Twenty years ago this year, I published a book called Westsiders, about some of the stories behind the West Coast hip hop that had come out of Los Angeles in the 90s. Q Magazine picked it as one of the 50 Best Books About Music. The Times called it “definitive”.
If you want to read a bit more about Westsiders, take a look here.
If you want to buy the complete book on Kindle for only £1.99, it’s here. But for the moment, read on…
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1. The New Dope Game
BABYBOY
The 110 freeway ignores the strict perpendicular below, curving at palm-top level above the streets. From this elevated vantage point, the speeding drivers can see for miles, out towards the Pacific in the west, to Customs Island in the south, northwards to the skyscrapers of Downtown, or towards the hazy San Bernardino Mountains far to the north-east. The territory beneath their wheels is invisible, blanked out by the sound walls on either side. Once a wide flood plain, it is now divided into square lots of streets and houses that you barely notice from up here. Only the occasional billboard, apartment block, minaret or tower reaches high enough to merit attention.
The wide 110 is a futuristic ride, two car-pool lanes each way, four lanes on either side of them, with complex, beautiful interchanges that sweep the cars upwards through elegant curves and then lower them to rejoin other routes, all equally busy. A quarter of a million vehicles hurtle over this fat freeway every day, unslowed by South Central’s massive sprawl below.
I drop my speed in preparation for the off-ramp to Martin Luther King. For all its vastness, South Central is avoidable. A trickle of tourists occasionally venture into the post-industrial wasteland of Watts to visit the Watts Towers, those strange, dream-like sculptures built by a lonely Italian immigrant in the fifties, but there is no other advertised reason for the casual visitor to enter it. I have been visiting Los Angeles for 12 years, yet I have strayed into South Central on only a few occasions. They were usually when I lost my way and discovered myself in some neighbourhood on Western where I could make out no other white faces, where I pressed down the door locks on my hire car, embarrassed at my own timorousness.
Though it stretches right into the middle of the huge expanse of Los Angeles, South Central has become somehow detached from it. I had few reasons to go there until now. The times I did find myself there, I remember a sense of disappointment. How ordinary and undramatic these rows of small, neat houses looked, with their clipped grass and their palm trees; and how different from the image of the place I had built up from the hip-hop records, videos, news reports and movies.
South Central’s reputation precedes it, in garish news stories about gang murders, or in that single helicopter shot that travelled the world swamping all the other images from the 1992 riots, of a mob dragging a white truck driver from his cab and beating him until he was almost dead.
It is the culture of hip hop, though, which has done more than anything in recent years to define this geography. Young people all over the world now know about South Central, or at least have some vivid image of what they think it must be like. From the records and movies they would probably imagine it as a crime- ridden hell-hole. Some parts of it are. They might imagine too that nearly all the people who live there are black. Once upon a time they were, but the last 20 years have seen a massive influx of Latinos. Today African-Americans make up only half the population, yet through their music black Americans have somehow repopulated the region.
All music is about geography, in a way. It’s either about the place in which it’s made, or the place where the maker wants to be; rarely, though, is music as explicit about its sense of place as hip hop. Hip hop in particular is about where you’re from. It’s about what where you’re from says about you, and what you say about where you’re from. Since its beginning, Los Angeles hip hop has revelled in listing specific locations, street intersections, schools, stores, parks, housing projects, gang turfs and ‘hoods’. The only other genre which is as needily specific about place names is emigrant music, whose songs nostalgically detail the names of old home towns, hillsides and rivers. To my ears, hip hop can sometimes sound just as woebegone, just as romantic about the geography it’s trying to claim as any emigrant music.
In 1987 a young member of a Crip gang from LA’s Compton district called Eric ‘Eazy-E’ Wright and his group Niggaz Wit’ Attitude, or NWA, released their first single. It was called ‘Boyz In Tha Hood’. Crudely produced though it was by the standards of New York rap, it was also a simple, effective conjunction of masculinity and geography: boys in the ’hood-– men and the territory they wished to claim as their own. The phrase was later purloined and made famous by the young film director John Singleton, for his 1991 movie of the same name, starring one of NWA’s original rappers, Ice Cube.
Bored as hell and I want to get ill
So I went to a place where my homeboys chill . . .
‘Homeboy’. ‘Homie’. Even that word, such a staple of hip-hop vocabulary, works to join men to a location. More than that, it contains hidden memories of the great northward migration of the first half of this century, when the rural populations of the old South moved to the booming industrial cities. Ghettos began to fill with migrants who clustered together with others they knew from back home. In those days ‘homeboy’ meant, more literally, my boy from home — from Arkansas, or Mississippi, or Alabama.
The following year, after ‘Boyz In Tha Hood’, NWA became more geographically specific with ‘Straight Outta Compton’:
Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube From the gang called Niggaz Wit’ Attitudes
When I’m called off, I got a sawed off Squeeze the trigger and bodies are hauled off.. .
Geography and masculinity; manhood and place.
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Up until then, hip-hop culture had been largely owned by New Yorkers who had filled their music with references to the communities they had grown up in, the Bronx, Brooklyn, Harlem and Queens. With the album Straight Outta Compton, a little-heard-of city in South Central Los Angeles was demanding its share of attention too, for the first time. And when Eazy-E filmed the video for tracks like ‘100 Miles And Runnin’ he was showing America parts of South Central which had almost certainly never been seen on television before.
The choice of location wasn’t just accidental: in some ways this was the point of the whole enterprise. There’s an African-American verb beloved by hip- hoppers: to represent. Its meaning is broader than it is standard English. To represent is not only to portray something, but also to throw your whole self into doing it. Eazy-E and NWA were representing.
Creating culture is the act of writing yourself into land. That’s what hip hop does, more literally than any other pop culture yet. But if hip hop invented itself as a way for young men to find themselves in the ghettos they lived in, it quickly became more than that. It became a way of getting the hell out of those ghettos too. By the late eighties, when Los Angeles began to contribute to the canon, hip hop was also a potentially very viable way of building a life away from the conflict and poverty of the inner city. Hip hop made money. As Ice-T, a former Los Angeles pimp and armed robber turned rapper, once announced: ‘Rhyme Pays’:
Rhyme pays — buys my food every night and day Pays my rent, my bills, I guess I’m doin’ OK . . .
Stars were already facing a peculiar dilemma: if they were successful, they were automatically distanced from their own subject matter, from the environment which gave their music meaning. Ice-T moved up into a fancy house in the Hollywood Hills, to the derision of some of his former followers.
The wide, east-west thoroughfare of Martin Luther King is slow today. In front of me is a pick-up truck, in the back two Latino children, each tugging at the same blanket. A car cuts in front, between the truck and me. Its bumper sticker reads: ‘I MAY BE FAT BUT YOU’RE UGLY-– AND I CAN LOSE WEIGHT.’
Once, before I ever came to South Central, I asked Ice Cube, one of the fiercest mythologists of this land, for some stories about growing up here. He told me about the year when he turned 17. It was the year he bought his first car, an old VW Bug. It was also the year he saw his first two people killed.
The first was at a KFC restaurant. He had just got into his VW, and was trying to find a place on the seat to put his drink so that it wouldn’t spill, when he saw a man walking past with a gun in his hand. Oh shit! thought Cube. He struggled to get the car into reverse.
The murderer had just robbed a store. He was looking for a car to make a getaway in. Still tugging at his gear-stick, Cube watched him walk up to a car three vehicles ahead. ‘Get out,’ the gunman ordered.
Probably the driver just hesitated too long. The gunman fired four times. Uh- uh-uh-uh. The driver slumped over. Shit, thought Cube. Shit.
The second time was at a fast-food restaurant too, a Brolly Hut — one of those stands with seats all around on the outside. Cube was on the inside, just about to place his order. The first thing he noticed was the glass breaking all around him, then the popping sound. He dived down, but by the time he had hit the floor, it was all over.
When it was safe, he walked outside and looked at the victim, head bleeding on the kerb, feet still up on the chair, stone dead, his friends all around him crying.
Cube never found out what it was about. This time he was cooler about the whole experience. He walked back to the counter and asked, ‘You still talking orders?’
‘No,’ shouted the frightened man behind the counter. ‘Closed!’
‘South Central,’ Cube told me, ‘. . . it ain’t the most terrible place to live in the world, but it’s just so unpredictable.’
For the last couple of weeks, I’ve been visiting talent shows, record stores and clubs in South Central, and scouring the small ads in the local hip-hop press, trying to find the would-be hip-hoppers, the African-American boys who haven’t made it yet, the ones who are still trying to make something of themselves. I’m driving westwards on King because I want to meet those who are still trying to find a voice, who are still dreaming about their houses in the hills, away from this flat landscape, dulled by cheap real estate and comer liquor stores. The rappers I think I’m looking for don’t necessarily have to be destined to be great: they just have to be dreaming of greatness.
Two days earlier I had called up one of the people who run one of the local hip-hop showcases on cable TV. He had passed me the pager number of a young man who called himself Babyboy. Carefully checking the street names at the unfamiliar intersections as I cross them, I’m on the way to meet him.
On the phone, Babyboy gave me instructions to meet him on Wilton Place, two blocks north of King.
He is there standing under a small tree, clutching a briefcase. His friends turn and look at me, briefly, then resume their conversation.
‘I’ll be a minute, OK?’ says Babyboy. He is about six foot, with a closely shaved head, and wearing a plaid shirt over his trousers; thin in a muscular way, and good-looking. His brown eyes have the red rims of a heavy grass smoker.
This is a typical South Central neighbourhood: small houses, laid out on even lawns-– sometimes with even smaller guest houses built in their backyards — set on an endless criss-cross of streets. In the forties this was a white neighbourhood, back when the African- American ghetto was still restricted to small sections of the city to the east of here.
There are almost always one or two men leaning against the tree, or sitting on doorsteps, at the comer of Wilton and Leighton. A few of the cars that cruise slowly up and down Wilton pause here, uncertainly: this is a well-known spot for buying weed. The drivers peer at me out of their side windows, then rev up and drive on, put off by my presence. White people are conspicuous in this part of town.
I too feel uncomfortable, standing on this concrete sidewalk, dressed in a suit. I don’t normally like to wear a suit, but when I imagined what it was going to be like, travelling here to Los Angeles to mingle with the young men of South Central, a suit seemed appropriate. I have met so many white hip-hop fans who like to dress like the boys of the inner cities, even adopt their language, deeming the world around them either ‘dope’ or ‘wack’ by turns, and who practise elaborate street-comer handshakes. Perhaps it is just as perverse for me to dress up as it is for them to dress down, but I was bom and raised in rural England and have little obvious in common with the people I want to meet here. I would be embarrassed if I was thought to be pretending otherwise. Now, of course, not only am I overdressed for the summer weather, but I feel faintly ridiculous to be so dressed up.
I wait about ten minutes before Babyboy leaves with his companions and wanders over to meet me. With him is his friend and cousin, a big, round- faced boy called Rahiem, whom he introduces as ‘O.G. Budman’.
Budman has a dream. He wants to record an album of songs entirely about weed. Marijuana is a substance Budman has developed a profound respect for. It’s not like other drugs. The way he sees it, you smoke it and it doesn’t make you want to kill someone; it just makes you want to eat something. It’s a handy source of income too.
Budman’s group is called Ya Highness-– highness, as in stoned. Ya Highness have been together for a year: the group consists of him and a friend who calls himself Payback whom Budman knows from their days together at Birmingham High School. They weren’t even friends until they smoked their first joint together: this, Budman believes, is proof of the great transformational value of weed. ‘Marijuana can’t end world violence,’ declares Budman. ‘But it’s a start.’
Since they shared that first joint they’ve written a bunch of rhymes about weed. Like ‘So High’, ‘Bud 4 Life’, ‘Another Day With A J.’, and one for the ladies that’s called ‘I Wanna Smoke Wit’ Ya’. Their rhymes attempt to dissect every possible stoned experience. Budman writes ambitious couplets in praise of the drug, like:
There’s nothing wrong with havin’ a bong and fillin’ the cap with chronic You want the best then come to the west and purchase hydroponic.
In the meantime the large, bear-like Budman, who always seems to wear a shy grin on his face, gets by selling a little weed and smoking a little of it too. ‘A friend with weed is a friend indeed,’ he proclaims profoundly.
There’s even one called ‘Creeper’, about those times when you smoke and you don’t feel a thing until it creeps up on you later on. The high point of their career so far has been opening a show for Playa Hamm – the LA rapper who was once half of a group called the Penthouse Players, who recorded for Eazy-E’s label, Ruthless.
Becoming a rapper is a dream for Budman. You couldn’t exactly call it an ambition, because Budman isn’t really the ambitious sort. It’s his friend Babyboy who has all the ambition.
Babyboy has pulled a video camera out of his car. ‘This is for my cable show,’ he explains as he zooms in on Budman. He doesn’t have a cable show yet, but he’s planning to get one. Babyboy is full of plans. ‘Welcome, everybody,’ he supplies his own voice-over to the camcorder, ‘to the N Entertainment video volume . . .’
Babyboy tells me he has his own entertainment company. It’s a loose collection of local rappers and producers that he has marshalled from the area. He’s a rapper too: Babyboy Delatorres is one of his rap names. His real name is Kimeyo Daniels. Sometimes he uses another rap name, Keydawg. The name implies drags: a key is a kilo of cocaine. Drug dealers are, to their credit, forward-looking; they have gone metric well before the rest of pounds-’n’-ounces America. ‘Keydawg’ is also an unwieldy acronym for ‘Kimeyo Extra Yard Dickin’ All Women Good’, but these days he usually just calls himself Babyboy. The name Keydawg harks back to an earlier time a few years ago when he made a serious effort to become a cocaine dealer himself. These days Babyboy still deals drags, but in a minor way. ‘I’m a hustler, man. I don’t hustle cocaine, heroin’ – he pronounces it ‘hero-wine’ — ‘speed, sherm. That ain’t my forte. That ain’t me.’
What he really dreams about doing is creating a music business empire right here in South Central.
‘Music,’ he tells me, repeatedly, ‘is the new dope game.’ In the seventies, when cocaine first began to flood the inner cities, it was glamorous to be a drag dealer. It was also, of course, a hazardous occupation, and careers were often brought to an abrupt halt, but it was a way in which poor boys with little education could become rich and earn respect. But the last decade has seen the young men of the inner cities turn to a new money-spinner that appears to offer incredible riches.
‘That’s what it is. It’s the new dope game,’ Babyboy says. He gives me his card: ‘Kimeyo Daniels, CEO N Entertainment. No Respekt Mob Records.’
I meet Babyboy a few days later at M+M’s Diner-– ‘Tennessee Homestyle Cooking’-– at the junction of King and Crenshaw. He sits, proprietorially, in a Naugahyde booth, laying his briefcase down beside him, and tells me a little about himself and his dreams for N Entertainment.
He’s 24 now and lives with his girlfriend Marlene and their newly born daughter Chanel -– Babyboy’s second child. Their small apartment is in Culver City, a few miles west of here, where many of the film studios are based. Marlene pays the rent. She works as a secretary at Fox.
Babyboy doesn’t have a job. After Marlene has gone to work in the mornings, he gets in his old silver Mercury Cougar and rides back out to Wilton Place and King, where I met him. It’s where he grew up. He calls it ‘the hood’ or ‘the dub’. It’s where his people are. Marlene’s family live just around the comer.
Babyboy hangs out. He hatches plans to break into the music business and he smokes grass with Budman and his friends on the dub. ‘On the dub,’ he says, peering over the menu, ‘we barbecue maybe four or five times a week, you know what I’m sayin’?’
As Keydawg, he once wrote a rap called ‘Hoodlife’, which romanticizes the boyish indolence of life here:
Spendin’ all the day walkin’ back and forth to the store To get another blunt and two four-ohs
And I’m the only homie that will drink the O.E.
But I’m down to put ends on a fifth of Hennessy
I’m gonna kick back, relax and chill
On the ‘W’ where the niggas show love and stay real . . .
A ‘blunt’ is a cigar, usually used to roll a joint in; a ‘four-oh’ is shorthand for a 40-ounce bottle of beer, usually a brand like O.E., Old English; ‘ends’ is slang for money, and ‘the W’ is Wilton Place, the dub.
Babyboy’s love for the hood is powerful. It is his identity, his place. He could happily pass his life here, if it were not for his ambition to make something big of himself. He has been around here all his life, apart from a spell in prison, and another in North Carolina, when he was a Marine.
As a schoolboy, all Babyboy wanted to be was a Marine. He was in ninth grade when the recruiter came to his school and dazzled him with the white cap with the anchor badge on it. There was a school legend that if you actually reached out and touched the cap, you’d end up joining up. Babyboy picked up the hat right away and signed on the moment he was old enough. He wanted to see the world. He dreamed of going to Okinawa. They sent him to North Carolina instead. The entire experience was a sorry disappointment.
Instead of having a real taste of Marine Corps action, he ended up in Bravo Company, 7th Engineers, which he will happily deride as a ‘bitch-ass company of pencil-whippin’ motherfuckers’. So he quit the Marines and went made his way back to the dub. ‘I got out of that shit. As long as I been living, I ain’t been a motherfucker that played no games,’ he says, ordering his pork chop and biscuits. The menu is strictly Southern.
When he arrived back on Wilton and King in 1992, the Los Angeles rap scene had already taken off. People like Hamm and DJ Quik were making a lot of money. He started scheming right back then, fancying himself as one of the new rap moguls of Los Angeles. ‘I always wanted to be in the spotlight,’ he says. ‘I always thought I was somebody special.’
When the chop arrives, he leans over it and whispers a few words of grace.
Eazy-E had enjoyed a great run with his Ruthless Records empire by the time Babyboy returned to LA. Now a new record company had emerged from South Central, run by another man connected with the Compton gangs, a big, violent, heavy-set man called Marion Knight, also known as Suge Knight, short for the Sugar Bear. Suge was known to have connections with the Mob Piru Bloods. Rumours were flying around LA that Suge Knight had strong- armed the former Crip Eazy-E, turning up to a business meeting with a gang of thugs armed with baseball bats. The rumours were largely true. Knight had used threats of violence to force Eazy-E into signing over the contracts to some of his most profitable artists, including NWA member Dr Dre. By this time Dr Dre had become the hottest record producer in Los Angeles, and was working with a new artist, a one-time Long Beach Crip known as Snoop Dogg. Thuggery aside, the LA rap scene had never been healthier. Millions were being made.
For a couple of years Kimeyo, as he was then, didn’t do anything serious about his ambition. It was enough for him to make money by what Babyboy calls the CSC, the California Street Code: selling cocaine. His first attempts at getting into the music business were not auspicious. In ’93, he, Payback and Budman formed a group they called No Respekt Mob and took their very first demo to Suge Knight’s Death Row record company, at its offices at 10900 Wilshire Boulevard. By this time Death Row had become the number- one rap label in America, with Snoop’s Dre-produced album Doggystyle and Dre’s own The Chronic. Babyboy had a chance to let Knight’s promotions man, Kevin ‘DJ Black’ Connell, hear the tape. The Death Row man played a little of it, then shooed Babyboy straight out of the office. The tape was so badly recorded he could hardly hear it on the huge office system.
Babyboy was homeless, staying with whoever would put him up. Things went from bad to worse. While cheating on his girlfriend, he made another girl pregnant. She gave birth to his first daughter, Kimaree. To top it all, the police caught up on him when he was trying to pull off a scam involving forged cheques and he ended up in prison.
It was his first offence, so he was back on the streets soon. He weighed his options. He’d had some success dealing in cocaine, but the money came and went. On 13 August 1996, the day before his twenty-third birthday, he decided it was time to start taking the music business seriously. ‘Man,’ he says, ‘I got tired of doing the shit I was doing.’ That was the day he decided to form N Entertainment-– which stood for No Respekt Mob Entertainment.
He turns his back to me. ‘See?’ he pulls down the collar of his plaid shirt and shows me the five-inch-wide tattoo on the back of his neck. Poking out of the top of his shirt and curving around the dark-olive skin of his neck is the logo he designed for his business, a large black letter ‘N’ inside a circle.
‘Hey!’ he hails a waitress. ‘Can you give me a couple more napkins, hon?’
‘Coming up.’ The restaurant is filling. It’s lunch-time. Shoppers from the nearby Crenshaw-Baldwin Hills Mall enter clutching bags of shopping.
‘The reason I like entertainment,’ he considers, ‘is ’cause there ain’t no career where you can kick it as much as you work . . .’
After we’ve eaten, he promises to keep in touch. He writes down my number and puts it in his wallet. I notice a picture of a pretty girl inside.
‘Is that your girlfriend?’ I ask. He looks horrified. ‘Hell no.’
Outside, I take a look around. King and Crenshaw is one of west South Central’s best-known comers. To the left of me, on the same block as M+M’s, is King of Music Records, opposite the large shopping mall. Recently the Crenshaw—Baldwin Hills Mall has thrived. Magic Johnson has opened up his new movie theatre on the far side of it. It lies between two major gang territories, the Harlem Crips to the east and the P Stone Bloods to the west. The local businessmen have fought hard to establish what they call ‘the Crenshaw corridor’ here. They hate the bad image this area has earned.
Babyboy walked up here from the dub. I offer him a ride back there. As we drive out of the car park he points at a couple of boys who watch us drive past and says, ‘Look at those motherfuckers staring at us. A thug and a white boy.’ He laughs. He says they’re staring because they can’t figure out why I’m in the same car with him. ‘That’s the trouble with Los Angeles. It’s all about stereotypes.’
If you enjoyed Chapter 1, you can buy the complete book on Kindle, it’s here.