RHYTHM & GANGSTER 7A
How style, cinema and aspiration shaped & reflected the looks of R&B and hip hop
[This essay is a continuation of my April 6th post.]
LEROY ‘NICKY’ BARNES ON THE COVER OF THE NEW YORK TIMES MAGAZINE. JUNE 5, 1977
In their aspirational attire the R&B singer were kindred spirits with upwardly mobile gangsters. The goal of the well-dressed entertainers who toiled on the chitlin’ circuit of ex-vaudeville houses in big cities and road houses down South was “respectable” show business. The Copacabana in New York, Coconut Grove in Los Angeles, Las Vegas casinos etc were staples of a white mob-controlled world where only a select group of non-R&B black folk ( performers like Nat ‘King’ Cole, Sammy Davis Jr, Lena Horne, Harry Belafonte, Eartha Kitt) were granted regular entry.
Berry Gordy’s hugely successful Motown Records empire, from their album’s filler cuts of Broadway show tunes to the white models who appeared on many early LP covers to the exacting stage shows and careful styling, all had no goal -- to crack open the supper clubs and hotels that were then the Holy Grail of American show business. Hit records were one thing. But bookings at Vegas casinos or Copacabana were the equivalent to the search for the veneer respectability a black gangster sought residing in Orange, New Jersey or Baldwin Hills, California. Motown succeed spectacularly, landing those supper club bookings, getting network TV specials, and eventually molding Diana Ross into an established show biz star in the mold of Barbara Streisand. Until Motown no one from the R&B end of music had made that leap as successfully.
The ethos behind all this strenuous effort was simple: conformity to white norms of presentation would lead to acceptance and acceptance insured mainstream success. It was integration with a glamour, a vision that has long driven much African-American cultural production. For example, conformity to mainstream show biz norms informed Sam Cooke’s 1964 ‘Live at the Copa.’ The song list is heavy on show tunes and light on the churchy improvisation that had made him a gospel star. Instead Cooke’s vocals don’t stray far from the melody, leaning on his glorious tone to show fealty to show tunes that might charm the white paying customers. The strategy employed by Cooke on that album would be echoed in the ‘80s when the ballad heavy song choices of Whitney Houston and the masterful pop composed by Lionel Richie made them huge pop stars. Parallel to the success of Houston and Richie in the ‘80s, a new template for black gangsterdom and black music, developed in America’s streets. The crack era introduced a new dangerously addictive drug and a fresh vision of how a black gangsters carried themselves. That the word “gangster” fell out of fashion the new “gangsta” reflected an on going aesthetic shift.
Up through the ‘70s in New York heroin kingpins like Frank Lucas, Frank Mathews and Leroy ‘Nicky’ Barnes held sway. Though the movie ‘American Gangster’ was built around Lucas, it is Barnes who remains the most fascinating figure. In the film Cuba Gooding Jr depicts him as a coked-up buffoon. In the real-world Barnes was a stylish dresser with a barrel chest and a hard man strut. Barnes was an empire builder who used his drug money to buy real estate throughout New York and around the country, while organizing six other Harlem traffickers into something he called the Council, a kind of lethal Elks Club. Tapping into the racial uplift of cultural nationalism, Barnes created an oath that went “Treat my brother like a treat myself.” Of course by “brother” they mean others in the drug game, not black people in general who they exploited.
Veteran NY Times reporter Sam Roberts, who covered crime in the city throughout the ‘70s, wrote that “Leroy Nicholas Barnes was the notorious de facto incarnation of Ron O’Neal in Gordon Parks Jr.’s 1972 film “Super Fly.” Mr. Barnes was the flamboyant dope peddler who flooded Harlem and other black neighborhoods with heroin, led cops on frivolous 100 m.p.h. car chases and redefined bling.” Famously Barnes was photographed for the cover of the New York Times magazine on June 5, 1977, while he was on trial for one of several murders he allegedly ordered. Barnes’ tinted shades, hard look into the camera, posture and denim suit made it clear this wasn’t a civil rights leader being profiled. In red letters the headline proclaimed Mr. Untouchable and the copy underneath: “This Is Nicky Barnes. The Police Say He May Be Harlem’s Biggest Drug Dealer. But Can They Prove It?”
That same Sunday morning President Jimmy Carter saw the picture, read the story and told attorney general Griffin Bell convicting Barnes was now a law enforcement priority. In January 1978 the Feds finally got Barnes, who was convicted of drug related offenses and sentenced to life in prison without the possibility of parole. Despite the oath he shared with the Council members, Barnes ratted on his peers in 1983, resulting in scores of convictions. The one-time king pin had been in the federal witness protection program since 1998. It was only revealed in 2019 than Barnes had died of cancer in 2012 and spent the last decades of his life working at Walmart. When asked by neighbors about his past Barnes would say he was a bankrupt businessman. He died in his late ‘70s.
During the late ‘70s reign of Barnes, Anthony Holloway aka DJ Hollywood, a pioneering rapper and DJ, was making a name for himself uptown. Barnes and his ilk frequented after hours clubs and gangster owned nightclubs where you had to be known to gain entry (my late father was a regular at these establishments and gave me a tour back in the ‘70s.) When I asked my father if he ever associated with Barnes’ crew he shook his head vigorously and said, “No. Those were some rough boys. I kept my distance.”
DJ HOLLYWOOD IN HIS PRIME
Hollywood entertained regularly on this circuit, wearing smart suits, open collared shirts and razor sharp lined hair. The MC looked like his audience — adult, slick and aspirational — his rhymes came from a variety of sources (jail house toasts, nursery rhymes R&B radio DJ patter), all of it delivered in a booming, dynamic voice. In fact it is this after-hours Harlem gangster pedigree that, decades later, still leads many Bronx MCs to refuse to acknowledge Hollywood as a part of hip hop’s lineage. At the same time he was playing inside clubs and ball rooms for hustlers and paying customers, the Bronx rappers were toiling in parks, schoolyards and recreational centers. Hollywood’s rejection reveals aesthetic, geographical, and generational divisions. between the rough and tumble Bronx and the slick, fly denizens of Harlem. Though a young man, Hollywood was tied to the old gangster world, while the nascent hip hop style would reflect “new jack hustlers” on the come up.
Looking back at hip hop gear between 1978 and 1983, the years when the culture was finding its recorded footing, early performers transitioned from gangster style (suits, blazers, hats, leather shoes) to punk funk (leather pants, studded jackets, boots, new wave shades) that owed much to Rick James and his Stone City Band and science fiction. Then, in 1983 when Run-D.M.C. dropped their check jackets for black Lees and unlaced sneakers, hip hop’s look changed from presentational to representational. Instead of looking like entertainers, the move was too look like your audience. Unlaced sneakers were particularly important since wearing shoes without laces was enforced in correctional facilities, a non-verbal signifier that so many in the audience connected with. It would be first of many times that hip hop iconography reflected the realities of incarceration.
Nicky Barnes was a style icon of the gangster era, the new gangsta archetype became the flamboyant Alberto Martinez aka Alpo, a handsome half black, half Puerto Rican from East Harlem, who was as ruthless as he was fly. Looking at pictures from his heyday as crack kingpin he rocked “dookey” gold chains, baseball caps wore sideways, Dapper Dan designed jackets (Gucci was favorite logo) — all of this before they became staples of rap iconography.
DAPPER DAN AT HIS HARLEM STUDIO CIRCA 1980s
Dapper Dan, who’s boutique on 125th Street was open all night to serve a clientele of drug dealers, hustlers, and entertainers, made Alpo a “snorkel” (a three quarter length parka with a deep hood with deep pockets prefect for storing drugs, guns or money.) “The most popular snorkel I ever made was the one I designed Alberto ‘Alpo’ Martinez,” Danny Dan wrote in his memoir, “which became known as the Alpo coat.” It had a leather Louis pattern for the front panels and pockets, while the sleeves were light brown.
It was Alpo, and his generation of dealers, who established the visual vocabulary of what would come to known as “urban street wear.” Baggy clothes (better to stash crack rocks in) and jeeps as the new Cadillac were made hot by young gangstas who defined the culture when MCs were just clocking minor figures. It was young rappers who entertained at the parties of crack dealers. In hip hop’s ‘80s beginnings the MCs didn’t have as much money or celebrity as the hustlers. Eventually the balance of power shifted, and MCs became the true stars. But what never has changed is that in hip hop storytelling the tales of street kings like Alpo, full of money, violence and self-regard, became essential.
ALPO WEARING A DAPPER DAN OUTFIT
These gangstas were loud and young. For them older ideas of respectability meant nothing. These new gangstas didn’t wear the traditional uniforms of commerce. They didn’t blend in. They didn’t conform. Just as hip hop’s manipulation of music rejected R&B norms, the gangstas who took over the black underworld during the crack era rejected the demeanor and garb of their predecessors. It was a change of attitude that would ultimately alter the lyrical DNA of commercial black music. For every “Super Fly” song or blaxploitation sound track that told the tale of a drug dealer in the ‘70s, R&B was filled to the brim with songs that examined romantic relationships from every possible angle — almost to the point of self parody. Endless sexual soap operas was detailed in one song after another.
Hip hop upended that cliche and replaced it with its own: the drug dealer as narrative centerpiece. Whether you site Ice T’s “6 in the Morning,” Schooly D’s “PSK (What the Hell Does That Mean?)” or Boogie Down Productions’ “Criminal Minded” as the big bang, the stories of young criminals like Alpo, Fat Cat Nichols, Freeway Ricky Ross and a long string of other dealers became the coin of the realm, the relentless beat and the never changing same of hip hop. If R&B themes of love lost were “soft” to many younger ears, the fate of the crackhead, corner boy, chicken head, gun moll, mule, king pin etc took the places of wayward lovers, cheating husbands, defiant wives and the brokenhearted.
Narratives filled with drive bus, Uzis, Tech 9s, kidnappings, double crosses and bloody vengeance sold records, and ignited careers. Told by gifted storytellers like Rakim, Ice Cube or Jay Z these stories could be as bracing as novels by noir masters like James M. Cain or James Ellroy. But, as hip hop expanded, listeners came to expect this sonic grind house of lyrical beat downs with the rote expressions of school kids reciting the national anthem.
The crack house gave way to the trap house decades ago but hip hop has never shook off its fascination/fixation with the drug dealer as god head. As artificial as smoothed out R&B could sound, I’m not sure what Eazy E labeled “reality rap” has not just become another pop formula for success. It may not be respectable in the old sense but it has become so expected that any deviation from the norm (for example Drake’s emo attitude) sounds absolutely refreshing.
Now I want to be clear: I am not against descriptions of violence in hip hop and not because I believe it’s a first amendment right of the artists to do so (thought I do believe it is.) The history of black people in this country is soaked in blood, blood drawn both by white supremacy and black self-genocide. There are lots of stats I can site but here are a few that speak to why the creators of hip hop would write about violence. According to a 2007 report from the Bureau of Justice Statistics titled Trends by Race, 1976-2005, 186,807 died from homicides in the U.S. between 1995 and 2005. Of those victims 89,991 or 48% were black, yet during this period African-Americans made up about 12% of the population. From that same report the black homicide rate was six times that of whites in 1980, five times in 1985, seven times in 1990, nearly seven times 1995, six times in 2000 and six times in 2005. During hip hop’s developmental period the number out of black people dying was way out of proportion. When you break that number down to the homicides of black men the lyrical content of hip hop comes into sharp focus.
Jill Leovy, who’s 2015 book Ghettoside, is a bracing look at the murder of a one young black man in Los Angeles, wrote that “[black men] were the nation’s number one crime victims. They were the people hurt most badly and most often, just 6% of the country’s population but nearly 40% of those murdered. People talked a lot about crime in America, but they tended to gloss over this aspect — that the plurality of those killed were not women, children, infants, elders or victims of workplace or school shootings. Rather, they are legions of America’s black men, many of them unemployed and criminally involved. They were murdered every day, in every city, their bodies stacking up by the thousands, year after year.”
The prevalence of this violence permeates the consciousness of the community. So many grieving parents and loved ones. So many futures cut short. So many people seeking revenge. So for any MC from a working class to poor neighborhood not to address it would have been a dereliction of duty. But what’s irritating is how so many MCs, gifted storytellers and otherwise thoughtful human beings, have treated violence as a sport and not a disease.
Hip hop colonized the language of crime, going back to the Prohibition era for old words like gatt, while inventing an unending stream of new words and definitions. Black music had always been funny and nasty when it came to describing sex. But hip hop treated crime like a dear lover, ransacking pulp fiction, Hollywood movies, and police numerical codes, pulling all this language into his heart and loving it dearly. It’s the sound of the oppressed trying to redefine their oppression through rhyme schemes and couplets.
This verbal colonization came in a crucial cultural context -- the crack era. Like the civil rights movement, which was accompanied by and shadowed by the Vietnam War and heroin era, hip hop culture became tied to the mentality and tropes of crack and the government's repressive reaction to it. From Toddy Tee's "Batter Ram" in 1985 to TI's "Trap Muzik" and beyond so much of what became codified as hip hop was refracted through the gangsta ethos of mean streets. A more subtle approach to underworld life was replaced by an in yo’ face aesthetic and it sold, partly because outlaw stories have always fascinated non-outlaws ,and because it played into stereotypes about inner city life.
I used to make the case that any MC writing a song where he shoots people is the same as a Hollywood actor shooting people on screen. I still thing that’s a valid defense. But, that said, how that shooting is handled and why that trigger is pulled is crucial. The Notorious B.I.G.’s “Warning” is my favorite example of justifiable lyrical homicide. He is told of a plot against him in a phone call. He prepares to defend himself. At the end of the song one of the people who plotted against him is shot. It’s a beautifully written set of rhymes about self-defense.
But random lyrical violence irks me, especially if delivered gleefully, like the narrator has enjoyed the death of others. I assume that stance is really about distancing themselves from death. If its “them versus me” they have to go. Perhaps that kind of brutal mentality is necessary for running a trap house. But, on record, it feels less like an artist telling a story and more like a justification for the mentality that fuels so many murders.
SCENE FROM THE MOVIE ‘PAID IN FULL’
For one of the legendary gangstas who helped usher in this lyrical template, his end game was sadly similar to previous generations. Alpo aka Alberto Martinez, who was charged with killing as many as 14 people, eventually turned government informant, serving much of a 35-year sentence before entering the witness protection program in 2015. Like Barnes and Lucas, he too was immortalized in a movie (‘Paid in Full’) and in numerous hip hop lyrics. But reel life wasn’t enough for Alpo. Though in witness protection in New England, Alpo couldn’t escape the lure of uptown life, driving down to the streets he once ruled on a regular basis. On October 31, 2021 at 3:30am Alpo was shot five times while sitting in a Dodge Ram in Harlem. Fade to black.