by Jeff Chang
By 1976, Jamaican DJ Dillinger’s song “Cokane In My Brain”—an unlikely smash hit in Kingston, New York and London—announced that the white-line pipelines out of the Andean “snowfields” through the remote Caribbean cays into the First World’s leisure centers were open. In a 1981 cover story featuring a martini glass filled with cocaine, Time magazine toasted the “all-American drug,” the powder that made you “alert, witty and with it.”33
Best of all, this “emblem of wealth and status” was now available to millions of ordinary middle class Americans. During the early 1970s, rich New Yorkers paid one thousand dollars per ounce for the pleasure.34 But a decade later, cocaine production and distribution became so efficient that the price of a gram had dropped to as little as one hundred dollars, or roughly three dollars per ounce.35 The time was right for a chemical innovation to take care of the glut and increase cocaine’s demand and profitability again.
Don’t Ever Come Down
For years, Andean farmers had smoked coca paste, which they called basuco, or basé. The high one got from smoking the paste was much more intense than snorting it. In 1974, a San Francisco Bay Area coke-powder smuggler and his chemist friend tried to replicate the smokable coke. They converted the powder by mixing it with ether and heating it, creating not a paste, but little crystals. When they smoked them, they couldn’t believe what they had done. This product got the name “freebase,” because the process that made the rocks had literally, in chemist’s terms, “freed” the “base.” Their mistranslation—Spanish “basé” to English “base”—had led them to something entirely new.36
Freebase was marketed as even safer than the powder itself. Journalist Dominic Streatfield writes, “One 1979 manual I found in the Drugscope library in London, called Attention Coke Lovers! Freebase = the best thing since sex! . . . [concluded] that freebase is ‘considerably less harmful, physically, than regular cocaine in any quantity.’ ”37 At that point, cocaine’s price was still too high for many to experiment with freebase, so for a time, cocaine smokers remained among the most elite of clientele.
But indications that smokable cocaine might not be so benign began to bubble up along the cocaine pipelines. In the early 1970s, doctors began to notice paste-smokers in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia turned to walking ghosts. And when the glut of cocaine hit the Bahamas—the key Caribbean transshipment point—cocaine smoking took off amongst the sufferers. Since the high was also shorter, it was chemically more addicting. Addicts spent all of their time chasing the next high. All that needed to happen was for the right entrepreneur to figure this all out.
That man, the Kid Charlemagne of cocaine, was Los Angeles legend Ricky “Freeway Rick” Ross, an illiterate ex-tennis champ who got his first fifty-dollar bag of coke for Christmas in 1979, flipped it and never looked back. Freeway Rick came onto the market at the right time. Cocaine production had never been higher and distribution was about to get much easier.
He began by selling powder to wealthy Black clients. As he expanded his market, he got cheaper prices from his suppliers. Then Rick systematically absorbed his competition, making them his own retailers by offering them better prices. Pushers of PCP—known on the streets as “sherm” or “water”—traded in their stuff in to get with him. He even began training Crips to be salesmen.
Freeway Rick’s clients knew about freebase. Richard Pryor’s 1980 explosive episode with a home-making kit—leaving him with third-degree burns—had been a great advertisement. But they didn’t want to risk or bother cooking it up, so Rick learned how to make a simpler version of it by cutting it with baking soda and heating it. He called the result “Ready Rock” and took orders for their weekend parties in powder or rock.
By the end of 1982, as Freeway Rick’s prices continued to drop, his clientele shifted down the economic ladder, and Ready Rock had completely replaced powder. Freeway Rick was not mad. Ready Rock was made for the masses. Once he figured out how to standardize production and prices, Ready Rock offered a potentially larger market at double or more the profits of powder.38 Anyone could afford a deuce or a nickel rock. And who, after hitting it, didn’t want more? Now the streets started getting really ugly.
Aqeela Sherrills, then a teenage Grape Street Crip, watched his Watts neighborhood change. “Once an individual got hooked on it that was their only pursuit. They was robbing, stealing, jacking, everything. Then you think about some of the neighborhood killers. When they was strung out on the shit, they was robbing a dice game, getting into it with some cats, shootouts would happen. Cats who was like big-time drug dealers in the neighborhood, all of a sudden they were strung out, with nothing.”
He says, “The whole quality of life in the neighborhood just changed. I mean all of the girls that we were just crazy about when we were kids, that we all looked up to, became strawberries. The neighborhood was already tough, but people literally lost their families to drugs and the violence that came out of people utilizing drugs and making money off drugs. Folks went to jail for the rest of their life. People got murdered. It just totally devastated the neighborhood.”
In Nicaragua, Reaganite hawks were concerned about the new leftist Sandinista government that had overthrown their dictator-of-choice Anastasio Somoza, the most stunning development since Fidel Castro had taken Cuba. But their zealous military interventions on behalf of the Contra counterrevolutionaries were not popular with the American public. By 1985, Congress voted to cut off funding the Contras. So intelligence and military operatives turned to covert illegal means of supporting their dirty war—selling guns to Iran, and assisting Contra supporters who were trafficking cocaine to fill the exploding demands in the north. At the other end of the pipeline, the illiterate, jobless and hopeless Ricky Ross and many others like him turned into vulture capitalists to feed their ghetto clienteles the illicit spoils of war.
When the Wild Style crew had stepped into the Harajuku, Freeway Rick’s Ready Rock—this new, less pure, more popular cousin of freebase that the media would name “crack”—was flooding Los Angeles, Miami and New York City. Another Planet Rock was taking shape—a world defined by the constants of destabilization and collapse.
Raising Hell
Run DMC had hollowed out the music and killed the old school. Their Raising Hell album was bolting to platinum as they headed out of New York City with the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J and Whodini on a sixty-four-date tour. But even as they reigned as kings of the new school, the world was changing.
This new world could be heard one hundred miles from New York City in Philadelphia. Around the time the city’s first Black mayor, W. Wilson Goode, authorized police to drop the bomb on the Black radical organization, MOVE, burning down sixty-one homes in a working-class Black neighborhood, a North Philly rapper named Schoolly D used a cheap drum machine, his partner DJ Code Money’s scratch and a reverb knob to create menacing tracks like “Gucci Time” and “P.S.K.”—the initials for his crew, the Park Side Killers—songs about beating down style-biters and screwing cheap whores.
Across the country, the hottest mixtape in Los Angeles was a homemade cassette made by Compton DJ Toddy Tee in his home-studio. On the tape, Toddy Tee rapped about the new cracked-out world over instrumentals of east coast hits. Whodini’s “Freaks Come Out at Night” became “The Clucks Come Out at Night”; UTFO’s “Roxanne Roxanne” became “Rockman, Rockman.” Most famously, Rappin’ Duke’s “Rappin’ Duke” became “Batterram,” at tale about the military-armored personnel vehicle L.A. Police Chief Daryl Gates used to bust down the doors of rock-houses.
L.A. rap pioneer Tracey “Ice T” Marrow and his Chicano friend, Arturo “Kid Frost” Molina Jr., had cut a handful of tracks in the early ‘80s to no great consequence. Instead Ice T had parlayed his street rep into a starring role in Breaking and Entering, a 1982 cult movie about the L.A. dance scene that inspired Breakin’, and led to his casting in a role for that movie. He had started rapping as a teenage Crip with lines inspired by the Crips’ poetry books and Iceb
erg Slim pulps, like:
Strollin’ through the city in the middle of the night
Niggas on my left and niggas on my right
Yo I Cr-Cr-Cr-Cripped every nigga I see
If you bad enough come fuck with me.39
“Batterram” and “P.S.K.” gave him the juice to revisit his old gang rhymes. In 1986, Ice T dropped “Six in the Morning” on the b-side of his single, “Dog N’ The Wax.” “That song,” he told journalist and photographer Brian Cross, “turned out to be my identity.”40
The tale of a “self-made monster of the city streets, remotely controlled by hard hip-hop beats,” “Six in the Morning” was a revisionist rap history told from the hard streets of Los Angeles. The tale begins in 1979, the same year as “Rapper’s Delight,” with an early morning escape from the cops—no comic book superheroes here, just a ghetto noir anti-hero on the run. “Didn’t know what the cops wanted, didn’t have time to ask,” he sneers.
As he runs, he stops on the corner to roll some dice, ends an argument with a woman by beating her down, and finally gets arrested and thrown in jail, where he causes a riot. When he emerges from prison seven years later, it’s 1986, the old school is over, the action has moved west and the whole world has changed. “The Batterram’s rolling, rocks are the thing,” he raps. “Life has no meaning and money is king.”
At the end of the summer of “Six in the Morning” and “P.S.K.,” as the Raising Hell tour was heading into its final stretch, Run DMC’s limo pulled up to the Long Beach Arena in Southern California. They anticipated fourteen thousand fans anxiously awaiting them inside. Instead they found a full-scale melee in progress. Los Angeles’s gangs had turned the concert in the arena into their own private battlefield, with thousands of innocents caught in the middle.
Local radio personality Greg Mack was MCing the show. He told Brian Cross:
[T]his guy threw this other guy right over the balcony on to the stage while Whodini was peforming, so they got up on the stage trying to talk to the guy, next thing you know a whole section was running, gangs were hittin’ people, grabbing gold chains, beating people . . . I got the girls, ran to the car, there was a Crip standing next to me getting his shotgun, getting ready to do God knows what.41
This was a new breed of renegades. The hip-hop generation had reached childhood’s end, and was coming into an era of rebellion.
Hip-hop was not just a ‘Fuck you’ to
white society, it was a ‘Fuck you’ to
the previous Black generation as well.
—Bill Stephney
LOOP 3
The
Message
1984–1992
The search for identity. Harlem, 1992.
Photo © John Van Hasselt/Corbis Sygma
In response to the killing of Michael Griffith, the “Day of Outrage”
demonstration comes to Howard Beach, 1986.
© Eli Reed/Magnum Photos
11.
Things Fall Apart
The Rise of the Post–Civil Rights Era
Not only there but right here’s an apartheid.
—Rakim
If there was a single moral struggle that gripped the 1980s in the same way that desegregation had the 1960s, it was the global fight against apartheid, the racist South African apparatus of law and ideology that allowed the white minority, outnumbered five to one, to maintain political and economic power over the native Black majority. The anti-apartheid movement represented the climax of a century of anticolonial and antiracist resistance, the light piercing the last darkness before the dawn of a new global century.
Pedro Noguera, a student leader at U.C. Berkeley during the mid-’80s, says, “Apartheid was such a stark situation. It was so clear. How repressive the regime was, how unjust apartheid was—in some ways it was easier to see the issues there than it was to see the issues here.”
The Black struggle in the American south for desegregation had inspired millions around the world to throw off the shackles of white rule, and the children of civil rights, the young Americans who came of age during the late seventies and early eighties, were never allowed to forget it. The elders spend a lot of time talking about the glories of the civil rights movement, while dismissing the hiphop generation as apathetic and narcissistic.
Angela Brown, the daughter of a family of civil rights activists, was one youth organizer who wearied of her elders’ criticism. “Most young people who have grown up in the South have really gone through hell with our elders,” she says. “They have constantly challenged us, that we haven’t done what they’ve done as far as moving the movement forward.” But in the fight against apartheid, the post–civil rights children found a desegregation battle to call their own, something in which to find their own voice and stake their own claim to history.
The Divestment Strategy
The roots of the contemporary American anti-apartheid movement date to 1963, the peak of the civil rights movement, a year after the CIA aided South Africa’s white-minority regime in their capture of freedom fighter Nelson Mandela.1 That year, the United Church of Christ called for economic sanctions against the apartheid government, whose rule was being buttressed by highly profitable gold and diamond mining industries. By the end of the decade, the American Committee on Africa, the American Friends Service Committee, radical workers groups and others had launched educational campaigns in African-American communities.
In 1971, the National Council of Churches called upon General Motors to divest of all its direct investments in the South African economy. By pulling money out of South Africa, activists felt they could make a moral statement and weaken the apartheid regime. They then formed the Interfaith Center on Corporate Responsibility, which helped organize shareholder resolutions against ITT, AT&T, Union Carbide, Ford, Exxon, Polaroid, Sears, Xerox, IBM and Mobil.2The following year, African-American student Randall Robinson and others turned Harvard Yard into a cemetery of five hundred black coffins, representing the victims of the university’s investments, and set off years of student protests against their universities’ “complicity in apartheid.” The movement would come to call for cultural and consumer boycotts, government sanctions, and divestment of public-sector and corporate funds.
In the beginning, the movement faced long odds. After arresting Mandela and banning his organization, the African National Congress, the South African government brutally quashed Black resistance and rapidly expanded its security, surveillance, and policing complex. The repression had the intended effect; foreign corporate investment skyrocketed. In 1973, U.S. direct investments in South Africa totaled over $1 billion a year.3 The Nixon administration’s so-called “tar baby option” further sealed North American participation in the regime, making it official U.S. policy to accommodate the white minority, and support South Africa as a strategic anticommunist beachhead in the region.
By the mid-1970s, South African youths had reshaped the growing Black Consciousness movement, and their protests took a more militant turn. The apartheid regime stepped up their repression. On June 6, 1976, South African troops fired on demonstrators in the townships of Soweto, leaving hundreds of youths dead. In the crackdown that followed, over a thousand were killed. In 1977, Stephen Biko, the father of Black Consciousness, died of injuries sustained in prison beatings. Dozens more Black and multiracial organizations were banned, newspapers were closed and hundreds more remained in jail. President Jimmy Carter recalled his South African ambassador and urged a tightening of the arms embargo. U.S. campus protests—from Princeton and Brown to Michigan State and Morgan State—took on a new urgency.
When Ronald Reagan took office in 1980, foreign policy swung back toward Nixon-style normalization, articulated as “constructive engagement.” Reagan’s United Nations ambassador, Jeanne Kirkpatrick, summed up the position by stating flatly that a racist dictatorship was not nearly as bad as a Marxist one.4 In 1985, Reagan called the white-minority regime “a reformist administration,” and stirred g
lobal uproar by saying, “They have eliminated the segregation that we once had in our own country—the type of thing where hotels and restaurants and places of entertainment and so forth were segregated. That has all been eliminated.”5
But while Reagan was prematurely hailing the end of South African segregation, the apartheid regime had declared a state of emergency, the equivalent of martial law, in an attempt to crush the rising Black movement. Between 1984 and 1986, the regime detained 30,000 protestors and killed 2,500 more.6
The Rise of the Anti-Racism Movement
In 1984, the American anti-apartheid movement began to peak. Jesse Jackson made South African divestment a presidential campaign issue. States like Michigan, Connecticut, Maryland, Nebraska and Massachusetts, cities like New York City; Boston; Philadelphia; San Francisco; Gary, Indiana; Wilmington, Delaware; and Washington, D.C.; and universities like the City University of New York divested.
On November 26, Randall Robinson, now the national coordinator of the Free South Africa Movement, led a small group of protestors to the South African embassy in Washington, D.C., and launched one of the starkest protests since the height of the civil rights struggle. For months, whether in bitter cold or blazing heat, celebrities, citizens, congresspersons, congregations, youth and elderly sat in at the Embassy doors, and were arrested in a quiet daily ritual. In under a year, over three thousand were arrested there demonstrating against apartheid.
U.S. campus protests swung into high gear. In March 1985, Columbia University students launched a three-week takeover of Hamilton Hall, renaming it Mandela Hall—the biggest campus protest there since 1968. Run DMC came down to perform and show its support. During the divestment springs of 1985 and 1986, hundreds of campuses exploded in demonstrations. On the quads or in front of administration buildings, the shantytown replaced the cemetery as the symbol of disruption.