Decoded (27 page)

The theme song to The Sopranos
¹
/
plays in the key of life on my mental piano
²
/ Got a strange way of seein life like /
I’m Stevie Wonder with beads under the do-rag
³
/ Intuition is there even when my vision’s impaired, yeah / Knowin I can go just switchin a spare / On the highway of life, nigga it’s sharp in my sight / 0Oh! Keen senses ever since I was a teen on the benches /
everytime somebody like Ennis
⁴
was mentioned /
I would turn green, me, bein in the trenches
⁵
/ Him, livin adventurous not worryin about expenditures / I’m bravin temperatures below zero, no hero / No father figure, you gotta pardon a nigga / But I’m starvin my niggaz, and the weight loss in my figure /
is startin to darken my heart, ’bout to get to my liver
⁶
/ Watch it my nigga, I’m tryin to be calm but I’m gon’ get richer /
through any means,
⁷
with that thing that Malcolm palmed in the picture / Never read the Qu’ran or Islamic scriptures / Only psalms I read was on the arms of my niggaz / Tattooed so I carry on like I’m non-religious / Clap whoever stand between Shawn and figures / Niggaz, say it’s the dawn but I’m superstitious / Shit is as dark as it’s been, nothin is goin as you predicted / I move with biscuits, stop the hearts of niggaz actin too suspicious /
This is food for thought, you do the dishes
⁸

My president is black / My Maybach too / and I’ll be goddamn if my diamonds ain’t blue / my money dark green / and my Porsche is light gray /
I’m headin for D.C. anybody feel me
¹
/ My president is black / My Maybach too / and I’ll be goddamn if my diamonds aint blue /
my money dark green
²
/ and my Porsche is light gray / I’m headin for D.C. anybody feel me / My president is black / in fact he’s half white / so even in a racist mind / he’s half right / if you have a racist mind /
you be aight
³
/ my president is black / but his house is all WHITE / Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther could walk / Martin Luther walked so Barack Obama could run /
Barack Obama ran so all the children could fly
⁴
/ So I’ma spread my wings and / you can meet me in the sky / I already got my own clothes / already got my own shoes / I was hot before Barack imagine what I’m gonna do / Hello Ms. America / Hey pretty lady / that red white and blue flag /
wave for me baby
⁵
/ never thought I’d say this shit baby I’m good / you can keep your puss I don’t want no more bush / no more war / no more Iraq /
no more white lies
⁶
/ the president is BLACK

W
hen I first started working on this book, I told my editor that I wanted it to do three important things. The first thing was to make the case that hip-hop lyrics—not just my lyrics, but those of every great MC—are poetry if you look at them closely enough. The second was I wanted the book to tell a little bit of the story of my generation, to show the context for the choices we made at a violent and chaotic crossroads in recent history.

And the third piece was that I wanted the book to show how hip-hop created a way to take a very specific and powerful experience and turn it into a story that everyone in the world could feel and relate to.

All of those threads came together at a pivotal moment for me, the moment when I fully crossed from one life to another.

CLARK SOUGHT ME OUT, DAME BELIEVED

I hadn’t been to Manhattan in a minute; in fact, I probably hadn’t seen any of the five boroughs in months. There’s a line in a song I did with Scarface,
guess who’s back, still smell the crack in my clothes,
and that’s real after you’ve been putting in work for a while. No one else can actually smell the coke, of course, but you still feel it coming off you, like your pores are bleeding a haze of work into the air around you—especially if you’re sitting still for the first time in weeks, ass on a hard chair in a carpeted room with the door closed and windows sealed and a man in a suit staring you down. I could practically see the shit floating off of me.

I was sitting across a table from Ruben Rodriguez, a music business vet wearing the uniform: a double-breasted silk suit, a pinky ring, and a tie knotted like a small fist under his chin. The room, the table, the view outside the window of a pinstriped skyscraper—the whole scene was surreal to me. I’d been living like a vampire. The only people I’d seen in weeks were the people in my crew down south and my girl in Virginia. And, of course, the customers, the endless nighttime tide of fiends who kept us busy. My hands were raw from handling work and handling money; my nerves were shot from the pressure. Now I was in this office, sitting quietly, waiting to hear something worth my time from this dude, who was looking back at me like he was waiting for the same thing. Luckily the silence was filled by the third guy in the room. Sitting next to me was Dame Dash.

Clark Kent, the producer/DJ/sneakerhead, is the one who introduced me to Dame. I knew Clark through Mister Cee, Big Daddy Kane’s DJ. Clark was pivotal at this stage in my life. In the mirror, all I saw was a hustler—a hustler who wrote rhymes on corner-store paper bags and memorized them in hotel rooms far away from home—but still, first a hustler. It’s who I’d been since I was sixteen years old on my own in Trenton, New Jersey. I couldn’t even think about wanting to be something else; I wouldn’t let myself visualize another life. But I wrote because I couldn’t stop. It was a release, a mental exercise, a way of keeping sane. When I’d leave Brooklyn for long stretches and come back a hundred years later, Clark would find me and say, “Let’s do this music.” I don’t know if he smelled the blow on my clothes, but if he did, it didn’t matter. He kept on me when I was halfway gone.

I appreciated him—and Ty-Ty and B-High—when they’d encourage me, but I was so skeptical about the business that I would also get annoyed. B-High used to really come down hard on me. He’s real honest and direct, and he told me straight up he thought I was throwing my life away hustling. He may have had a job, a gig at Chemical Bank with a jacket and tie, but he wasn’t exactly in a position to judge. He’d see me on the street after I’d been away for six months and give me a look of absolute disgust. There were whole years when B-High, my own cousin, didn’t even speak to me.

But Clark wasn’t family like Ty-Ty and B-High. He had no reason to come after me, except that he thought I had something new to offer this world he loved. Clark would call me if there were open mics at a party, and if I wasn’t too far away, I’d come home, get on at the party, then head back, sometimes in the middle of the night, to get back to my business. The beats would still be ringing in my ears.

Clark had been passing Dame groups to manage and splitting a signing fee with him. He knew Dame was hungry for talent to represent so he could break into the music industry and thought we’d be a good match. So he arranged a meeting at an office somewhere. Dame walked into the room talking and didn’t stop. He would later tell me he was impressed because I had on Nike Airs and dudes from Brooklyn didn’t wear Airs, but I didn’t say much at that first meeting. I could barely get a word in edgewise. He was a Harlem dude through and through—flashy, loud, animated. Harlem cats enter every room like it’s a movie set and they’re the star of the flick. Dame was entertaining, but I could see that he was serious and had a real vision. His constant talking was like a release of all the ambition boiling in him, like a pot whistling steam. He was a few years younger than I was, just barely in his twenties, but he projected bulletproof confidence. And in the end, underneath all the performance, what he said made sense. I believed him.

Dame knew I needed convincing to leave hustling alone, so right away he offered to put me on a record, “Can I Get Open,” with Original Flavor, a group he was managing. I went to the studio, said my verse, and as soon as we finished the song and video, I skated back out of town and out of touch. When Dame could catch me, he would set up these meetings with record labels and drag me to them, but none of them were fucking with us. Not Columbia, not Def Jam, not Uptown. Sometimes there was talk of a single deal, but whenever it got to the point where it was supposed to be real, the label would renege.

THE WORLD DON’T LIKE US, IS THAT NOT CLEAR

So one more time here we were, again, in this office with Ruben Rodriguez. I didn’t know Rodriguez, but I knew this wasn’t like taking a meeting with Andre Harrell or Sylvia Rhone, both of whom had already shut us down. We were working our way down the industry depth chart. I didn’t have my hopes up, but I respected Dame’s hustle enough to keep coming to these meetings. Dame made his pitch and then Rodriguez sat back in his chair and leveled his eyes at me. “Yo, give me a rhyme right now,” he said.

I’m not against rhyming for people when they ask. I’d rapped for free at open mics all over the tri-state area, battling other MCs, spitting on underground radio shows, getting on mix tapes, hopping on pool tables in crowded back rooms. So I wasn’t too arrogant to break out into a rhyme. Maybe it was the drive into the city still wearing on me or maybe I was anxious about some loose end in Virginia. Or maybe I was just disoriented by the whiplash of my life. But when he asked me to rhyme, it felt like he was asking a nigger to tap-dance for him in his fancy suit and pinky ring. So I bounced. Well, first I said, “I ain’t giving no free shows,” and then I walked. It wasn’t arrogant, but I did expect a level of respect, not just for me personally, but for the art.