Decoded (11 page)

HAD A DREAM I SAID

You hear rappers talk a lot about winning, about being number one and taking out whoever’s on top. There are very few beta rappers—it’s alphas all the way. Even in rap groups or crews where you think there’s an obvious leader, believe me, the other dude thinks he should be on top. Even the weed carrier thinks he could be the top guy. This is another way the streets bled into and shaped hip-hop.

What’s the basic motivation for a hustler? I hit the streets for the same reason a lot of other kids do: I wanted money and excitement and loved the idea of cutting myself loose from the rules and low ceilings of the straight world. The truth is that most kids on the corner aren’t making big money—especially if you break their income down to an hourly wage.
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But they’re getting rewarded in ways that go beyond dollars and cents. The kid on the streets is getting a shot at a dream. The dream is that he will be the one to make this hustling thing pay off in a big way. He sees the guy who gets rich and drives the nice car and thinks, yep, that’ll be me. He ignores the other stories going around, about dudes who get shot or beaten to death with bricks and chains, the young guy in a wheelchair for life, the nigga out of state who never came home, the nigga upstate who’ll never come home. But they’re working that corner for more than whatever small cut they get of the crack they sell—they’re working because they think they’re due for a miracle. The kid in McDonald’s gets a check and that’s it. There’s no dream in fast food. Manager? That’s a promotion, not a dream. It took me a long time to realize how much courage it took to work at McDonald’s, to walk through the streets past rows of hustlers wearing that orange uniform. But at the time, it seemed like an act of surrender to a world that hated us. I never even considered it as a possibility.

When you’ve got a nation of hustlers working for a small handful of slots, you learn something that you’ll never learn at McDonald’s. You learn to compete hard, even when you lose, because you can’t settle for second-best as a hustler. It’s not worth it. There’s no pension and benefits for a scrambler. On the other hand, you might get killed. The only reason to do it is for the top slot, for the number one position. If not just for you, then for you and your crew. If you’ve got the heart and the brains you can move up quickly and start making enough money to break some off to give your moms or your girl a taste—and the ultimate dream seems even closer, worth more and more risks. There’s no way to quantify all that on a spreadsheet, but it’s that dream of being the exception, the one who gets rich and gets out before he gets got, that’s the key to a hustler’s motivation. Legions of young cats chase after that ghost and die in the streets so a small handful of bosses—the ones who really did catch the miracle—can get richer. Sort of like the music business.

CAUSE I AIN’T SOLD THEM A DREAM, I JUST SHOWED THEM THE CREAM

When I was working out of state, every time I came home to New York I’d link with Jaz. We’d go back and forth to each other’s houses and write rhyme for hours. We’d lock ourselves in a room with a pen, a pad, and some Apple Jacks and Häagen-Dazs. We were coming up with new flows, improving our speed, delivery, and composition.

One day in Jersey I got the call I had secretly been hoping for. Jaz got a record deal. EMI advanced him a ridiculous amount of money, nearly half a million. That was huge back then for rappers. That was R&B money. EMI was treating Jaz like the O’Jays, but only because they didn’t know any better—they didn’t know record labels were signing rappers for cars. The A&R department had convinced Jaz to work with Brian “Chuck” New, a producer who was riding on the success of the Fresh Prince. The label rented Jaz a flat in London to work with Chuck and record his debut.

Jaz invited me along for the ride. Inside I was doing backflips and shit, but when I told my crew, they didn’t share my excitement. They thought I was bugging for leaving the block at a time when we were doing so well. “These rappers are hoes,” was the general response. “They just record, tour, and get separated from their families, while some white person takes all their money.” But it didn’t matter to me. Jaz’s money was real; I respected that. And even though I didn’t go around talking about it to even my closest friends, I believed I could make it as a rapper, too.

Up until that point my life could be mapped with a triangle: Brooklyn, Washington Heights, Trenton. So everything about the trip to London—going to Rockefeller Center to get my passport, packing for a month-long trip, preparing for a trans-Atlantic flight—was new for me. It was a surreal, disorienting experience: two niggas from Marcy in a flat in Notting Hill. But it was fun, too. Once we got out there, I linked up with Monie Love, a cutie and a dope MC who’d recorded with De La.

She’d come through and take us to clubs and to the movies. Irv Gotti was out there, too, DJing for us for a time.

I wasn’t really doing anything musical in London, but I was like a sponge when I’d sit in on Jaz’s recording sessions and meetings. I never gave my opinion about how his business was being run. I was new and I didn’t necessarily know how things worked in the music business. I did notice that even though we were in London more than a month, when the A&R guys from EMI finished Jaz’s album, it didn’t sound that different than his demo. The only new track they gave him was “Hawaiian Sophie,” a poppy song with a ukulele on the hook. That wasn’t a song Jaz would’ve come up with on his own. But we were looking at the plaques on their wall and thinking about the radio play they got Will Smith and we let them convince us that “Hawaiian Sophie” was gonna make this nigga blow.

When we shot the video, we were crazy excited. We were wearing Bermuda shorts and leis, rhyming on a soundstage with sand and palm trees. It looks like a bad joke now, but back then it felt like we were shooting an action movie. Unfortunately, it didn’t read that way once the video came out. That single was nearly career suicide for Jaz. He went from being courted at the highest level to not having EMI return his phone calls. The wildest shit about the whole thing was that the executives at EMI and Capitol who’d withdrawn support for Jaz’s project were coming to me behind his back trying to holla at me on some solo shit. I thought to myself, “This business sucks.” No honor, no integrity; it was disgusting. In some ways it was worse than the streets. Jaz’s debut album, something he’d been dreaming about his whole life, did come out, but in the end it was nothing more than a tax write-off for a giant corporation.

IS IT BACK TO CHARGING MOTHERFUCKERS 11 FOR AN O?

After the way EMI handled Jaz, I buried my little rap dreams. If I had any pent-up resentment or anger, I took it out on the block.

We started doing work in Maryland. Once again we had better prices than most kids in town but that didn’t make things easy. I remember one night—the coldest night in my memory, bar none—we were hustling in front of the place where we were staying, which was stupid, but anyway, it was part of a development with long buildings facing each other at either end of the block. It created a wind tunnel along the paths between the buildings. We set up shop right in the middle of it. You couldn’t really hang in the pathway because people really panicked—they didn’t want it too hot. So we had to stand in this hole in the wall so we weren’t technically in the pathway. And the nights were freezing. I mean, so cold that your nose couldn’t even run. And in that bitter cold, folded into the crevices of a project wall, hundreds of miles from home, I sold crack to addicts who were killing themselves, collecting the wrinkled bills they got from God knows where, and making sure they got their rocks to smoke. I stood there thinking, “What the fuck am I doing?”

This was the flip side of the Life. Here’s what I loved about hustling. Forget the money. It may sound strange, but it was usually a fun way to spend time. It was an adventure. I got to hang out on the block with my crew, talking, cracking jokes. You know how people in office jobs talk at the watercooler? This job was almost all watercooler. But when you weren’t having fun, it was hell. Maryland ended badly, too—shootouts in clubs, major police investigations, whole crews arrested. I got out of there just in time. Some of my best friends weren’t so lucky. It was tragic. I was making money, but winning on the streets, really winning, is hard, nearly impossible.

Maybe that’s why boxing is almost a religion to hustlers and the big title fights in Vegas are like pilgrimages. In boxing, you have to impose your will on the situation. You have to make sure the match runs according to your style and rhythm and not get caught up in someone else’s game plan. You have to be willing to suffer and to make someone else suffer, because only one of you can win. Once you’re winning, you can’t let up till the bell rings. And once you’ve won, you have to be gracious and let your opponent accept his defeat without humiliating him, because it’s not personal.

Boxing is a glorious sport to watch and boxers are incredible, heroic athletes, but it’s also, to be honest, a stupid game to play. Even the winners can end up with crippling brain damage. In a lot of ways, hustling is the same. But you learn something special from playing the most difficult games, the games where winning is close to impossible and losing is catastrophic: You learn how to compete as if your life depended on it. That’s the lesson I brought with me to the so-called “legitimate” world.

A LITTLE BIT OF EVERYTHING, THE NEW IMPROVED RUSSELL

When I was moving off the streets and tried to envision what winning looked like, it was Russell Simmons. Russell was a star, the one who created the model for the hip-hop mogul that so many people—Andre Harrell, Puffy, even Suge Knight—went on to follow.

People in the record business had always made a lot of money. Not the artists, who kept dying broke, but the execs. Still, regular fans had no idea who they were. Russell changed that. His brand as an executive mattered not just within the industry, but among people in the street. And with Def Jam he created one of the most powerful brands in the history of American entertainment.

Russell also made being a CEO seem like a better deal than being an artist. He was living the life like crazy, fucking with models, riding in Bentleys with his sneakers sticking out the windows, and never once rapped a single bar. His gift was curating a whole lifestyle—music, fashion,
comedy, film—and then selling it. He didn’t just create the hip-hop business model, he changed the business style of a whole generation of Americans.

The whole vibe of start-up companies in Silicon Valley with twenty-five-year-old CEOs wearing shelltoes is Russell’s Def Jam style filtered through different industries. The business ideal for a whole generation went from growing up and wearing a suit every day to never growing up and wearing sneakers to the boardroom.

Even as a teenager, I understood what Russell was on to. He’d discovered a way to work in the legit world but to live the dream of the hustler: independence, wealth, and success outside of the mainstream’s rules. Coming from the life I was coming from, this was a better story than just being a rapper, especially based on what I now knew about how rappers got jerked.

I first met Russell when Dame, Biggs, and I were negotiating for a label deal for Roc-A-Fella after
Reasonable Doubt
dropped. I remember sitting across the table from him and Lyor Cohen in disbelief that we were negotiating a seven-figure deal with the greatest label in rap history. But I was also feeling a dilemma: I was looking at Russell and thinking,
I want to be this nigga, not his artist.
(In the end, we made a deal with Def Jam that kept us in control of Roc-A-Fella, instead of my just signing up as a solo artist.)

Russell would become a valuable informal mentor for us. He wasn’t a gangster by any stretch, but he’d put in his time hustling, selling fake cocaine to college kids in the Village, that sort of thing. He reminded me of a lot of street dudes I’d known: He had a great memory, kept figures in his head, and was a quick judge of character. He also had tremendous integrity and confidence. He knew that the key to success was believing in the quality of your own product enough to make people do business with you on your terms. He knew that great product was the ultimate advantage in competition, not how big your office building is or how deep your pockets are or who you know. In the end it came down to having a great product and the hustle to move it, which was something I learned working the block. Russell was an evangelist for hip-hop. He knew the culture’s power and was never shy about leveraging it and making sure that it was the people who were creating the culture who got rich off of it.