3 Kings Read online

  Caz is one of many who gave or signed away valuable music rights for a pittance decades ago, a showbiz tradition that has become a painful and indelible aspect of the hip-hop psyche, and likely part of the reason financial gain is so often flaunted when it does occur. Unlike rock music, which is in many ways a reaction against wealth, a core element of hip-hop is rejoicing in success.15 “Hip-hop from the beginning has always been aspirational,” Jay-Z told Forbes in 2010. “It always broke that notion that an artist can’t think about money as well. Just so long as you separate the two and you’re not making music with business in mind.”16

  This book offers a peek into both the musical and financial sides of the industry, with a heavy dose of hip-hop history coming in the first few chapters. Most of the myriad characters mentioned in these pages deserve more ink than they’re given; to help keep track, I’ve created a dramatis personae at the back of this book. Throughout the narrative, as the kings ascend to the upper strata of the entertainment and business worlds, their circles grow smaller, and the names become fewer—and more recognizable to the casual reader.

  In just a few decades, hip-hop has become deeply and profitably intertwined with mainstream global culture, and emcees born in other countries have gone on to enjoy great success locally and internationally. Take MC Solaar, the French rapper who debuted with the smash single “Bouge de Là” (“move a little”) in 1991 and by the 2000s was contributing songs to The Hills and Sex and the City. Or Tommy Tee, the godfather of Norwegian hip-hop, who took inspiration from the culture coming out of the Bronx in the early 1980s and went on to help launch a similar scene in Scandinavia at around the same time, complete with all the elements of hip-hop. “In the regular newspaper, they had break dance courses—‘How to Break-Dance’—for a whole summer,” says Tee, who has released several studio albums and runs his own independent label. “Now we have a generation that’s born in the nineties that grew up with hip-hop… everywhere.”17

  More recently, the genre has given rise to a film that grossed north of $200 million worldwide (the Dre-produced N.W.A. biopic Straight Outta Compton), one of the most popular television shows in the United States (Empire, whose lead character is a mélange of the three kings, but particularly Jay-Z and Diddy), and the most-awarded Broadway show in recent memory (Hamilton, a hip-hop history written by a New Yorker of Puerto Rican heritage and performed by a cast that brought a much-needed blast of diversity to the Great White Way).

  To be sure, Diddy, Dr. Dre, and Jay-Z alone weren’t responsible for all of hip-hop’s recent triumphs, nor were they on the front lines as the genre’s first champions smashed barrier after barrier that stood in the way of its early progress. They weren’t always model citizens either—all three had violent episodes, though none did any hard time—yet each man’s most serious brushes with the law served as a life lesson and a career turning point. Hip-hop is now America’s most-consumed genre, fronted by a generation of up-and-comers whose trail was blazed by Diddy, Dr. Dre, and Jay-Z. Despite their imperfections, the members of this trio combined to do something vital: transport a mature but evolving movement to places nobody dreamed it could go while providing an incredible set of entrepreneurial blueprints.

  “Who thought we were going to be promoting Skittles?” asks former Def Jam president Kevin Liles. “Who thought that we would be in the headphone space? Who thought that we would get bought out? Who thought that we would own a streaming company? Who thought that we would have a five-hundred-million-dollar alcohol? And I don’t think we’re done.”18

  It may have been Lawrence “KRS-One” Parker, the conscientious old-school “rapper’s rapper,” who put it best. One day, at a press conference, a writer asked him what he thought about the corporatization of hip-hop.

  “I don’t look at it as the corporatization of hip-hop,” KRS said. “I look at it as the hip-hopitization of corporate America.”

  The room fell silent.

  “You’re not changing us,” he continued. “We’re changing you.”19

  CHAPTER 1

  The Originators

  Lovebug Starski may be best known for getting shouted out by Notorious B.I.G. in “Juicy,” a 1994 hit produced by Diddy and later sampled by Jay-Z. The song, however, makes no mention of Starski’s chief contribution to hip-hop: though he didn’t invent the genre, he may well have been the first to give it a name.

  “I would do a rhyme and I would get stuck for a couple of words, and I would just go, ‘Then you rock the hip, then you rock the hop, a hip-hop a hippi, da hop hop hippi hippi…’” he explains, recalling his early days as a pioneering rapper-DJ in New York. “And it caught on because I’d be doing it in the rhythm of the record.”1

  He says this sitting at my dining room table, eating takeaway from a five-dollar sushi buffet after declining my offer to take him out for lunch. Starski is nearing age sixty, much older and heavier now than in the faded YouTube videos he shows me on his phone, in which he skips across a pastel stage jovially delivering Dr. Seuss–style rhymes. Today he speaks obliquely about his declining health and tattered finances, wheezing occasionally, but then he’ll toss in a detail like the price of his coat: $1,700. Or he’ll laugh—a booming, subterranean sort of guffaw that makes it sound as though he just ate a subwoofer—usually while reminiscing about his early days.

  Born Kevin Smith in the South Bronx, the aspiring DJ fell in with a gang called the Black Spades. “At first my name was Kool DJ Kev,” he says. “Not catchy.” While watching a Herbie the Love Bug film with some fellow gang members, his stage name simply erupted from his brain. “I looked up at the screen… I said, ‘I’m the l-o-v-e the b-u-g!’” he raps to me. “I just kept doing it and doing it, and got kicked in the head with a fucking army boot by a female Spades member.” The second part of his name came to him in rhyme, too: “Like a crippled crab without a crutch, it’s Starski without a Hutch.”

  Following close on the heels of his friend Anthony “DJ Hollywood” Holloway, Starski became one of the first rapping DJs to emerge from the disco scene in the 1970s, and many better-known wordsmiths have gotten rich cribbing his rhymes. As journalists started covering hip-hop, though, the narrative of its origins coalesced around the easily packaged idea of a holy trinity of founders: Afrika Bambaataa, Clive “DJ Kool Herc” Campbell, and Joseph “Grandmaster Flash” Saddler.

  All three deserve recognition as much as anyone, but trying to accurately pinpoint three—or even five—originators of a movement with as many diverse influences as hip-hop is tricky. The trinity concept leaves out forerunners like Jalal “Lightnin’ Rod” Nuriddin, a member of the civil rights–era group the Last Poets. His 1973 spoken-word album, an underworld Iliad known as Hustlers Convention, has caused many to dub him the grandfather of rap. “All the candy rappers got my money,” Lightnin’ Rod complained when I spoke with him in 2016. (He said that he had known Jay-Z’s father. But when I asked if he’d tell me more for the book, he demanded compensation, and I declined per journalistic principle.)2

  Others with a claim include Brooklyn DJ Grandmaster Flowers, disco group the Fatback Band, jazz poet Gil Scott-Heron, smooth-talking midcentury radio personalities like Frankie Crocker and Jocko Henderson, swaggering rhymester Muhammad Ali, and scatting jazz legend Louis Armstrong. Hip-hop’s lineage could even be traced as far back as the troubadours of West Africa, called griots, who’ve engaged in spoken-word storytelling for ages. For Lightnin’ Rod, Starski, and their ilk, there’s a palpable bitterness toward the movement they helped create. They feel ignored by the three kings’ generation; occasional lip service isn’t enough.

  “Puffy would never walk up to me and say, ‘What up, Lovebug, you all right?’” says Starski, raising his voice as he plays out the hypothetical encounter. “‘Hell no, motherfucker! Put a million in my pocket!… I don’t want no photo op with your ass, ’cause it don’t mean nothing. I can’t take it down to the subway and get on the train with it.’”3

  Though the likes of Flash a
nd Fab still earn a comfortable living plying their respective trades, the same can’t be said of most of the pioneers, even one of those whose lyrics were used without permission in “Rapper’s Delight,” the first hip-hop song to crack the pop charts.

  “I came up with all those rhymes, you know?” says Starski, his eyes suddenly misty. “It was real good times, Zack, innocent times. We were all innocent. Nobody knew nothing about business.”

  If Starski, Bambaataa, Flash, Herc, and Hollywood are among hip-hop’s founding fathers, you might say that midcentury master builder Robert Moses is the genre’s estranged, power-crazed, malevolent granduncle. His policies uprooted scores of New Yorkers and shuffled them into the dysfunctional housing projects where the collective angst of a generation would be channeled into what became hip-hop.

  Moses made himself the most influential figure in postwar New York City by amassing appointed positions and political capital, shaping the city’s development according to his own imperial worldview. After the 1964 completion of Shea Stadium,4 he declared, “When the Emperor Titus opened the Colosseum in eighty A.D. he could have felt no happier.” Moses believed the future would be dominated by the automobile, and that he could solve all urban ills by constructing hulking skyscrapers and connecting them by a vast web of thoroughfares. Starting in 1931, he built just about every major highway in the city and all seven bridges leading to and from the Bronx, rigged with enough steel wire to circle the earth.5

  Though he had his share of triumphs, among them the performance spaces at Lincoln Center, Moses’s creations are in many ways overshadowed by what he destroyed. Using highway construction as a pretext for leveling areas deemed blighted, a process that came to be known by the Orwellian name “urban renewal,” his minions bulldozed blocks of vibrant minority neighborhoods, uprooting an estimated 250,000 residents. About a quarter of them were evicted from a few square miles of land to clear the way for the Cross Bronx Expressway and resettled into grim housing projects, an operation akin to the forced removals that occurred at around the same time in South African neighborhoods like Cape Town’s District Six.6

  Moses’s form of discrimination wasn’t codified in the blatant terms of state-sanctioned apartheid, but the destruction wrought by his plans came in concert with new construction bearing a clear message. He “built housing bleak, sterile, cheap—expressive of patronizing condescension in every line,” Robert Caro wrote in his Pulitzer-winning book The Power Broker. “And he built it in locations that contributed to the ghettoization of the city, dividing up the city by color and income.”7

  On a snowy night in 1967, Clive Campbell and his sister, Cindy, emigrated with their parents from Jamaica to the Bronx. They settled into an apartment at 1520 Sedgwick Ave, a complex almost close enough to the Cross Bronx Expressway to allow them to smell the diesel burning. Six years later, inspired by Cindy’s desire to generate cash for back-to-school shopping, the two siblings threw a party in their building’s rec room (admission: fifty cents). Clive worked the turntable, selecting the name DJ Kool Herc for himself.

  The last part of this moniker aimed to signal his Herculean physical prowess (he earned medals, as well as American friends, for his track-and-field efforts in high school), while “Kool” was inspired by a cigarette commercial. In the spot, a James Bond look-alike drives an Aston Martin, his Kools in a box by the gearshift. When his lady friend reaches for one, he stops the car and tells her to get out. “And the commercial says, ‘Nobody touches my silver thin,’” Herc recalled decades later. “I was like, ‘Wow, that’s Kool!’” Thus, the DJ many consider to be the foremost founding father of hip-hop launched his career with product placement ingrained in his professional name, auguring the multibillion-dollar connection between brands and the genre in the years to come.8

  In addition to his thick Jamaican accent, Herc possessed something his mostly teenage audience hadn’t heard before: a sound system as physically imposing as he was. Borrowed from his father, the speakers became especially important when, after a few parties, Herc outgrew the rec room and started playing outside.9 He’d crack open streetlamp bases and tap their electric wiring to power his massive system, playing songs with lengthy danceable sections—known as the “break” or the “get-down”—by acts like the Incredible Bongo Band and James Brown. To optimize the experience for what came to be known as break-dancers, he’d pick up his turntable’s needle at the end of the break and set it back to the beginning, thereby extending the prime part of the song, or to the break of another song altogether. He called this the “merry-go-round.”10

  The parties, and hip-hop itself, served as an outlet for—and an expression of—the frustrations of life in the Bronx. Local emcee Melvin “Melle Mel” Glover would sum up the harsh realities best in “The Message” several years later: “Broken glass everywhere / People pissin’ on the stairs, you know they just don’t care,” he rapped, going on to bemoan the “rats in the front room, roaches in the back,” and the “junkies in the alley with a baseball bat.” Crime had indeed surged: from 1965 to 1975, in the wake of Moses’s urban renewal, violent offenses tripled across New York.11

  At 1520 Sedgwick, though, a relatively peaceful atmosphere prevailed, thanks to the presence of hulking Herc himself, with help from his sidekick, an emcee who went by the name Coke La Rock and peppered performances with soon-to-be-ubiquitous ad-libbed phrases like “Ya rock and ya don’t stop!” and “To the beat, y’all!” In the mind of many historians, Herc’s parties constituted the beginning of hip-hop in 1973. “He’s the father,” says Caz, who grew up three blocks from 1520 Sedgwick. “He’s the guy that everybody aspired to be… Nobody was there when Herc was there in the beginning.”12

  If anyone could match Herc in terms of sheer presence, it was Bambaataa. Even today, the burly DJ explodes out of cars and bursts into restaurants with the bombastic intensity of the Incredible Hulk. Little is known about his origins, and he doesn’t offer many clues (“I’m really from the universe… I’m what you call a person of star seed,” he said when I first interviewed him in 2009).13 Working backward, he arrived on this planet—birthed by an Earthly mother, or so he says—in the late 1950s or thereabouts. He grew up in the Bronx River Houses, a Moses monstrosity ten minutes east on the Cross Bronx from Herc’s stomping grounds. By the early 1970s, he’d risen to the rank of warlord in the Black Spades.

  On a trip to Africa at around this time, he discovered the luscious grooves of Afrobeat legend Fela Kuti; upon his return, Bambaataa created a peaceful organization called the Universal Zulu Nation. He convinced many Black Spades to put down their weapons and pick up his new philosophy, codifying and preaching four pillars: DJing (spinning records), emceeing (rhyming over a beat), graffiti (street art), and b-boying (break dancing). He later added a fifth pillar: knowledge.

  “Everybody needs to show respect to each other’s ways and culture of life that we get on this planet,” Bambaataa told me. “Don’t get caught up on, ‘I’m black, brown, yellow, red, or white.’” (There are some odious matters that run contrary to this lofty talk: Bambaataa was recently accused of sexually abusing adolescent boys throughout the 1970s, allegations that he has strenuously denied; it appears that he won’t face prosecution due to New York’s statute of limitations, though the Zulu Nation did remove him from its ranks.)14

  Bambaataa wasn’t the first person to spin records or write graffiti, or to celebrate emceeing or b-boying, but these four core elements of hip-hop coalesced under his aegis when he started throwing parties in the South Bronx. He’d play the unfamiliar music he had found in Africa—from Kuti to Nigerian juju musicians like King Sunny Adé—alongside Sly and the Family Stone, Herbie Hancock, and Kraftwerk. Bambaataa’s long grooves enabled a golden age of break dancing.

  Meanwhile, a couple of miles south of 1520 Sedgwick, Grandmaster Flash emerged on the scene thanks to even more advanced methods of turntablism. He helped popularize the scratch move invented by his pal Grandwizzard Theodore, who discovered the
technique of moving the vinyl back and forth in rhythm in 1975. (While practicing his DJ skills as an adolescent, his mother startled him by bursting into his room and telling him to turn down the volume; he accidentally nudged the vinyl, and the resulting sound went on to become a turntablist staple.) Theodore soon earned a reputation as one of the most dexterous DJs in the neighborhood, as did Flash, who gained an even greater measure of renown for using two turntables at the same time and cutting up the breaks with the precision of a sushi chef.15

  The technique had been born, but word moved slowly in those days. “Hip-hop is kind of regional in a small sense,” Caz explains. “If you from Bronx River, you got your hip-hop from Bambaataa. If you was from the West Side, you got it from Kool Herc. If you was from the South Bronx, you got it from Flash.”16

  Of the three, Bambaataa became the first to draw interest from beyond the Bronx. Tom Silverman was a Colby College geology major who had started a publication called the Dance Music Report with other recent grads of the Maine school in 1978. One day, Silverman dropped by Downstairs Records on the seedy fringes of Times Square and found it packed with teenagers from the Bronx. They were scooping up records by the Incredible Bongo Band as well as by rocker Billy Squier and pop-rock quartet the Monkees. When he asked the shoppers why they wanted the records, they replied with an almost religious zeal, “We buy what Afrika Bambaataa plays.”17

  In many ways, the ascendant genre was completely novel. And in others, it seemed strangely familiar.

  “Hip-hop was always here, since the beginning of time,” says Theodore. “The tribespeople, they sit around the campfire and tell stories to the kids. That’s like the emcee right there. Then you got my ancestors, they bang on the drums and that’s like the DJ. Then they do the tribal dances to the drums—that’s like the b-boys. Then you go to the caves and you see the hieroglyphics… That’s like the graffiti artist… Those four elements is hip-hop right there. Basically, what we did, we just reinvented hip-hop.”18