That Way Madness Lies

by Dahlia Adler

  The Dark called each of us, and we each wanted it in our own way. But with the deaths of Julia’s murderers underlining the power pulsing in my veins—

  The Dark is mine now.

  THE TRAGEDY OF CORY LANEZ: AN ORAL HISTORY

  Inspired by Coriolanus

  Tochi Onyebuchi

  Volumnia: O, he is wounded; I thank the gods for’t.

  Menenius: So do I too, if it be not too much. Brings a’ victory in his pocket? The wounds become him.

  —ACT 2, SCENE 1

  The Tragedy of Cory Lanez: An Oral History

  There are no monuments to Cory Lanez in the Rose Park neighborhood of Long Beach, California. Briefly, on Ohio Avenue, a poster of the rapper/singer had been taped to a palm tree and, over the course of a few days, several bouquets of goldenrod and roses had been laid at the makeshift memorial. Within the week, the whole thing had been dismantled, but not before the poster had been vandalized, a red X spray-painted across the seventeen-year-old boy’s face. On a wall of Corky’s Market, on East Fifteenth Street and Junipero Avenue, a mural to the musical artist had been painted in similar shades of goldenrod and crimson. It had lasted a few weeks, guarded by some of Lanez’s most ardent fans and childhood friends, before being similarly defaced and, ultimately, painted over by the proprietor of Corky’s.

  “It brought too much trouble,” he told me in a later interview.

  * * *

  It’s like this all over Rose Park: on storefronts, in alleyways, along freeways, portraits or some other pictorial record of the boy, sometimes with details of what happened to him, will appear somewhere in Long Beach and remain for some time, his face haunting that corner of the city before evanescing into the ether. A ghost trawls Rose Park. The violent tearing down of these memorials tells the story of a figure almost universally hated in the neighborhood.

  * * *

  Cameron Marcus, more popularly known as Cory Lanez, was stabbed outside the Executive Suite nightclub on Redondo Avenue in the Belmont Heights district of Long Beach on April 2, 2019. He died six days later. Weeks of news coverage and remembrances followed. At his memorial service, those who spoke told stories not only of Mr. Lanez’s musical career but of his vision for his Rose Park neighborhood and for the larger Long Beach area: his plans to build a clothing shop in a lot not far from his childhood home, the entrepreneurial center he had started to help neighborhood kids get involved in the tech industry from an early age, as well as the skate park he had planned on turning into a gallery for art installations displaying local talent. Notoriously, in attendance at that memorial service were members of both local Crip and Blood gangs as well as local elected officials and many of the music industry’s most powerful titans. To look at the audience was to see evidence of a young man whose life had a widespread impact, his presence felt everywhere from local gangland rivalries to the affairs of those walking the halls of the local political establishment. To hear Cory Lanez spoken of like this, one would be mistaken for thinking those in the audience were preparing to bury a grown man who had lived half a dozen lives and not a seventeen-year-old boy.

  * * *

  The passing of Cory Lanez was felt widely throughout the music industry, with tributes from the likes of Kendrick Lamar and Billie Eilish. Everyone seems to have a Lanez story. As widely as his loss has been felt, it has been felt most deeply by those who knew him not only as a successful recording artist but as a son, a father, a lover, and a friend. This is his story, as told by those who knew him best.

  Terence Stevens (member of the local CitiZens rap group): We was at school together, but we hated that nigga at first. Cory was always so standoffish. Or, at least, that’s how it came across. He was quiet, never talked to nobody unless it was to hurt they feelings. (Laughing) Even then, he had bars. I think that’s what made him such a good battle rapper later on, you know? One afternoon, in the cypher, I overheard him call the dude he was battling a “fragment.” That’s it. Fragment. (Laughing)

  Herbert McKenzie (member of CitiZens): He was quiet. It could read as standoffish, but he also had this self-possession about him. We was in middle school and he seemed to already know who he was. Principles.

  Menachem Adler (childhood friend and Lanez’s longtime producer collaborator): I saw that, but it was weird. We got close very early on. Grade school. I was the only Jewish kid in the neighborhood. It was quiet for me. Always gettin’ jumped, all of that. Cam was the first kid who would get in the way of the bullies. Long time, he was the only one.

  Stevens: Yeah, y’all were thick as thieves.

  Adler: Me being Jewish had nothing to do with why he sorta became my protector. It was like this barrier between me and everybody else, but it didn’t matter with him. Matter fact, he was the one always asking about it. He wanted to learn.

  Violet Marcus (mother): Self-possession. That’s what it was with him. It was a tough childhood for him, but I made sure there were always books in the house. He actually used to be a pretty gregarious child. As a baby, he was always crawling around. I called him my little explorer. He wanted to know about everything. I think he really looked to his daddy in that regard. It’s no secret Van was a Panther. Van wanted to make sure the boy knew where he came from and what it was like out there. I would watch them sometimes, and it looked so often like he was grooming a soldier, not a son. I did what I could to give him a childhood, but after Van was killed, I couldn’t be around as much. I had to work three jobs just to keep the lights on. And that did something to Cameron. Suddenly, he has to eat his cereal with water, and I can’t cook meals anymore. And when he does see his mother, she’s always tired.

  The night of January 12, 2009, Van Nathan Marcus was at the office of a local nonprofit and food bank—Breadren—when LAPD officers raided the building on suspicion that there were narcotics and guns on the premises. Marcus was armed at the time (he had a concealed carry license). In the ensuing confrontation, several volunteers were wounded, and Marcus was shot and killed. The district attorney declined to press charges against the officer who shot and killed Van Nathan Marcus. A subsequent wrongful death lawsuit against the city of Los Angeles went nowhere in the courts and nearly bankrupted the family in the process.

  Adler: Cam never talked about his dad. But you could tell there was a seriousness about him.

  Titus Lawrence (former member of the Piru Street Bloods): Lotta cats got involved in gang shit because they dads was locked up or dead. Some of them, it was like a family business. You know, your daddy’s a Piru, so you’re a Piru. Your daddy’s Rollin 60s Crip, so you’re Rollin 60s, feel me? A lot of us, it was like being made into a soldier.

  Cornelius Thompson (former member of the Piru Street Bloods): And you had a lot of gangbangers was loud, you know? You post up on the corner with your chain, your kicks, and your strap. You ain’t even have to open your mouth to be loud. But Cam was quiet even when we was bangin’. Everybody knew he was a Piru, but they also knew that if he was called in to deal with somethin’, it was a wrap for you.

  Lawrence: Bro was a warrior. Name rang bells all throughout Bompton. Imagine bein’ fourteen, fifteen, and havin’ the scars that he had.

  Violet: It seemed like every day, he came home with some fresh wound. It became a ritual. He never said what happened, and I learned, after a while, to stop asking. I was just happy my baby was surviving. Still. I knew he was destined for something greater. I made sure there were always books in the house, but I also took him to the record store. We played a lot of Motown at our house, and some house music from Chicago from back in the day. But one day, he came up to me with an N.W.A. album. I think it was their first. And he asked me to buy it. I’ll never forget the look on my Cameron’s face when he came up to me and held it out to me. It seemed like such a strange thing. He could have stolen it, that wouldn’t have been unheard of. He certainly had enough money to buy it himself. But we never played rap in the house, and I think he knew why. He knew I thought there was enough gang nonsense outsi
de that I didn’t want to bring it back into the house. But he was earnest. And there was a look in his eyes. Like he’d found something magical. So I bought it for him. If I’d known what would happen …

  Adrian Young (senior VP of A&R at Volscian Records): A few years prior, we’d signed Aufset, and he’d come out of the same battle rap tradition that Cory Lanez seemed to come from. There’s lore in music circles that says the two of them used to battle at school.

  Stevens: Those battles were epic. In another time, they woulda been on those Smack DVD tapes everyone in the hood used to be passin’ around. And that’s when you really saw Cory shine. The gang shit was one thing. But, yo, when it came time to hurt someone’s feelings during a battle? Forget it.

  McKenzie: Legendary. They musta battled like four, five times while we was there.

  Young: Aufset was making a name for himself on the mixtape circuit. He had the neighborhood behind him and pretty quickly picked up some sponsors. Ross wanted to sign him. Jay wanted to sign him. Even Em wanted to sign him. He did his own independent thing for a while, worked with local producers on this very grimy sound he wanted to perfect. It sounded like someone who’d listened to a lot of ’90s New York hip-hop.

  Stevens: A lot of cats was feelin’ it, I’m not gonna lie. But it wasn’t West Coast, feel me?

  McKenzie: There’s a special West Coast sound. Dre, Snoop, ’Pac, E-40, and the rest of those cats from the Bay. Game. All of them. You could be gangsta, but you could also be at a party. Auf had that East Coast vibe, and if you listened to him, you couldn’t tell he was even from Cali. You could always tell with Cory.

  Adler: So when Cam finally came to me and was like, “I wanna make music,” it was the same thing as before. He already knew who he was. Wasn’t just in his rhymes either. We spent I don’t know how many hours in the studio I rigged up at a mutual friend’s basement putting that sound together. Like, it wasn’t just the hood. It was this hood. And that’s how we made the Rosa Parks mixtape.

  Lawrence: Yo, the Rosa Parks mixtape shook the entire hood. The birth of Cory Lanez.

  Thompson: The whole hood rallied around him. He had us puttin’ up posters. We were payin’ out of our own pocket for radio advertisements.

  Adler: We’d produced the album independently with what money we had or whatever people we knew would front us. Lotta folks didn’t even ask for their money back. That’s how much they believed in him when that first tape came out. Cory Lanez was this larger-than-life figure that the hood could put all their hopes and dreams in. It was a Serena Williams situation. Someone from your hood makes it to such a big stage and every time they win, it’s like all of us win.

  Thompson: But every time they lose …

  Adler: That’s the thing. We almost never lost.

  Vera Gibson (partner, mother of Lanez’s son, Mutasa): We’d been seeing each other for a little over a year by then. Our son, Mutasa, had been born. Cameron had suggested the name after hearing about this place in Zimbabwe.

  Violet: Cameron’s father could trace his ancestry back to Zimbabwe. Ultimately, it became a point of pride for him. For us. Everything in the house was Manicaland.

  Vera: Mutasa was a few months old when Rosa Parks came out. Cameron and I met just as Cam was getting out of the gang life. I knew how it wearied him. He wouldn’t show that to anyone. He needed you to know that he was ride-or-die, but it aged him. And I think having Mutasa helped him realize some things that made him ultimately leave that life behind. Over the next few years, Mutasa heard how everyone spoke about his father and even started calling him Cory. (Laughing) Cameron would try to get mad at it, but it was always our joke.

  Julius Brown (former city councilman): And then the hood turned on him.

  Silas Vale (local law enforcement community liaison): We’d been working on gang prevention initiatives, and I think there was tension between his burgeoning musical career and his efforts on the ground trying to better his community.

  Adler: Nah, don’t talk about Cory like that. There wasn’t tension.

  Thompson: You were the Feds’ eyes and ears in Rose Park, and when Cam’s star was bright enough, y’all swooped in. But you couldn’t just shoot him or whatever, because the hood loved him. Wasn’t no tension.

  Brown: Cory Lanez was not a universally loved figure. As a city councilman, it was my job to be out there on the streets and know the concerns of the people. And, to a T, they felt when they listened to his music that they were being talked down to. They felt they were listening to a guy who couldn’t be bothered with them, who thought they were lesser than him. Call it standoffishness, call it him being quiet and taciturn, but that was the mood on “the streets.”

  Stevens: Wasn’t a problem for y’all until he started talking that Panther shit. When it was all stick talk, nobody had no kind of problem. But he started making music to elevate us, like N.W.A. did when they first came out, started really dishing the truth about our situation, then shit changed. He was just a regular hood nigga with a mixtape until he turned into someone that could do your job for you, Councilman.

  Adler: So much was goin’ good for Cory. That’s when someone from Aftermath reached out and we started putting a terms sheet together for Cory to link up with Shady Aftermath. He woulda been their biggest West Coast artist since Game.

  Thompson: He even had me in the room with him and Menz. Just goin’ over terms. Now, I’m just a hood nigga from the block. I don’t know shit about contracts, but it was always, “Yo, Com, this look right to you?” or “Com, what you think about this?”

  Lawrence: He wanted all his people to make it. If he was movin’ up, he wanted all of us to move up with him.

  Thompson: Woulda been easy to sign the Aftermath deal and be done with it.

  Adler: They were givin’ us everything we were asking for.

  Thompson: But Cory was so hardheaded. Couldn’t put his principles to the side, not for the little shit, and certainly not for shit this big.

  Vera: It really felt like everything was happening at once. Yesterday, he’s this quiet boy who loves putting jalapeños on everything and who I’m having a baby with, and then the next day, he’s a Grammy-nominated rapper and the police are constantly comin’ by our house.

  Stevens: I’m sure the councilman had nothin’ to do with that.

  Vera: When it got to be too much, we moved. He bought us a house in Calabasas. That’s how much money he’d made off his music at that point as an independent artist.

  Lanez’s eagerly awaited debut album, Common-Wealth, was years in the making, its origins tracing back to the Rosa Parks era. Released in October 2018, after he inked a partnership with Volscian Records, Common-Wealth was acclaimed as one of the year’s most audacious, genre-bending, and impressive musical albums and, along with a Grammy nomination, launched Cory Lanez into the mainstream. Lanez would go on in the months that followed to collaborate with ScHoolboy Q, Bryson Tiller, JID, and Burna Boy.

  Young: It was so strange to watch this kid who’d put out a critically acclaimed mixtape and who’d just snagged a Grammy nomination move through the world like he didn’t enjoy any of it. I mean, I got to know him a little better, and it was a little more complicated than that. It’s always a little more complicated with him. But—

  Violet: He was missed. I think he felt betrayed by his city. By Long Beach. By Rose Park. Almost everyone he’d loved and who’d been around him when he was low had turned against him. I’m sure part of it was envy. But I’m sure there was more. Rose Park is protective of its own. Whatever its problems, they’re our problems.

  Young: We were cognizant of all of that when we signed your son to our label. There’s this widespread notion that we tried to soften his sound a little, have him stand in contrast to Aufset, but they complemented each other very well. They had a mutual respect for each other.

  McKenzie: Lot of us felt betrayed by that. Aufset was someone else. He wasn’t us. Lotta people looked at Auf and what he represented as the enemy. Lik
e he was the death of West Coast rap. Then when he started singing, that was it.

  Vera: Things did change when we moved to Calabasas. Cam spent more time by himself. He would vanish for days at a time. He became more closed off. It began to affect his relationship with Mutasa. Didn’t feel like we was raisin’ a kid the right way. So I moved back to Rose Park to be with Violet. It hurt me to leave him like that, but … it felt like he’d already left me.

  Young: We worked to make sure that we could provide as welcoming an environment as we could. It wasn’t just about the music. We take care of our artists. I know Cory and Aufset spent a lot of time together. They grew very close. It’s easy to forget they’re both kids. Cory turned seventeen, Aufset’s a little older, but they were both working through things. Figuring each other out.

  Adler: Rose Park wasn’t the same without him. It was almost like he had to leave in order to really blow up. That hurt. We’d built something beautiful here.

  Stevens: The hood holds on to hurt.

  Lawrence: The guy we saw in videos and on TV, that wasn’t our Cam. Cory Lanez was someone else. Dressin’ different. The people he was hangin’ with now. Totally switched up.

  Violet: But he didn’t look happy. He was coming back to do a show at Rose Park, him and your artist. And …

  Adler: He’d called me about a week and a half before the Rose Park stop on his tour to tell me about meeting DJ Khaled. He was so hype, and the two of them really hit it off. He and Auf had a recording studio on one of the tour buses. And that night, Cory wrote a whole-ass record based off that one convo with Khaled. He was always a workhorse.

  Lawrence: The Rose Park show felt, to a lot of people, like the ultimate disrespect.