Breaking News: Hip Hop Star Found Dead In Paris

PARIS (REUTERS)-The most controversial rapper and producer in Hip Hop was found dead this morning, at a five-star hotel in Paris, France.

The body was discovered near the balcony in the luxe Coco Chanel suite of the Ritz hotel, sometime around 5:15 AM, by the concierge.

Though there were no bruises, marks, wounds, puncture holes, or any apparent trauma found on the body, there was a pool of black, digital ink that had coagulated underneath his head. 

"New Jack" Anthology Xcrpt: In Cold Blood (The Baltimore Teen Murders)

In Cold Blood: The Baltimore Teen Murders

By Barry Michael Cooper

(Published in Spin Magazine May 1986)

God Almighty, you can get killed in Baltimore--for no reason at all.

Say that to yourself a few times. Gargle it, and choke on the terror.  If you look at a kid too long, or the wrong way, you could get killed. For no reason at all. If you bump into a kid on the street, if you only lightly brush up against him, and even if you apologize, it could be the last thing you ever do.

In Baltimore, 14-and15-year-old boys are killing each other on rundown basketball courts, in high school gyms, in poolrooms, on row house porches, in garbage strewn back alleys. In the last 14 months there have been almost 20 murders of young kids by other kids. 

Baltimore is known in the tourist trade as Charm City. But do not come down here looking for charm right now, and whatever you do, don't disrespect the killer children on the corners.

"New Jack" Anthology Xcrpt: Mourning In America (The Crack of the Dawn of the Dead)

Mourning In America 
(The Crack of the Dawn of the Dead)

An Essay By Barry Michael Cooper

"The velocity of history will either break your back or give you wings"

The '80s is dead, y'all, and crack cocaine murdered it. Crack both disfigured the Belle Epoque of the 1980s and wind-sheared the wings on the American Dream, sabotaging it’s flight path and fracturing it almost beyond recognition. Crack created a mass grave filled with the time-eaten corpora of our communal selective memory; a grave twenty-five years deep and a quarter-century long. 

For some, the 1980s were the dawn of an America the RRC (Republican Ruling Class) thought they had lost in the 60s with the election of Kennedy--John F. and almost Robert F.--the proliferation of Dr. Martin Luther King’s multi-colored Dream, and the specter of Malcolm X’s Black Nationalist resolve stamped, By Any Means Necessary. By the time Jimmy Carter--the son of a peanut farmer who became a Naval officer--was elected President of the United States in 1976, the American Dream was beginning to have the potential retrofit of a land filled liberty and justice for all. The Carter Era--not Jigga or Weezy’s but Jimmy C.’s--was a prodigious time for us Mountaintop Children. The Mountaintop Children (or Black Boomers, if you will) are that progeny--primarily African-American--born at the rise of the Civil Rights movement; children of cultural privilege and promise, hoisted onto the shoulders of history by ancestors who struggled, bled, and died to make this One-Nation-Under-GOD -With-Liberty-And-Justice-For-All-America, a level playing field.