Close to the Edge

by Sujatha Fernandes

  It’s the only way, of course some will say that that’s the lonely way

  But hey, I’d rather stand on my own

  Than be a puppet with a string on a microphone.

  Then the riff, an underground anthem: “Now do we keep it hard core? Underground, straight, raw On tour, we’re going from shore to shore, now do you heads want more? / Yo, do we keep it hard core?”

  After All Natural, Mass Hysteria was on the stage. Over the speakers, there was a heavy bass with a high-pitched buzzing, like a swarm of insects or police sirens on alert. Treese was rapping over the top:

  No one made you do this,

  Would you stay true to this, if you weren’t paid to do this

  So stop bragging about your number one hit

  I thought you knew, my crew don’t care about that dumb shit.

  I’m not one of you, not like you, none of you, not even some of you

  Dis me, what will become of you, you’ll be gone, for good.

  My life don’t mean shit to me, tell me why the fuck you think yours would.

  Then more scratching and the hook to the song: “On the mike, I let vocabulary spill,” repeated over and over.

  I was gratified to see a woman up next—Angela Zone, aka Ang 13. Underground hip hop in Chicago tended to be a male affair. Ang 13’s background beat, by the veteran Chi-town hip hop producers the Molemen, opened with the tones of a piano and synthesized violins. “I’ll take you back in time, the year is ‘89,” 13 opened her rhyme, a personal narrative about her troubled relationship with her parents. “It was moms who brung this / Sit back, I’m gonna tell ya how my peeps and I swung it.” The song recounts 13’s trips to the emergency room as a young child, her dad off with another woman, then her mom in jail while Ang 13 and her sister were raised by relatives.

  “Moms had a lot of male friends who I detested,” 13 continued, “running in and out, then one night I got molested Never talked to me about the incident as if it never happened All I heard was her in the next room It never got better, worst came to worst Before she looked out for her kids, she always looked out for her man first.” On the chorus she rhymed, “You understand what it’s like now I hate their ways, yet I love ’em Never will forgive my moms, she put my sister out at 18 But first she tried to break her fuckin’ arm So many times I wanted to flex / But I knew I had to watch my neck, ’cause I knew that my ass would be next.”

  Ang 13

  Finally, as an adult, 13 reconciles with her mom. “‘I’m sorry, forgive me / I love you, I never meant to snub you,’ said moms Said how she was dead wrong Sad songs say so much, don’t know how she hurt me so much / Situation made me go nuts.” These personal and raw narratives of women’s experiences were something that was absent in corporate rap—but they were also surprisingly rare in underground rap. It was also unusual to see women up at the open mic. Given underground rappers’ polemic against the one-dimensional “bitches, hoes, and bling bling” formula, I thought that this scene would create more spaces for women, queers, and those generally outside the orbit of commercial rap. Why didn’t that seem to be the case?

  The final act for the night was the renowned freestyle battle rapper Che Smith, aka Rhymefest. Fest hailed from the far South Side neighborhood of South Deering and had come to fame the previous year, when at seventeen he and his rapping partner, Terrence Parker, aka MC Juice, had beaten the notable white rapper Eminem in an emcee battle at the Scribble Jam.

  The track consisted of synthesized horns and bells leading into a sparse beat. “Well, hey, yo,” rapped Fest, over the top of the beat. He looked over to Juice. “What’s up, Juice, it’s about time that we set it straight and show these other cities how to represent and regulate / Y’all niggas don’t want to spark me I can hit the rhythm ’n’ split ’em just from the drums of my heart beat Yo, I can’t deny I live and die for the streets of Chi But there’s more than meets the eye, than pimpin’ hoes and getting’ high You do or die, but you can live and do the same thing.”

  Juice entered, “No pause or comma, ‘cause I’m gonna keep you fearin’ this / You got a question mark, I’m the nigga here, period.”

  “Dope it is.”

  “I am.”

  “But can you rock?”

  “I can.”

  “You think ya dope.”

  “I do.”

  “That’s how we chill, part two.”

  Juice continued:

  Versace wearing rappers, always tryna play some pimps in this biz,

  These record labels sign the most unpresentable

  Hits that go platinum for grabbin’ on their genitals

  And every single day brothas is dyin’ in my mix,

  But all they ever rap about is Alize and grabbin’ dicks.

  Now you might say who is Juice to try to check sombody else,

  But it do get kinda boring always rappin’ ‘bout yourself

  And your jewelry and your guns, you think that shit is rhymin’?

  The billboards say you climbin’ but every trend has its timing

  I ain’t sayin’ no names, but why you bitin’ his style

  I’ll have all you niggas layin’ in the casket with your Cristal

  There was a certain reality to underground rappers’ beef with corporate capitalism. It wasn’t theoretical, as in the case of the Cuban rappers who experienced capitalism by long distance. It came from years of winning Scribble Jam battles and still working low-wage jobs or from seeing countless young black men in the ‘hood hoping to get rich and dying trying. If underground rappers sounded bitter and cynical, it came from seeing the meteoric rise of those willing to embrace the music industry formulas, while their years of “paying dues” by studying and nurturing the culture with scarce resources counted for naught in the marketplace of MTV.

  It was a Tuesday night at Subterranean, and a sizable crowd had gathered to see Chicago’s finest hip hop DJs. The attention of the audience was focused on Johnny Cervantes, aka DJ Presyce, who had worked with Mass Hysteria and had been a part of crews the Molemen and Turntable Technicians. DJ Presyce was a round-faced Mexican American guy who grew up on the South Side at Sixty-third and California. When he was fourteen, Presyce and his older brother Jesus, or “Chuy,” watched tapes from the annual DJ competition known as the DMC World DJ Championships, and they taught themselves how to scratch. Chuy was a car mechanic, and he and Presyce mastered the inner machinery of their turntables by taking them apart and then putting them back together.

  Presyce won the DJ battle at the Cincinnati-based Scribble Jam contest three years in a row before being forced to retire from the competition. In 1998 he participated in a regional DMC DJ battle, winning a spot in the US finals, where he came in second in 2002. But being a dope battle DJ didn’t really translate into money, and Presyce was working at Best Buy and Target to get by.

  The earnest audience at Subterranean—consisting of mostly male DJs, emcees, and fans—filled the cocktail tables at the front and center of the room. People were focused intently on the turntables, appraising every move of the DJ. Others were drinking and talking quietly on the sides and at the back of the club on velvet couches. It was very different from a typical club scene, where people got drunk, flirted with each other, and shouted over the din of the music. Here all attention was on the DJ at the front.

  Presyce was just getting warmed up at his instrument. One hand was scratching the record on the left turntable back and forth. The other flew deftly over the mixer, manipulating the crossfader and volume control at a dizzying pace.

  A few young women—most of them girlfriends of the DJs— were clustered together at the back. As I sat with Mike Treese at one of the cocktail tables at the front, it struck me that this was yet another segregated space. But rather than being divided by skin color, it was divided by gender. There was a masculine camaraderie among the DJs, rappers, and producers who populated the front of the club. They all read the same magazines, debated the origins of a particular sample,
shared information about rare record auctions, and watched classic DJ battle videos at each other’s crib. The women at the back were excluded from this society because they didn’t have the right cultural knowledge to be a part of it, or they self-excluded because they weren’t that interested. I felt like an interloper among the males—I really didn’t have much of an opinion on the difference in sound quality between an SR-16 drum machine and a Roland TR-808.

  The show was under way. Presyce was manipulating the record on the right to speed it up till the voices on it began to sound like squeaky cartoon characters, and then he slowed it down to produce the droning effect of an old tape. Audience members were on the edge of their seats. As he quickened and slowed the pace of the record on the right, he always kept it in time with the record he was scratching on the left, with the mathematical calculation that had earned him his DJ name.

  There was still something else about the underground that fostered such a closed culture. The underground had been fighting so long and hard against the perversions of the music industry that it became obsessed with its own purity, even at times to the exclusion of what was different. It brought to mind Randy’s evocation of “rice with mango” to describe the fusion rap denigrated by the Cuban underground. The melding with other musical genres and styles was perceived by the underground as an encroachment, even though hip hop since its birth had always been nourished by other traditions and would probably live on in different musical forms. But here and now what mattered was dedication to the art form, practicing your lyrical or acrobatic or digital dexterity. While the outside world— including maybe your family and former schoolmates—saw you as a pizza deliverer or Target employee, the underground recognized your genius. This was one place where hip hop still held to high standards. It was just that sometimes those high standards translated into conformity.

  After the show Treese and I drove back to Hyde Park in his black ‘94 Jetta, with leather seats that heated up in the winter. I told him that I would really like to start performing again but that I felt insecure about whether I would be accepted. “Dude,” he looked over from the wheel with incredulity on his face. “If I have to work this hard to get people to take me seriously as a white emcee, how are they gonna accept an Indian female emcee with an Australian accent!”

  Yo, just calling to let you know that our new joint is out. I’m coming by to drop off a copy for you.” On the phone Treese sounded excited.

  It was April 2000, and it had been a while since I had seen Treese. He and Gee Field were busy in the studio recording their latest album, and I would finally get to hear it.

  Treese lugged a suitcase up the stairs to my fourth-floor apartment. It was full of CDs and he pulled one out for me. The cover was a color photocopy with the name of the album— Cooley High: Class of2000—and images of two characters from the cult film Cooley High, the Chicago version of Wildstyle. The playlist consisted of tracks from well-known Chicago artists like All Natural, Juice, Common, Vakil, and Prime Meridian, together with songs from Mass Hysteria. It was a classic mixtape, a hip hop staple that dated from the early days when DJs would record shows and then sell the tapes in order to promote themselves. It didn’t matter that this wasn’t an actual four-track tape, because the idea of the mixtape—as a do-it-yourself artifact— still reigned in the era of CDs. I turned on the CD player and popped it in.

  There was a sound of someone knocking on a door, then a raspy voice, “What the hell you want here, honky?” “I’m, uh, looking…Is Louise here?” “There’s no goddamn Louise live here, honky.” “But, I—” Then the sound of a door slamming. A realization, “My money—” Then in a higher pitch, “I’ve been screwed!” It was a sample from Cooley High, a scene from the film where some neighborhood guys find a white man at the local bar and promise him that he can have sex with a prostitute named Louise.14 They drop him off at an unidentified location, offer to guard his belongings, and then take off with all his possessions while he’s upstairs knocking at the door. It’s all about the hustle.

  The next track was an interlude, with scratching by Presyce and short stabs of synthesized keyboards. KRS and Method Man repeated “Mass Hysteria, Mass Hysteria,” in sampled clips and then the female emcee Rage, rhyming “Always and forever,” intermixed with various other samples from Xzibit and Pete Rock.

  “So how do you sell these? Concerts? Mom-and-pop stores? Word of mouth?” I was curious.

  “I mostly sell these myself at concerts and parties,” Treese explained. “But the problem with Chicago is, ‘cause it’s so segregated and spread out, you have to drive a lot. The West Side is a whole different world. If you’re doing hip hop shit, you are not gonna sell on the West Side, period. And the West Side shit is not gonna sell on the North Side. So you gotta go to Evanston, then you gotta go to the south suburbs, then you gotta go to the west suburbs, Hyde Park.”

  Treese described what a night of selling mixtapes would look like. He might leave his crib around 11 p.m. He would drive to a concert, maybe a rap show at the House of Blues, even though he didn’t have a ticket. Then he would pitch his CD to people waiting in line or even inside the show, if he could make it in. His pitch would include drawing the person’s attention to the big names on the playlist, highlighting the quality of the mixtape compared to what other DJs were putting out, and then talking about Mass Hysteria. It might take several pitches before he could sell a CD. These were the days before music downloads, podcasts, and iTunes, and people often bought the CD because they wouldn’t have access to the music otherwise—not unless they bought 12-inch singles on a regular basis. Sometimes he would get spotted by security, and when he failed to produce a ticket, he would be escorted out from the building. If the show was in full swing, it left few people outside to sell to. He would have to wait outside until the show was over, and he could begin selling to people as they left. In one night of hustling he might sell fourteen CDs at ten dollars a pop. After calculating $70 of that in overhead, that’s $70 profit. For five hours of work, that’s about $12 an hour.

  “Last winter I got sick three times just from being out in the cold,” Treese sighed. “But I still kept going out and selling CDs. You can push it better on your own than giving it to a record store. You gotta do your pitch in order to sell your records.”

  I nodded and thought back to my rapper friends in Cuba who complained that the state didn’t record or distribute their music. Here in Chicago, rappers like Treese were trying to do it on their own, but they came up against so many obstacles. Being an independent artist was much harder than I had imagined. Success and failure are all on you as an artist. “I paid dues,” rapped Gee Field on one of the tracks, “but if I don’t make it, then who tha fuck’ll reimburse me?”

  “I once read somewhere that being a street-level drug dealer is a low-wage job,” Treese reflected, “when you figure out how much he makes versus how much time he has to spend doing it. For the time you’re putting into it, it’s not worth it. It’s the same way with independent rap and selling shit on your own. It’s hard. It’s time consuming. Maybe I’ll make one hundred dollars on a night, maybe two or three hundred dollars on a good night. But that’s from going to three or four different clubs and bars and staying out from at least 11 p.m. to getting home at 4 a.m. That’s a shift. I mean that’s work, like going to a restaurant and working for five hours, and you’re making a hundred bucks. That’s still not really rapping for money. But I’d rather do that than actually work at a restaurant, which I do, too. ‘Cause you’re promoting yourself. You can’t just be a rapper and think that you’re gonna put out a product in the stores and it’s gonna sell. Shit doesn’t work like that.”

  Treese wasn’t waiting for someone to come along and give him a record deal or to recognize him at one of his shows and sign him up. There weren’t even any major record labels in Chicago. He spoke with admiration about rap entrepreneurs like Jay-Z, who were building up capital, working hard to put out new products. “That’s why I didn
’t put an album out and just have it sit there and know that I couldn’t tour out of Chicago,” Treese said. “What’s the difference if I’m just doing local shows, getting a hundred dollars a show, two hundred dollars a show. It’s a joke! You gotta be on the road, promoting your music, selling your music in other markets, and having your shit in stores.”

  “Well, I can respect that as an artist you gotta get paid,” I said to Treese. “But I guess I always associated underground, independent rap with maintaining a conscious, anticapitalist stance, not with entrepreneurs calculating the best market strategy. And what kind of role model is Jay-Z, a hip hop powerhouse worth $550 million? I thought that being independent is about staying true to the art, rejecting the market.”

  But after years of doing restaurant work to make a living, Treese didn’t share my poverty ethos. “Forget about Top Forty radio and forget about Best Buy. I’m not talking about that,” Treese responded. “I’m talking about having your shit worldwide-distributed like Rawkus and Fat Beats was. If I wasn’t doing that, what difference would it make if I had an album? Who’s gonna know? Unless you got access to making hits, it’s not even an option: Should I be major or should I be independent? You’re independent ‘cause you gotta be.”

  As much as I had hoped that underground rap could be the basis for an anticapitalist, anticorporate Hip Hop Nation, I realized that as an artist you had to make your life within the system. You could oppose the music industry and its distortion of the culture, but what other model was there in America besides the entrepreneurial one of self-reliance and self-promotion? It was just like the Hip Hop Revolucion artists in Cuba who had to rely on state sponsorship to make a living. You made your music within, and despite, the constraints of each situation.

  Iwas still curious as to whether I could make my music in Chicago as an Indian female emcee with an Australian accent. A mutual friend introduced me to Navraz—a feisty Punjabi American rapper and singer. She had grown up in the northern Chicago suburb of Plainsville and was a student at Loyola College. In a friend’s home studio she sang for me the R&B-inflected chorus to her latest song. “Are you an exotic queen come up from my dreams / Are you my fantasy, right here to satisfy me? / Whatever, uh-uh fool, I am a woman like your mother.” We clicked straight away, and before long we were writing and rehearsing songs together. We would mix in Punjabi bhanghra, a working-class Indian style that was popularized in the dance clubs in London.