. Men and women ran through the streets, their arms crammed with their stolen bounty—shoes, clothing, groceries, whatever. Classes were cancelled. The National Guard was called. A dusk-to-dawn curfew was implemented. And suddenly “Fuck tha Police,” the record blasting from cars, became an unofficial motto during the unrest. Rioters chanted “Fuck the police,” screaming it into news cameras and spray-painting the phrase on walls around South Central. The world watched in horror, and confusion. “Finally it took a motherfucker to videotape a nigga gettin’ the shit beat out of him for everybody else to say ‘fuck tha police,’ ” Eazy later said.
“Whether Rodney King happened or not, we would have still been saying that shit was real,” Cube said of “Fuck tha Police” and how many saw the record foreshadowing the riots. “Nobody could tell us anything different because we had saw stuff like this with our own eyes. People probably needed validation for themselves, but we didn’t need it because we weren’t looking for none—we were spitting it how we saw it and how shit was around us. I had the feeling of ‘we finally got y’all asses on tape.’ That was the feeling: ‘We finally got you, and this is why people are saying ‘Fuck tha Police.’ ”
The D.O.C. and Warren G went out together and looted. “It seemed like the thing to do,” D.O.C. said. What struck D.O.C. the most was how radically different the city felt in that moment. Before he was typically cognizant of where he was in the city as some areas were unsafe to travel in. But on that day, it didn’t matter. “It didn’t feel like LA at all. As long as you were black you were good. If you weren’t black, you may have a problem,” he laughed. “I didn’t worry about Bloods or Crips that day, it was very much if you’re black we’re in this bitch together—let’s go.” Added Sir Jinx: “It was like a big-ass picnic.”
“The events in the USA are evidence—again—of the sense of exclusion by which minorities feel themselves victimized in the country that was conceived to be a paradise of opportunities for all of its citizens, and even for the millions it has welcomed as immigrants,” a Brazilian paper wrote, while a publication in Rome proclaimed “Los Angeles is paying today what other cities and nations tempted by the same illusions could be called upon to pay tomorrow: the price of indifference and of judicial disgrace which protects the (white) police attackers and condemns the (black) victims; which acquits a Kennedy and condemns a Tyson for the same crime of rape.”
When the rioting finally ended five days later, more than sixty people (mostly black and Latino) had lost their lives in shootings or incidents tied to the unrest, more than two thousand people were injured, eleven thousand arrested, and $1 billion in damage had been done, in what was the most devastating civil disturbance since the 1863 Draft Riots in New York City.
“It was more than just the verdict. More than just the white cops. It was a lot of shit building up—issues with the Koreans and blacks, the Mexicans and the blacks. It was boiling over and it just needed one thing,” Jinx said. “People didn’t really give a fuck about Rodney King like that, but we thought it was fucked up what they did to him and it was on tape. It wasn’t like they beat this nigga up and there was no proof. There was a video.”
“Born, wicked, Laurence, Powell, foul / Cut his fuckin throat and I smile,” Ice Cube rapped on “We Had to Tear This Muthafucka Up” from his album The Predator.
Released months after the LA riots, The Predator touches on the events from earlier that year and became his first number one album. “Who Got the Camera?” is inspired by the Rodney King beating, imaging a scenario in which a black motorist is brutally beaten by cops and hoping its filmed. He seethes at the Simi Valley jury that acquitted the four officers charged with beating King on “Now I Gotta Wet ’Cha” and “We Had to Tear This Muthafucka Up.” And on the album’s closer, “Say Hi to the Bad Guy,” Cube envisions revenge on a cop by enticing him with donuts and blasting him in the head. The Predator, however, is mostly remembered for “It Was a Good Day,” a mellow, celebratory jam created around an Isley Brothers’ sample describing the perfect day where there was no gang violence, police confrontation, or drama, that’s become his most famous recording—so famous in fact, a blogger calculated the exact day that Cube describes in the song as January 20, 1992, two months before the killing of Harlins and King’s beating. Goodyear decided to fly its blimp over South Central like the song said to pay tribute.
By the time the riots had inflamed LA and captivated a nation, Gangsta rap had already embedded itself into the pop zeitgeist of the 1990s, going from scandalous musings of urban miscreants to a lucrative industry.
The year prior, N.W.A notched the first number-one Gangsta-rap album with its final release, Efil4zaggin, and three of its former members—Ice Cube, MC Ren, and Dr. Dre—put out hit projects that year. Tupac Shakur emerged with his debut, 2Pacalypse Now, offering raw mediations on racism, police brutality, poverty, black-on-black crime, and teenage pregnancy from the lens of a twenty-year-old black man. DJ Quik, an inventive rhymer and producer from Compton, became the first rapper from the Bloods to break big. Ice-T dropped O.G. Original Gangster, which still remains a seminal entry in the genre. And Hollywood, seeing the growing commercial success of Gangsta rap, embraced films that told the same grim and violent stories emcees were rapping about. With Cube’s Boyz n the Hood launching a subgenre of hood films, rap continued to deepen its influence. In fact one of the biggest singles of 1992 came from a young teenage rap duo named Kris Kross that rapped about missing the school bus on one song while sampling Eazy-E on another. But in 1992, rap was such a hot button in politics it led to the Los Angeles Times to label the months of controversy and debate over race and class as “The Uncivil War.”
After the riots, political rapper and community activist Sister Souljah gave an interview where she levied the unrest as “revenge” against years of white oppression.
“I mean, if black people kill black people every day, why not have a week and kill white people? . . . In other words, white people, this government and that mayor were well aware of the fact that black people were dying every day in Los Angeles under gang violence. So if you’re a gang member and you would normally be killing somebody, why not kill a white person? Do you think that somebody thinks that white people are better, or above dying, when they would kill their own kind?” she asked.
Souljah, born Lisa Williamson, appeared on several tracks with Public Enemy before briefly becoming a member, replacing the exiled Professor Griff as
the group’s “Minister of Information.” In 1992 she tried her hand at a rap career, releasing her only album, 360 Degrees of Power, which featured her explosive oratories. “Souljah was not born to make white people feel comfortable. I am African first. I am black first. I want what’s good for me and my people first. And if my survival means your total destruction, then so be it,” she yells on “The Hate That Hate Produced,” one of her two singles banned by MTV because of their language and imagery.
An edited version of Souljah’s words reached Arkansas governor and presidential candidate Bill Clinton. Needing to appeal beyond the Democratic vote, Clinton saw an opportunity to try to get the support of Republican voters disillusioned by President Bush and those considering Ross Perot when he was invited to speak at the Reverend Jesse Jackson’s Rainbow Coalition Leadership Summit. To the surprise of the organization hosting him, Clinton used his speech to denounce Souljah and criticize them for allowing her to speak at a youth forum. “She told the Washington Post . . . ‘If black people kill black people every day, why not take a week and kill white people?’ . . . If you took the words ‘white’ and ‘black’ and reversed them, you might think David Duke was giving that speech,” Clinton said, comparing her to the former grand wizard of the Ku Klux Klan who ran for governor of Louisiana the year prior. His denouncement, based on a quote taken out of context, angered Jackson and other black leaders who accused Clinton for exploiting Souljah “purely to appeal to conservative whites.” It was an embarrassing hiccup for Clinton who later won over black voters when he pulled off a smooth saxophone solo on the Arsenio Hall Show and won the election—he was even labeled America’s “first black president.”
Clinton’s takedown of Souljah wasn’t the only political shaming of hip-hop. The Combined Law Enforcement Associations of Texas and the Dallas Police Association united to call for a boycott of “Cop Killer,” a song from Ice-T and his thrash metal band Body Count. Ice, the first rapper signed to Sire Records, was no stranger to his music attracting political attention. After founding the Parents Music Resource Center, a committee established to keep explicit music away from kids, Tipper Gore, wife of Clinton’s running mate Senator Al Gore, and Susan Baker, wife of longtime Bush confidant and secretary of state James Baker, used their political influence to initiate the 1985 Senate hearings on explicit lyrics, which led to the Recording Industry Association of America being pressured into introducing a labeling system that identified potentially offensive albums. Ice-T’s debut, Rhyme Pays, was the first album to be labeled with a warning sticker under those guidelines. Released a few weeks before the LA riots and months before law enforcement got their hands on its lyrics, “Cop Killer” was a rock song that was a dark fantasy about snuffing a member of the law. The song was dedicated to “every cop that has ever taken advantage of somebody, beat ’em down or hurt ’em, because they got long hair, listen to the wrong kinda music, wrong color, whatever they thought was the reason to do it.”
“Cop killer, I know your family’s grievin’ . . . FUCK ’EM! / Cop killer, but tonight we get even,” Ice sings over brash guitars and drums.
“Cop Killer” unleashed a furor not even seen by “Fuck tha Police” (the phrase is actually shouted repeatedly in the song’s final refrain). Law enforcement associations held a press conference calling for a boycott of Sire’s parent company, Time Warner, if it wasn’t removed from future pressings. Vice President Dan Quayle joined the outcry, denouncing the company for marketing “obscene” entertainment that, he said, ran counter to the traditional values of mainstream culture. “The problem is that records like ‘Cop Killer’ do have an impact on the streets—the wrong impact,” he decried, while President Bush offered an attack on the entertainment industry at large, saying it was “sick” to produce anything that glorified cop killing. The outcry was especially strange considering the previous year’s highest grossing film featured Arnold Schwarzenegger playing a cop-slaying cyborg and there was no one up in arms.
Sixty members of Congress signed a letter to Warner Brothers, slamming “Cop Killer” as “vile” and “despicable,” and there was a call for divestiture of stock from Time Warner. California attorney general Daniel E. Lungren sent letters to chief executives of eighteen record-store chains in the state urging them to stop selling the record, printing the missive on government stationery for extra potency. Oliver North, the former National Security Council aide who was entangled in the Iran-Contra scandal, called on the governors of all fifty states to persecute Time Warner for marketing “Cop Killer” in violation of sedition and antianarchy statutes. The National Rifle Association took out full-page ads in newspapers pledging legal assistance “to the interests of any police officer shot or killed if it’s shown that the violence was incited by Ice-T’s ‘Cop Killer,’ ” and future NRA president Charlton Heston read the lyrics aloud at a Time Warner stockholders meeting in Beverly Hills while hundreds of members from local and national police organizations, including the Los Angeles Police Protective League, protested outside.
As demonstrated with N.W.A’s “Fuck tha Police,” national fury is damn good for business. The protests led to the Body Count album selling 100,000 copies in a month, sending it racing up the Billboard chart despite it being pulled by about 1,500 stores. Citing his First Amendment right to free speech, Ice-T defended his band’s record saying, “If you believe that I’m a cop killer, you believe David Bowie is an astronaut.” The National Black Police Association denounced the boycott and Time Warner co-CEO Gerald M. Levin wrote an editorial for the Wall Street Journal suggesting that instead of “finding ways to silence the messenger” critics and listeners should be “heeding the anguished cry contained in his message.” Tired of the public condemnation as a violent thug and constant death threats, Ice-T agreed to pull the song from future pressings of the album and gave it out for free. Later that year, he split amicably with Sire/Warner Brothers after the label sought to censor lyrics on his solo project, Home Invasion, instead taking the album to Priority Records, a label familiar in dealing with public outcry over Gangsta-rap lyrics. Ice-T continued releasing albums, both solo and with Body Count, but he’s still most famous for his role on Law & Order: SVU—a drama in which he portrays, in one of the greatest ironies of all time, a detective.
NUTHIN’ BUT A ‘G’ THANG
Michael Harris, better known as Harry-O, made a fortune moving cocaine across the country—money he then funneled through legitimate business dealings, investing in real estate, a limousine service, hair salons, and a construction company. But the South Central drug kingpin was itching to get into show business. Harry-O got a shot in 1988 by coproducing a Broadway production called Checkmates, which starred Ruby Dee and Paul Winfield and served as the stage debut of Denzel Washington. Most impressively he managed to do this while behind bars, sentenced months before the show opened to twenty-eight years for crack dealing, kidnapping, and attempted murder.
In the autumn of 1991, Harry-O introduced his lawyer David Kenner to Suge Knight and asked Kenner to bring him in for a jailhouse visit so the two could confab about cutting a demo of his wife, Lydia Harris, an aspiring singer who served as his proxy on the outside. They discussed partnering for the label, with the incarcerated dealer particularly interested in Dr. Dre’s involvement. Within months he put up $1.5 million in capital for a 50-percent stake in a multimedia company called GF Entertainment, which commissioned Death Row Records as its record division (pay-per-view concerts and a movie division were also part of the plan). Suge and Harry-O frequently discussed business over the phone—despite it being illegal for an inmate to run a business while in state prison—and Suge would make the two-hour trek to the California Correctional Institution in Tehachapi to sit with his business partner, going nearly two dozen times in the next eighteen months after they met. Lydia and Kenner filed incorporation papers in May 1992 to establish GFE Inc., which stood for Godfather Entertainment Inc.
The “springing of Death Row Records” was celebrated w
ith a flashy party thrown by GF Entertainment at Chasen’s restaurant in Beverly Hills. Video footage of the party shows Suge and Kenner toasting Harry-O, a seemingly intoxicated D.O.C. declaring the label’s greatness, and Dre hamming it up with Michel’le. But the celebrations were short-lived for some of the label’s key players. Harry-O and Suge fell out after he learned Suge and Dre inked a deal with Jimmy Iovine’s burgeoning Interscope Records. The deal with Interscope also pushed out D.O.C. and Dick Griffey, with them later suing Suge for secretly incorporating the label and fraudulently transferring all its assets. “By the time it made it to Jimmy, I didn’t own anything. It was tough. Everybody knew it. And I knew everybody knew it, but there was nothing I could do about it. Dre was supposed to be my guy, and so if he’s not gonna stand back to back with me that means I’m out here by myself. For me, it was let’s just ride this thing out and see how I could get mine off of it and move on,” said D.O.C., who found out about the deal the night before shooting a video for The Chronic.
“Suge used to always say to me, ‘We don’t fatten no frogs for no snakes,’ meaning he didn’t want undeserving individuals in the corporate world to benefit from our hard work,” Harry-O said. “As it turned out, Suge ended up being both the frog and the snake.” Harry-O threatened to sue in 1996 and received a $300,000 settlement—in 2002 Lydia sued Suge and a judge awarded her $107 million, though only $1 million was paid after Suge was forced into bankruptcy—and a year later Griffey and D.O.C. sued Suge, who was incarcerated at the time, for $150 million and won a small six-figure settlement. D.O.C. likens the speed with which Suge changed on him to the old story of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. “It happened that fast,” he said. “The words don’t exist to explain how demoralizing it felt.”
Parental Discretion Is Advised Page 20