Hooked On The American Dream

They Shoot Black Movies...Don't They?

2012-01-28T23:03:00.001-05:00

Pioneer African American Filmmaker, Oscar Michaeux

They Shoot Black Movies...Don't They?

(The Realization of a Hustlerz Ambition)

By Barry Michael Cooper

At the dawn of the Black Hollywood Renaissance of the '90s, the sodality of filmmakers like Spike Lee, The Hudlin Brothers, Bill Duke, Stan Lathan, John Singleton, The Hughes Brothers, George Jackson, Doug McHenry, Mario Van Peebles, Robert Townsend, Keenan Ivory Wayans, Kevin Hooks, Fred "Fab Five Freddy" Braithwaite, Charles Stone, III, Nelson George and this writer, to name a few, felt like the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood. We--like Rossetti, Millais, and Hunt at the height of their artistic revolt in the U.K. during the late 1800s--were cinematic reformers, rejecting the cartoonish mythos of African American life, as depicted in the Black Exploitation flicks of the 1970s. In the 1990's we were Dr. Martin Luther King, we were Malcolm X, we were Gordon Parks, we were Melvin Van Peebles. We were insatiable American Dreamers, like Oscar Michaeux; albeit with limos, first-class, transcontinental transport, five-star luxury hotels and cuisine, Armani-Brioni-Versace-Zegna-Valentino-Ferragamo gear, expanding bank accounts, and cell phones. We had Been To The Mountaintop and had G.P.S.'d that noble glide-path while tracking the Realization of a Negro's Ambition, guided by the voice from an ancestral control tower which intoned, By Any Means Necessary.

We just knew The Dream would last forever.

Twenty years later Spike Lee--one of the most talented and prolific directors this country has produced in the 20th Century--can't get a green light for the sequel to Inside Man, despite the fact that the original film grossed nearly $200 million dollars worldwide. Twenty years later, two supremely talented actresses--Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer--are given Oscar nods for their portrayals of wise but weathered Mississippi domestics in a highly praised film titled The Help.

Twenty years many black filmmakers (including myself) haven't had a movie financed by a major studio in over twenty years.

Twenty years later and America has its first African American President of the United States, seeking re-election for a second term at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue.

Twenty years later, African American filmmakers navigate a course that is slightly sticky, smelly, and saggy, the aftermath of an exploding Dream deferred by Hollywood's Grand Illusion of Inclusion.

Twenty years later, is this the way it's supposed to be?

Twenty years ago, it was a heady time in Hollywood for a young black screenwriter like me. To be honest, it was unbelievable, and it's almost like it never happened at all. Sitting in meetings along with the late, great film producer George Jackson (and his partner Doug McHenry) at Warner Brothers in Burbank, California, was nothing short of surreal. Months earlier, George Jackson--who read my May 1986 Spin Magazine cover story on the Baltimore "Yo Boy" drug gang culture while changing planes in Denver--hired me away from the loading dock of the Hecht Company department store in Baltimore, to write the script of a movie that became the Rosetta Stone for modern urban culture; 1991's New Jack City. As the first black screenwriter in history to have two films--Sugar Hill and Above the Rim--released not only in the same year (1994), but 30 days apart from each other, I felt weightless in Hollywood's zero-gravity of glitz, fraudulent gravitas, and artifice.

As Biz Markie once said (describing the ego-toxic euphoria dispensed by the laughing gas known as The Vapors), "Damn it feels good to have people up on it..."

I wasn't alone; Spike had Malcolm X, Jungle Fever, Mo Betta Blues. Singleton got an Oscar nod for Boyz n the Hood, and continued building his visual corpora with Poetic Justice, Higher Learning, Rosewood, Baby Boy and many other films. The Hudlin Brothers created a franchise with House Party, and Reggie Hudlin directed one the best American romantic comedies in the last 30 years (and one of Eddie Murphy's greatest performances) with Boomerang. The Hughes Brothers ignited their spectacular career with Menace II Society. Nelson George penned the wildly successful west-coast rap spoof CB4 (which featured two New Jack City stars, Chris Rock and Al Payne).

The success story of African-Americans in Hollywood in the 1990s, was the result of a cultural harvest planted a century earlier, by Oscar Michaeux, the African American filmmaker who changed the game, at the beginning of the Twentieth Century. Born on 2 January 1884 in Murphysboro, Ill., Michaeux was the son of a former slave from Kentucky. Using funds he saved up from shining shoes in a white barber shop in Chicago, and work as a Pullman porter and a homesteader in the Southwest, Micheaux channeled his love for communication as a journalist (for the Chicago Defender), a novelist, and then a director. His first two films, The Homesteader (adapted from his novel, The Conquest) and Within Our Gates (which many observers at the time felt was Michaeux's answer to D.W. Griffiths anathematical racist epic, Birth of a Nation), not only blew the explosive depiction of African-Americans as nannies, coons, and sambos to anthropological smithereens, it defined black folk as human beings who wanted to be accorded the same dignity and rights as their white counterparts. Oscar Micheaux's films were pointed at the dead center/critical mass of Jim Crow's diseased heart of darkness, which made him more than just a courageous and acclaimed filmmaker, and his movies more than just entertainment. Micheaux's work was also a political statement.

And maybe, the decade-long dearth of African American films in recent years, is Hollywood's political statement to Black Americans. Maybe it's Hollywood's way of saying, Listen, my niggas; you got a black President, stop yer yappin'!! You overcame! Do you know how many unreported suicides and heart attacks took place in the Deep South (and the Northwest, too) among the offspring of Klansman and racial hate mongers, the night of 4 November 2008? Do you know how many good 'ol boys woke up, thinking they were having a nightmare about some darkie winning the White House...only to wake up and find out that a darkie was really gonna be in the White House?! Don't you see how those white Congressmen and Senators look at Obama when he's up on the podium giving the State of the Union Address to the entire world! The entire f---ing world! This is a guy who should be driving them to the airport, not sitting in the motherf---ing Oval Office! But he is, so please, cut us some slack. We're not green-lighting anymore black films right now; and especially films directed, written by, or produced by Blacks. With your boy Obama as President, now we have a pass to go back to the past, back to this nation's comfort zone, and you all can't say a damn thing about it! You had a ten-year run! You had your day! Be happy!

I remember moderating a panel on Hip Hop at Howard University back in 2009, the day before President Obama's Inauguration. It was part of an all day conference titled Refresh Everything, and it was sponsored by Spike Lee, Pepsi, and Howard University. I had an illustrious panel of guests: Sean "Diddy" Combs, Queen Latifah, Ludacris and his manager Chaka Zulu, noted lawyer and entertainment executive L. Londell McMillan, and MC Lyte. It was a spirited conversation, and my Hip Hop panel got a lot of attention; all 1508 seats in Howard's beautiful Cramton Auditorium were filled, and people were standing in the aisles.

A few days later, I remember emailing my thanks to Spike--the both of us basking in the radiantly historic glow of a Black President of the United States of America--and me thinking that now...in 2009...with a President Barack Hussein Obama, that Hollywood was going to be wide open for us. Wide open!

What a difference three years can make.

Last week, the critics at the Sundance Film Festival did their best to tweet and feather Spike Lee and his film Red Hook (written by Lee's talented collaborator James McBride, and financed by Lee himself). Red Hook--a controversial coming-of-age story about a young black teen and his life-altering summer vacation in Brooklyn's Red Hook projects--seemed to make critics uneasy. Many critics at the Sundance screening condemned Lee's film outright, as opposed to taking the time to discuss with their readers, what elements of the film made them squirm. Which is what real critics are supposed to do.

Last week, two of The Help's stars--the gifted Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer--were given well-deserved Oscar nominations for playing maids during the heat of civil rights unrest. Hollywood insists on rewinding those anachronistic ghost clocks of Mississippi, as long as the timekeepers are sympathetic white characters who retrofit the story from their sanitized and patronizing, p.o.v.

Last week, I had an interesting conversation with a well-known and visionary television producer--who is also white--who told me in no uncertain terms, "Barry, I don't have to tell you, the era of the 'hood movie, is pretty much over. The executives at the studios won't even take a meeting on that genre any more. Black films are having are hard time finding a home at the studios. If its not a big bucks sequel, or something that fits into their formula of huge box office, it's not going to get a green light. Which also includes small and really good films by white directors, too. It's a new day in Hollywood."

So are African American filmmakers still writing and shooting great Black films? Of course: Spike Lee just did it with Red Hook, Dee Rees did it with Pariah, and there will be more films like that to follow. True, Tyler Perry, the Hughes Brothers and John Singleton are creating incredible, viable, big budget studio films. But if it means that other African-American filmmakers have to go back to the grind of digging their own wallets--She's Gotta Have It and Hollywood Shuffle-style--and making it happen with a Canon 5D camera with a bare bones crew, then so be it. There is a gorgeous freedom of expression with that kind of cinema, and most assuredly, there is a growing audience in the millions (and a potential global audience in the hundreds of millions or even billions) who want view their work. And that growing audience is responsible for the emergence of streaming video services like Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime Videos, and Vudu, which in a few years--GOD Willing--may make cable television obsolete.

However, Hollywood is not completely out of the 'hood film bidness. Imagine if you will, some of those same bright-eyed number and career crunching studio execs, who publicly claim they are true blue Democrats--but surreptitiously vote crimson red G.O.P.--orchestrating attack ads portraying President Obama as a Harvard-educated Nino Brown and the White House as his very own New Jack City? A menace to their polite society; a "Nino Obama" who pushes their great country into the crack house of oblivion. Hyperbole, you say? Perhaps. But if I'm not mistaken, Newt "The Notorious N.E.W.T." Gingrich recently labeled (or is it libeled?) President Obama as the "Food Stamp President."

Those of us--no matter what race, social stratum, religion, or whoever we are--who want four more seasons of That Virtuous Brother Doing His Thing in the West Wing (And Trying To Make It Work For Everyone), need to show up at polls in droves (just like last time, with lines around the block), just to make sure that the GOP's post-mod minstrel show they are putting into production at this very moment, doesn't get that green light.

Be sure to order Barry Michael Cooper's debut anthology of street journalism from the 1980s (and more current essays), titled "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," which is now available on Kindle/Amazon. Don't have a Kindle? No problem; Amazon has a free app available for download, to read "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," on your PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. Click here to go to the Amazon site.

James McBride: "Being a Maid"

2012-01-25T20:58:00.000-05:00

The late, great Oscar-winning African American actress, Hattie McDaniel

This is a powerful and thought-provoking essay written by the brilliant screenwriter and Spike Lee collaborator James McBride--his produced work includes "Miracle At St. Anna, and current Sundance Film Fest lighting rod "Red Hook"--regarding Hollywood's retrograde state-of-affairs, when it comes to African American film. It almost seems as if Hollywood--like the GOP--is lobbying for a new "Jim Crow" in Hi-Res HD. McBride's commentary is a most cogent and brutally honest assessment of life on the celluloid plantation, in the era a Black Commander-In-Chief.

Being a Maid

by James McBride

Last night, President Obama, our first African American President, delivered his third State of the Union address. On that same day, the American Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences nominated two gifted African American actresses, Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer, for Oscars for playing maids in The Help. This is 73 years after the first African American to win an Oscar, Hattie McDaniel, garnered the award for the same role – as a maid, and a slave maid at that, winning the Oscar in the Best Supporting Actress category on Feb. 29, 1940.

And here we are, in the year of our Lord, Jan 25, 2012. Maybe I’m getting old, but the irony of this is too much. Or perhaps I’ve heard this song before. In the 1970’s, when I was a freshman at Oberlin College, my white friends and I used to sit up and talk about racism and solving society’s problems all through the night until the sun rose. Not much good came from these talks, the least of which is I hoped to get laid, which rarely happened. But on those cold nights, I was convinced that when I walked out of college, racism would be just about finished. Instead, it smashed me across the face like a bottle when I walked into the real world. Now, 33 years later, I find myself talking about the same thing I talked about when I was a college freshman.

I have no take with Ms. Davis and Ms. Spencer. They’re outstanding actresses. But the nomination of these two women by the Hollywood community 73 years after Hattie McDaniel won for the same role speaks for itself. As co-writer and co-producer of Spike Lee’s newest film “Red Hook Summer,” and his previous feature film “Miracle At St. Anna,” I have a clear eyed view of what the cultural display of African American life means to hearts in Hollywood, a land of feints and double meanings and as tricky to navigate as anything inside the Beltway. I wish someone had told me this when I was a freshman at Oberlin.

America is a super power not because we make the biggest guns. We’re a superpower because our culture has saturated the planet: Levis, Apple, Nike, Disney, Coke, Pepsi, McDonald’s, Jazz, Rhythm n Blues, Rock ‘n Roll, and Hip Hop. Our culture dominates the world far more than any nuclear bomb can. When you can make a person think a certain way, you don’t have to bomb them. Just give them some credit cards, a wide screen 3D TV, some potato chips, and watch what happens. This kind of cultural war, a war of propaganda and words, elements that both Hollywood and Washington know a lot about, makes America powerful beyond measure. The hard metal of this cultural weaponry, much of it, emanates from the soul of Blacks, the African American experience in music, dance, art and literature.

But this kind of cultural war puts minority storytellers – Blacks, Asians, Latinos and people of color – at a distinct disadvantage. My friend Spike Lee is a clear example. Three days ago, at the premiere of Red Hook Summer at The Sundance Film Festival, Spike, usually a cool and widely

accepting soul whose professional life is as racially diverse as any American I know– lost his cool for 30 seconds. When prompted by a question from Chris Rock who was seated in the audience, he blurted out a small, clear truth: He said one reason we did Red Hook Summer independently was because he could notget Hollywood to green light the follow-up to “Inside Man” – which cost only $45 million to make and grossed a whopping $184,376,240 million domestically and worldwide – plus another $37 million domestically on DVD sales. Within minutes, the internet lit up with burning personal criticism of him stitched into negative reviews of “Red Hook Summer” by so-called film critics and tweeters. I don’t mind negative reviews. That’s life in the big leagues. But it’s the same old double standard.

The recent success of “Red Tails” which depicts the story of the all black Tuskegee Airmen, is a clear example. Our last film, “Miracle At St. Anna,” which paid homage to the all-black 92nd Division, which fought on the ground in Italy, was blasted before it even got out the gate. Maybe it’s a terrible film. Maybe it deserved to bomb. The difference is this: When George Lucas complained publicly about the fact that he had to finance his own film because Hollywood executives told him they didn’t know how to market a black film, no one called him a fanatic. But when Spike Lee says it, he’s a racist militant and a malcontent. Spike’s been saying the same thing for 25 years. And he had to go to Italy to raise money for a film that honors American soldiers, because unlike Lucas, he’s not a billionaire. He couldn’t reach in his pocket to create, produce, market, and promote his film like Lucas did with “Red Tails.”

But there’s a deeper, even more critical element here , because it’s the same old story: Nothing in this world happens unless white folks says it happens. And therein lies the problem of being a professional black storyteller– writer, musician, filmmaker. Being black is like serving as Hoke, the driver in “Driving Miss Daisy,” except it’s a kind of TV series lasts the rest of your life: You get to drive the well-meaning boss to and fro, you love that boss, your lives are stitched together, but only when the boss decides your story intersects with his or her life is your story valid. Because you’re a kind of cultural maid.

You serve up the music, the life, the pain, the spirituality. You clean house. Take the kids to school. You serve the eggs and pour the coffee. And for your efforts the white folks thank you. They pay you a little. They ask about your kids. Then they jump into the swimming pool and you go home to your life on the outside, whatever it is. And if lucky you get to be the wise old black sage that drops pearls of wisdom, the wise old poet or bluesman who says ‘I been 'buked and scorned,’ and you heal the white folks, when in fact you can’t heal anybody. In fact, you’re actually as dumb as they are, dumber maybe, because you played into the whole business. Robbing a character of their full dimension, be it in fiction or non fiction, hurts everyone the world over. Need proof? Ask any Native American, Asian, Latino, Gay American, or so called white “hillbilly.” As if hillbillies don’t read books, and Asians don’t rap, and Muslims don’t argue about the cost of a brake job.

There’s nothing wrong with being white. I’m half white myself and proud of it. There isn’t a day passes that I don’t think about my late white Jewish mother and the lessons she taught me about humanity. But bearing witness to this kind of cultural war over the course of a lifetime will grind a man or woman down in horrible ways, and that’s my fear. I remember as a young saxophonist, just out of Oberlin, standing at a tiny jazz club in West Philadelphia watching the great jazz tenorman Hank Mobley in his last days, sick, broke. It was a jam session, and he strode onstage to reach for the magic one more time, to conjure up the power of his younger years when his mighty tenor powered Art Blakey and the Jazz Messengers and Miles Davis when those guys were the toast of Europe. Drink destroyed him. He was helped onstage by the kind musicians around him, and he stood there swaying, barely able to hold up his horn in that rancid little joint. When he put his mouth to his horn to play, it broke my heart. I felt like I was being strangled. His ability to play had vanished, and I saw my future.

It was terrible lesson for a young man fresh out of college and I did my best to forget it. But I understand it then and I understand it now: This is what happens when you walk through a supermarket and hear muzak playing ninth chords borrowed from your history; when you see instructions books made from the very harmonic innovations you created, and in my case, when you spend a lifetime watching films that spoof your community. Your entire culture is boiled down to greasy gut bucket jokester films, pornographic bling-rap, or poverty porn.

I used to think that if only there were a peaceful way, we could make Hollywood listen to the sound of America’s true drumbeat: the voices of working class poor, blacks, Asians, Latinos, Native Americans, and the so-called rednecks of this country; the people that walk the land, work in the K-Marts, run the fast food joints, drive the trucks, stand in line at 4 a.m. for the i-phones, go to church for redemption, and sell the knockoffs on ebay. But the new breed of Republicans have taken that high ground. They’ve gotten rich off it. That leaves me with nothing but the notion that Washington and Hollywood may be just alike. They’re engaged in a cultural war. They take your gun and use it on you, and it makes you sorry you drew your gun in the first place. It makes you wish you were a maid.

END

"THE LARRY DAVIS SHOW" (and the full "American Gangster" episode)

2012-01-18T22:59:00.000-05:00

By Barry Michael Cooper

(This is an excerpt from my 1988 Village Voice cover story, "The Larry Davis Show," which was both the source material and inspiration for the 23 October 2008 "Larry Davis: A Bronx Tale" episode that I produced for the BET crime doc series "American Gangster." You can read "The Larry Davis Show" excerpt and watch the full "Larry Davis" episode below)

Published in the Village Voice: November 28th, 1988

Rambo Rocks The House

"The night the police came," Larry Davis smiled, "I was watching Rambo on my VCR."

Davis and I were sitting in the visitor's area of the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan. The MCC is a large fortress filled with orange paint, thick Plexiglas partitions, and steel door that constantly buzz, click, and whine like robots in heat. Davis had entered the visitor's area through one of those doors, shackled along the wrists, waist, and ankles, a postmodern Kunte Kinte in federal prison browns. He was trailed by five male guards, one of whom held a video camera to record his departure from the holding area. Even in the joint, Larry Davis is a star.

"Sometimes," Davis said quite seriously, "It's good to pay attention to movies, because you get what's really happening." Before the movie ended on November 19th, what was really happening in the apartment overwhelmed what was playing on the TV screen: Davis, who was wanted for the slayings of four suspected South Bronx crack dealers, faced down almost 30 cops in one of the wildest shootouts in New York history. it was all over by nine, in time for the 11 o'clock newscasts to make Larry Davis an outlaw celebrity. It was the night he became the talk of the town: a muscular young black man bursts his way out of small apartment seiged by a 27-member team of armed police officers, wounding all of them in the process. It was the night he became an urban legend, a black Billy the Kid, an adolescent gunslinger outshoots an army of cops and lives to tell about it. It was the night Larry Davis became mythic.

In the weeks after Davis shot the six cops, faked out the costly, nationwide manhunt for 17 days, and held a major portion of the NYPD to a standoff in the Twin Parks Houses near Fordham Road, huge black-and-white mug shot-like photos of a starry-eyed, baby-faced killer adorned the front pages of the tabloids under headlines like "They Won't Take Me Alive" and the local news anchors excitedly invoked his name at the top of every show. He was all the talk between assistant D.A.'s and reporters during court recesses, between rap DJ's and MCs during songs at the Latin Quarter, between old Jewish women and their doormen on the Upper East Side. Did Davis shoot and kill dopeboys and take off crack spots? Did he really decide (as a cop testified) that it was too crowded in his van one afternoon, and casually order a flunky to kill a man sitting in an orange Toyota for the extra room? Did he really cook a Chihuahua and eat it?

I started getting phone calls from friends who couldn't stop talking about the B-boy renegade from the South Bronx. "That kid used to rock the fresh jams in the summertime in the P.S. 145 schoolyard," one buddy remembered. Another told me that, in addition to playing cops and robbers, Davis had stroked the keyboards on Goldie's Hot Tracks, a hip hop show on Manhattan Cable. I was told that Davis also sang, danced, and virtually, "turned the show out."

Some of Davis's acquaintances later told me he used to watch a videotape of that show over and over in his bedroom--a space that was packed with drum machines and keyboards and doubled as an eight-track recording studio--with "that look" on his face, a sly grin and a faraway, star-struck expression. Family members say it's the look he had playing drums for the choir of the Rapture Preparation Church on Crotona Avenue in the Bronx. It's the look of an impressionable young kid who sees his name in lights on the marquee of a hit movie with a long line, or his face 70 feet high inside the darkened theater, with the crowd screaming out his name.

Larry Davis had a different expression on the morning of December 6, 1986. Not that he lost top billing; as if they were watching the final installment of a hit miniseries, many New Yorkers sat in front of their televisions, mesmerized through the wee hours, waiting to see if the police platoon, armed to its teeth, would kill the freaky-dangerous 20-year-old holed up in the Bronx. But as the winter sun climbed into the sky, Larry Davis surrendered peacefully, taken away amid a swarm of helicopters, a heavily armed NYPD battalion, city officials, reporters, detractors, and hero worshipers. As the short, muscular, and leather-jacketed fugitive climbed into the paddy wagon, bathed in the jubilant but, at least in some quarters, sarcastic chant of "Lah-ree! Lah-ree!" rising from the courtyard of the Twin Parks West housing project, his face registered foggy apprehension and uncertainty. In lieu of the faraway gaze of the visionary, Larry Davis had the glassy-eyed look of a little boy who had woken up in the middle of a nightmare.

Read the full "The Larry Davis Show" cover story in my debut anthology of street journalism from the 1980s (and more current essays), titled "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," which is now available on Kindle/Amazon. Don't have a Kindle? No problem; Amazon has a free app available for download, to read "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," on your PC, Mac, iPad, iPhone, and Android devices. Click here to go to the Amazon site.

"The Peace Sign" (Barry Michael Cooper's 1990 Directorial Debut)

2011-12-08T04:49:00.001-05:00

By Barry Michael Cooper

"The Peace Sign" was the first film I ever directed. Watching Mario Van Peebles--who was not only gracious enough to invite me to the set of "New Jack City," the screenplay I wrote for Warner Brothers in 1987, which became a hit film in 1991 and ignited the careers of Van Peebles, Wesley Snipes, Ice T, Allen Payne, and Chris Rock--but he allowed me to watch him work as he set up shots with the DP Francis Kenny, block scenes with the actors, and masterfully helm a movie that became a classic.

photo still of David Mills, "The Peace Sign," 1990

After "New Jack City" wrapped production in early June 1990, I took a two-week crash course in filmmaking at the School of Visual Arts on 23rd Street in Manhattan. I began to read books like Andrew Sarris's The American Cinema: Directors and Directions. I also picked the brain of a man who I consider a cinematic mentor, the prolific director and TV producer Stan Lathan, in addition to devouring up to three films a day.

photo still of Eric Daniels, "The Peace Sign," 1990

"The Peace Sign" was the result of this intense celluloid immersion. Visually, I was influenced by a lot of the British New Wave's "Angry Young Man" cinema. Two films come to mind during this time; Jack Clayton's powerful "Room at the Top" (starring Lawrence Harvey and Simone Signoret; I am going to post a more in-depth essay on this film at a later date, GOD Willing), and the legendary Sidney Lumet's striking "The Hill" (an American director's take on the British New Wave), underscored by the knockout performances by the late, great Ossie Davis and a very un-James Bond-ish Sean Connery.

photo still of Derrick Roberts, "The Peace Sign," 1990

I loved the iconic camera artistry of the UK DP's like Oswald Morris ("The Hill"), and Freddie Francis ("Room at the Top"). The clinical beauty of their B&W photography, in tandem with their use of E.C.U's (extreme close-ups) turned their coverage of the actors, into a psychic X-Ray of their souls. The work of these filmmakers--then and now--had a great impact on me.

photo still of Brent J. Cooper, "The Peace Sign," 1990

I had a lot of help on "The Peace Sign". I am forever grateful to a group of amazing first-time actors--David Mills, Derrick Roberts, Eric Daniels, and Brent J. Cooper--who effortlessly brought the characters I scripted on the page to life in ways I never dreamed possible. I learned a lot from my cinematographer, Tim Naylor, who is one of the most sought-after DP's in the business. Working as my tenacious assistant director, was a super- talented Spike Lee protege named Jeff Byrd--who kept the shooting schedule of "The Peace Sign" on time and within the budget--who would later go on to become a great director and filmmaker in his own right. Tracy Daniels, my co-producer, did a phenomenal job of turning a $5,000 investment (the entire budget of "The Peace Sign") from Steven Starr (who was my first agent at William Morris), into an ambitious, seven minute film about how different people can bring radically different points-of-view to a single object. I had a great time creating "The Peace Sign." It was and still is, a project very close to me.

Be sure to pick up my new anthology, "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," available exclusively on Kindle/Amazon. Amazon/Kindle has a free, downloadable app for all computers and mobile devices. Click here to go to the "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1:New Jack City Eats Its Young" Kindle store site.

AP: Blogger Attacked At KFC-Points Finger At Hip Hop Star

2011-11-06T00:10:00.003-04:00

By TOM HOWE-VERHOVIK and MALINDE WHALUM

BRONX, NY (AP)-Almost twenty-four hours after one of the most bizarre press conferences in recent NY history, gossip blogger Sharon Thorne--the woman who many believe incurred the volatile actions of controversial hip hop star Malachi Joye, by sarcastically questioning his botched suicide attempt in Paris last week--was attacked by two unidentified women at a Kentucky Fried Chicken restaurant in the Bronx's Fordham Road neighborhood.

Thorne--45--and her scandulous imtellinonem.com blog (which reportedly receives nearly 1 million page visits a week) seems to have locked the troubled Joye in her online crosshairs for the past six months, with stories that have questioned his sexual preference, alleged drug use, poor business acumen, and lagging album sales. When Thorne questioned Joye in yesterday's press conference at the Jacob Javits Center in Manhattan, about why he would try to burn his underwear instead of having them cleaned, and referred to him by a somewhat veiled scatological term (Thorne called Malachi Joye, "Boo Boo," and said she meant that "literally and figuratively"), Joye seemed to snap emotionally, and threw a chair into the crowd of reporters, while hurling a profanity-laden diatribe at Thorne, as his manager Walden "Whip" Underwood, Dead-On label CEO Edgar "Spank" Jordan, and his security team, escorted Joye out of the building.

However, today was supposed to be an escape from the glare of the entertainment spotlight, or so thought Sharon Thorne. She went to her favorite place to eat, KFC, to get her favorite snack--a box of chicken gizzards and backs with a biscuit and slaw--and the place was crowded. When two women behind her realized that Thorne had purchased the last batch of gizzards and backs (portions Kentucky Fried Chicken sell as a "special order" because, said a KFC spokesperson who spoke off the record, "It's a part of the chicken that's not as popular in African-American neighborhoods in the post millennium, as it was, say, back in the '60s and 70s. Blacks are more health conscious these days, and lean more towards white meat, like breasts and wings. But from time to time, we get a requests for gizzards, so we make those on a limited basis."), the women became incensed and grabbed Sharon Thorne, by her coat collar, and started beating her along the face, and then snatched her take-out order of gizzards and backs, ran out of KFC, and disappeared into the crowds along the Grand Concourse.

Sharon Thorne was taken to Lincoln Hospital on 149th Street, treated for minor cuts and bruises on her face, and released. When these reporters reached her a few minutes ago, her statement was very brief. She told the AP, that, "I know that coward Malachi Joye, sent those two foolish women to do his dirty work! I know this!," Thorne said heatedly over the phone. "I don't blame those two hoodrats. They got bills to pay and Lotto's to play. Malachi paid them broadies off. This wasn't about no gizzards and backs. This was about a falling star who doesn't want the world to record his crash back to a harsh reality. This is about--and has always been about--Malachi Joye. Malachi even threatened me yesterday at the press conference, saying, he was 'gonna see me.' I grew up in the Drew Hamilton projects on 143rd Street in Harlem, I know what 'I'm gonna see you' means. I ain't stupid. And to make it simple and plain, one of the women--right before she snatched the box of gizzards and backs away from me--whispered in my ear, 'Skiddy says hello.' Skiddy. As in, 'Skid marks?' Hello?! Okay?! And now my lawyers are gonna say, 'Hello.' That's all I want to say. I'll have more to say on my blog in the next few days, after I heal."

And with that last remark, Sharon Thorne ended her conversation with two reporters from the Associated Press. But many believe, this string of strange events between these two media figures, is far from over.

You just read Part Three of:

Murder, Ink.

(An Episodic Short Story About
The Soap Opera
Formerly Known As Hip Hop.)

By Barry Michael Cooper

New Jack Epoch (2008 Liner Notes From New Jack Swing Gold Anthology)

2011-11-05T01:56:00.000-04:00

NEW JACK EPOCH

(Liner notes to the 2008 New Jack Swing Gold Anthology on Hip-O)

By Barry Michael Cooper

1987.

As the country did its best to slush through its extended winter of discontent created by the perfect storm of Louis XVI-like Reaganomics, the filthy lucre of junk bonds, and the Inner City's basso-profundo waltz of automatic gunfire underscoring the horror film known as Monster Crack, there was a hint of life as a rose grew in the bricks of cooked cocaine.

It was the Spring of New Jack Swing.

Horticultured by Teddy Riley, New Jack Swing was a colorful urban opera, a musical con-flux of robotic R&B, cool jazz glissandi, hip hop kick-snare-cut-scratch and claw chorused with sanctified church vocals. Drums that could make Nijinsky leap and strings that could make Verdi weep, New Jack Swing was the soundtrack for a Me Decade in manic-depressive flux. From the Glick-ish, Wall Street upstarts knocking back magnums of Krug and snorting Peruvian flake in the tony, Modernist zoo known as The Royalton--grazing in the Hey!-Look-At-Me!-ride of new money before burning it in the nihilist bonfire of their own vain excesses--to the dope money Glitter Kids trying to glow in the shadows of the ghetto. In their attempt to inhale the richly oxygenated atmosphere of the Grand Bourgeois--breathing the million-aire--this Generation of the Discarded, these Children Of The Disconnect burned their lungs with the noxious gas of twisted ambition and unbridled greed that silently suffocated their souls. Hip Hop's court jester, Biz Markie, had the perfect name for this condition.

Biz called it The Vapors.

Burdened with a fatherless home front, overworked/or welfare enabled and quite possibly drug addicted mothers, dismal school environs, a non-existent job market, New Jack Swing became an anthem for these needy urchins orphaned by an 80s Republic enamored and blinded in the abysmal flashpoint of Mourning In America. With the added malady of short term memory loss and even shorter fuses, these wealthy young beggars attended a banquet of spiritual famine, waiting on just deserts served with a sprinkle of teflon coated bullets from the mouth of an Uzi. In a hurry to taste the world and everything in it, these Affection-Deficit Babies were all dressed up--in $50,000 gold cable chains, Versace, Hugo Boss and Louis Vuitton--with nowhere to go and needed New Jack Swing's new breed of soulful Yowsa!-Yowsa! as a temporary distraction to their permanently scarred lives.

Rewinding Ellison’s Invisible Man coda, Teddy Riley's New Jack Swing spoke for these Lost Boys and Girls on the lower frequencies. Super-fluent in this new rap language, Riley-driven compositions like Keith Sweat's "I Want Her," Johnny Kemp's "Just Got Paid," and Guy's "Groove Me" (just to name a few on this phenomenal New Jack Swing Gold Compilation) became the Sound of a New America borne of a contemporary Harlem Renaissance by way of a hard knock life in New York City. However, New Jack Swing transcended the regional: it became the sound of Oakland (En Vogue's "Hold On," and Tony! Toni! Tone'!'s "Feels Good"), Oklahoma (Color Me Badd's "I Wanna Sex You Up"), Waco (Hi-Five's "I Like The Way/The Kissing Game":GOD Rest the soul of Tony Thompson), Charlotte (Jodeci's "Come And Talk to Me"), Boston (Ralph Tresvant's "Sensitivity"), and Philadelphia, too (Boys II Men's "Motownphilly").

New Jack Swing introduced us to Andre Harrell's Uptown, the label that created superstars out of Riley, Al B. Sure!, Heavy D, Mary J. Blige, and Jodeci. New Jack Swing made the two premiere production teams of the day--L.A. and Babyface, and Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis--re-evaluate, retrofit, and even re-invent their approach to the music. New Jack Swing snatched off the Kangols and Addidas and replaced them with high top fades, Gucci loafers and Ralph Lauren Rugby shirts. New Jack Swing pulled the frozen-mugged corner boys and salty around-the-way-girls off the wall and melted their ice-grills with the sweat of the Running Man and the Shaka Zulu on the dance floor. New Jack Swing resuscitated a flat-lining R&B with the brand new tenor melodies of Aaron Hall and Jeff Redd.

New Jack Swing even made the late Johnny Carson--the reigning King Of Late Night television-- look over his shoulder to see a grinning set of gums known as Arsenio Hall bearing down on his Tod-shod heels. That landmark year, 1987, that Spring Of New Jack Swing is the reason for this season of Bling 20 years later: the reason why Jay-Z became Jigga-national, the reason why Puff rocked shiny bespoke Valentino and won Coty Awards, the reason why Timberland and the Neptunes and Kanye, and Beyonce and Justin and Missy and Christina stepped fashion forward just to bring sexy back. The reason why VH-1 Hip Honors has inducted both Teddy and Andre into the Hall Of Fame this year. The reason why Jeff Redd could rock a crowd at Lotus in the summer of 2007 with "You Called And Told Me" and then that same New Jack-themed party hosted by legendary novelist and filmmaker Nelson George and New Jack Swing impresario Andrew Knyte (his wildly popular NJS4E.com website has generated an international resurgence of the genre) get almost 20,000 hits on You Tube in less than three days. New Jack Swing is a music born from the streets but it in reality it was the orchestration of a New Hustle. New Jack Swing has grown from impetuous youth into cautious Grown and Sexy, a glistening, V-12 ideal. New Jack Swing is both soundproof and timeless.

The Rolls Royce Movement has crossed the Rubicon.

The Bentley Brookland's are burning, burning, burning, on Amagansett Beach.

And let us all say, Yup-Yup.

Barry Michael Cooper
21 August 2007
Baltimore, Md.

AP Exclusive: Hip Hop Star Melts Down In Press Conference After Botched Suicide Attempt

2011-11-02T23:32:00.000-04:00

By TOM HOWE-VERHOVIK and MALINDE WHALUM
NEW YORK (AP)-Just minutes after touching down from Paris, France at New Jersey's Teeterboro Airport, troubled Hip Hop megastar Malachi Joye was rushed from the descended staircase of his Gulfstream G550, into a waiting Aston Martin Rapide, and into the crowded press area of Manhattan's Jacob Javits Center on 34th Street.

Somewhat shaky--but still defiant--as he took the podium, the 43-year-old Joye, was flanked by his manager, Walden "Whip" Underwood, the CEO of his Dead-On record label, Edgar "Spank" Jordan, his PR team, and his security.

As Joye began to speak, the barrage of HD minicams, iPhones, Androids, and SLR's began to illuminate the platinum selling artist (whose new release, "My Ride Is My Kasket," just moved two million downloads on iTunes, after reports of his botched suicide attempt) like a luminescent moth, burning in the tainted alabaster flame of ultra celebrity. Joye removed a folded sheet of paper from his stylish black double-breasted Hermes raincoat, and read from a prepared statement.

"Sean Diddy Combs and Christopher Notorious B.I.G. Wallace," Joye began in calm voice, "once mused, 'Mo Money, Mo Problems.' No truer words about this business of music, have been spoken. The Sloppit Mongers--those who masquerade as journalists and so called, 'gossip bloggers'--who trade in innuendo, slander, and straight out lies, are truly dangerous people in this 25/8 culture of non-stop information. Sloppit Mongers are like citizens who have deputized themselves to be journalistic police, but who are unauthorized and unlicensed to carry dangerous weapons, and who recklessly fire those weapons into the crowd, killing innocent bystanders. Those weapons in question being the Sloppit Mongers's convoluted and confusingly biased opinions, being deployed as actual news and accurate journalism. The innocent bystanders in question, are the millions of readers who log on to their pig pens every single day, and die from the venomous ammo launched from their poisonous pens of lies, that they thoughtlessly aim in all directions, murdering their readers' sense of balanced reporting..."

Just then, a stylishly dressed and very full-figured African American woman, who was later identified as the notorious gossip blogger Sharon Thorne--whose imtellinonem.com website, has had Malachi Joye in her crosshairs for some time now, with a string of malicious, unsubstantiated accusations involving his sex life, and the strange, pyrotechnic fetish involving Joye's underwear among other things--interrupted Joye's pointed monologue.

"I'm sorry," Thorne began, with a smile that failed to mask the verbal toxin in her voice, "I don't mean no harm, but you was paying like seven gees a night for that Coco Chanel Suite at the Ritz. With all that damn change you kickin' out, you mean to tell me you did have no maid service, no laundry or valet service, so you had to stoop to burning some damn skid marks in your drawers, Boo-Boo? And I do mean Boo-Boo, literally, and figuratively. That's some fooly-fool stuff you did in Paris, if I ever heard of some!"

It was at this moment, when the press conference took on a surreal and frightening turn of events. Malachi Joye began to sob, very loud, and then he picked up a chair near the podium, and threw it into the crowd of reporters, who gasped, screamed, and scurried for cover (including these two reporters). It was then when Joye's manager Underwood and his security, hurried the emotionally beleaguered star off-stage, as Joye began to rant and curse at Thorne.

"You big fat-back, greasy-ass, lopsided titty b--ch!," Joye fired back in a near scream, "Titties lookin' like two f--kin' broken door bells! You bug-eyed, motherf--ker! Lookin' like Felix The Motherf--kin' Cat after Boris hit him with a hammer! Righty-O! Another bucket of chicken, please! B---ch was a stand-in for 'Precious,' but they fired your big black, under-the-cover-of-darkness ass, because you keep eatin' all the gizzards! Shoes so damn runt-over, it looks like you ran 5,000 Boston Marathons in your Payless Shoes! In one day! Bunions so damn big, it looks like a linebacker trying to break tackle in them damn runt-over shoes! F--k you, you bum b---ch! Somebody is gonna see your Biggest Loser ass real soon, okay?! Okay?!!"

After Joye was quickly escorted out of the building, Thorne smiled, and briskly walked to another exit, not taking any questions from the reporters who anxiously scurried in her direction.

A bizarre news conference indeed, but one should expect no less from the controversial and reigning star of Hip Hop, Malachi Joye.

You just read Part Two of:

Murder, Ink.

(An Episodic Short Story About
The Soap Opera
Formerly Known As Hip Hop.)

By Barry Michael Cooper

Breaking News: Hip Hop Star Found Dead In Paris

2011-10-30T00:17:00.001-04:00

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.

Laying on the opposite side of the rapper's head, was an iPad, which had a screen which displayed the homepage of a popular African-American gossip site, where a photo of the rapper splayed on the front page with this headline:

HIP HOP MEGA STAR'S

FLAMING UNDERPANTS RITUAL CAUGHT ON CAMERA!

Next to the iPad was the rap star's iPhone; on the screen was an email that had been sent--according to sources close to the ongoing investigation, who spoke under the condition of anonymity--to a list of popular African-American bloggers in the U.S. The email--according to these same sources--was angry, desperate, and fearful. It reads:

"To All Of The Sloppit Mongers Out There:
You so-called "Gossip Bloggers," this one's for you. And you. And you. And you, too.

You are not Gossip Bloggers; instead, I call you sloppit mongers, because you bathe in innuendo, false information, skewered facts, gossip, and lies, the same way pigs wallow in sh-t and mud. It's not gossip. It's sloppit. And y'all need to stop it.

All of you are swine. Every last one of ya.

I'm writing this missive on behalf of myself and others like me, who have been the target of your vitriol. I'm writing this on behalf of myself, and others like me, who, though our lives may appear to be a bed of roses (with the illusion of all of our money, fame, power, and influence), it is really a mattress of thorns. Like Puff and Big said, mo' money, mo' problems. But our lives are made even thornier by the dirt you feed to the public every f---in' day. All of you have been a thorn in my side, and a thorn in the sides of many other Black celebrities.

Y'all have even gone in on the President of the United States, a Black man who has enough on his plate, as he sidesteps racists, political haters (some even in his own party) and armchair pundits who second-guess his every move, all while President Obama seems to bear the weight of the world on his shoulders. So is the life of a celebrity a bed of roses? Naaaah; roses might bed red, but they are also fertilized with sh-t, the same ingredient that informs the content of both your blogs, and your character. Roses might be red, but you all are smothered in the deepest hue of green envy. Violets are blue, and violence is a bruising shade of black and blue, and your blogs are devoted to character assassination.

All of you are merchants in the same business; Murder, Ink.

Some therapist may conclude that you all are enmeshed in the miserable velcro of a severely detached state of psychosis. I just think y'all are a bunch of professional f---in' haters.

Another thing, while I'm in my bag; y'all are some of the ugliest motherf---ers I have ever seen in my life! You look like homely, nerdy-ass cartoon characters. Is that raison d'etre (by the way, that's French for reason for existence; I know your dumbasses wouldn't know what that meant, because you are too busy digging up sh-- on people that's not true) for the hateful blogs? Wait, let me guess; it's because you got your lunch money took everyday? Or how 'bout, you were constantly bullied at school without mercy? Or is it because of your family and acquaintances (and I say acquaintances, for you have no real friends; only people afraid that you will write something bad about them), who say that they love you, despite how you look? Or is it because you cry each and every time you look in the mirror? Well???...

...Whatever it is; don't take that bullsh-t out on me. Handle that. You are getting enough crazy revenue from your blogs (the millions of pages views and visits to your blogs that click on the embedded ads) to see a professional. But what's even uglier, is what's inside of you; your soul, your heart, your motivation. That's what's really grotesque. But only a HIGHER POWER Really Knows what's really inside all of us. However, you are what you write, and all of you write some sickening, disgusting untruths. I'm just saying.

If I'm going to keep it on the really-reals, you all didn't invent gossip. Neither did Hedda Hopper or Walter Winchell (or his celluloid interpretation in "Sweet Smell of Success," J.J. Hunsacker). Gossip has been with us from the beginning--that is, if you believe that Eden was the beginning--when a supernatually ambitious and demonic serpent whispered a lie to an unsuspecting wife in Genesis chapter 3, verse 4: Ye shall not surely die. Gossip is the piecemeal account of the truth batter-dipped in a lie, and then deep-fried and served piping hot, to feed the ravenous appetites of those hungry for the destruction of others. Gossip is a vacuous landscape populated with ear-hustlers, swagger-jackers, and lurid spectators, whose only goal in life is to be sucked up into the gory details of someone else's misery.

But what really pisses me off, is the fact that you hacked into my iPhone, and leaked my private videos! So what I like to pour lighter fluid on the skid marks on my drawers, and then set my grown man Underoos (custom made by Hermes, if you must know) on fire in my hotel suite, and then do my little dance around the drawers, while singing "I'm A Little Teacup" in a high pitched, foreign accent while they burn? So what I like to film that sh-t and laugh about it later? So f---in' what?! I been a pyromaniac since I was six motherf---in' years old. That's my private pleasure--and the people I share it with--and it's my business!

Did y'all forget that we had an agreement? I wired you guys $5,000 a month, paid your overhead, sent you bonus checks on the holidays, and planted crazy stories about my sex life, my fake beefs with other celebs (which drove your blog traffic through the f---in' roof!), and leaked info on other celebs! You were a means to an end; an additional stream of exposure to keep my name ringing, because when your name stops ringing, that means the game is over. So it's not like I liked y'all anyway, you served a purpose; in addition to my P.R. team, your blogs served as an extra layer of publicity for me. Nothing more. And you were cheaper than PMK and Scanlon. You were supposed to play your position because you got paid to do so, you remember that sh-t?! All y'all had to do was keep your mouth shut and stay away from the real stories that could hurt or damage me!

Do y'all remember any of this?! Hello?!!

And now y'all wanna get fly, and freestyle on a nigga by hacking my phone and leaking sh-t without my permission?!

Are y'all serious?!!!

I mean, how the f--k are your cornball asses able to lease that Infinity, that Lexus, that BMW, that Benz? You are able to do these things, because me and other celebs have been paying the bills for you pieces of garbage while you sling the dirt we provide for you! Understand?! You ooogly motherf---ers are living lovely because I provided y'all with the pretty things that fill bank accounts! But no, you couldn't stay in your lane! You had to leak the video of me singing and dancing around my burning drawers, and that was private! I mean, I told y'all if you cross the line, you won't be writing any more blogs, you won't be doing anything, because you won't be above ground anymore. And if either one of y'all would disappear tomorrow, do you really think anybody would shed a tear? I mean, really doe...

Who likes a gossip?

Nobody.

Anyway, I just took a bunch of pills; my album is tanking, and despite all of my grind, my career is falling off like a bad bag of dope. Y'all better hope I don't wake up in the morning, 'cause if I do, then y'all won't be celebrating Thanksgiving or Christmas this year.

And if I don't then...hey. I guess you got a pass.

This time.

But because all of you are so thirsty for attention, money, and self-worth, you will try it again; you will keep stepping over the line, until that same line slices your trifflin' asses in half. Soon people will forget about you. And contrary to y'all thinking that me and others like me are hardcore narcissists, its really all of you who need the constant attention. The constant reinforcement from a bored public who are out of work, depressed, angry, confused, and use your blogs as a diversion from the pain and despair in their own lives. But when they move on--and trust me, they will , because they always do--and you become irrelevant, then what? Nobody cares about nare-a-one of you losers. They only care about the dirt you dig.

Not those who dig it.

And then you will be buried by the same sh-t y'all dumped on everyone else; but in this case, no one will hear your screams.

Or maybe the avid readers of your gossip just won't care.

Think about it.

Abeintot. Scumbags."

Breaking news update: Hip Hop Mega-Star Miraculously Revived at Paris's Pitie-Salpetriere Hospital! Has Harsh Words for African American Gossip Bloggers. Mega-Star's New Album sells 1 Million units the week after suicide attempt...

You just read Part One of:

Murder, Ink.

(An Episodic Short Story.)

By Barry Michael Cooper

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

2011-10-25T22:36:00.001-04:00

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.

The media in Baltimore have hardly covered this story. True, the TV news reports the murders, but it does so statistically, dispassionately, on its way to the weather; the newscasters appear numbed by it all.

Black congressional leaders, pastors and concerned citizens address the problems by generalizing it and in a sense dismissing it as a black on-black crime situation, by making defensive comparisons to other cities' crime rates, by covering up, and sometimes by lying.

The Atlanta child murders were a horror--someone was out there kidnapping and killing young kids. But with one arrest, it was over. Here, in Baltimore, the killing never ends. It goes on, a reign of terror. Over the past few months, much of my time has been spent watching these kids. Moving from club to club, hanging out on street corners. I've met the killers, and sadly, I think I've also met kids who will most likely be victims.

How do I describe for you the real terror, the real horror of all of this? is it by reams of graphic police reports? Do you need to see block upon block of bloodstained sidewalks, curbs, and stoops? Should I tell you about the mothers who wake up in the middle of the night, hearing what they imagine are the screams of their children being shot down in the street? Or a playground?

When I began several months ago, it was because with a bizarre regularity, I heard the reports of more and more killings. When I began, I heard, saw, and experienced things that I will never be able to overcome. And maybe because of that, and because I needed to understand what was going on, I went out into the streets to meet the Yo Boys, the young killers.

On a Saturday afternoon there are 10 of them on the northeastern corner of Pulaski and North. Their walk is a cross between a hard looping bop and a crippled pigeon's wobble. When they stand still, they hunch their shoulders and karate-chop the ice-cold air with dramatic gestures that underline the fearlessness they want to portray.

They're dressed in low-cut black Fila sneakers with two white-red lines around the sole. sweat suits in white, red, green--hard, sharp tones that complement the night, that flash warning signals--and oversized coats and hunting parkas with big pockets on the chest and at the waist that hold bullets, when necessary. On the insides are even larger pockets--"gun pockets"--that can hold several handguns at once, even an Uzi.

They move like vultures on the corners, in a circular death pattern, waiting for something to happen. The thick gold chains around their necks signal success, but at the same time weigh them down. They're the dogs of war.

Sitting through a Saturday-night movie marathon, they want to live the twisted interpretations of Al Pacino's Scarface and Schwarzenegger's Terminator. In the balcony of the dilapidated Hippodrome Theater, absorbed in the moving shadows on screen, sniffing $20 caps of "caine" (cocaine) to bring the images to life, their visions are of blood lust--$5 boys looking for million-dollar manhood in the barrel of a gun. Their dreams are to have it all, like Scarface Montana--"The world and everything in it," y'aw--even if it means going down, kicking it live, in a barrage of gunfire. These are the Yo Boys.

The situation here reminds me of the Harlem I grew up in during the early '70s. King Heroin reigned then.You had to worry about junkies walking up behind you and sticking a gun in your back. It was the era of the street gang: the Black Spades, Savage Skulls, the Glory Stompers.

If you weren't in any of those, you found alternative routes home from school, stayed upstairs on weekends, and read Iceberg Slim and Richard Wright, and danced to James Brown and B.T. Express, but you didn't go outside. Those years also birthed the dopeboys, kids who came to school with Elliot Ness shoulder holsters, "strapped," as we used to say, packing trey-five-sevens under $400 cashmere Cortefiel coats. You felt the fear in Harlem, but you knew the knuckleheads would examine all options before pulling the trigger.

Baltimore is different. There are no options to weigh. I want mine, I want it now, and I'll get it anyway possible. The boys here live from a whisper to a scream, no middle ground, no gray. Just pull the trigger. And keep on stroking.

North Avenue, the heart of black Baltimore, is a horizontal stretch of ghetto, rubberbanding from east to west. It's not a harsh layout. There are a few sections of burned-out, abandoned buildings that look like postwar Berlin, but some of the tan, red and blue row houses look like Japanese watercolors, soft city pastels. Still, you get a sense from the people that something is missing here, as if the empty rhetoric and fallen heroes of the civil-righteous '60s sucker-punched them silly.

On every other block are the obligatory bar-liquor-drugstore combos--which double as dream factories where you can float on a sea of booze and million-dollar lottery fantasies--laundromats, and Korean greasy spoons, known as carryouts. Cheeseburgers, cheesesteaks, crab cakes, french fries; some of he foreigners behind the Plexiglas walls can barely pronounce the menu, let alone understand many of the orders, but as long as the kids are hustling on the corners, the carryouts will be open. Twenty four hours.

Sun Carryout, on Pulaski and North Avenue, is crowded this Friday night, as usual. The odd, lyrical strains of Korean opera are suspended near the ceiling, counterpointing the popping grease from the grill and the conversation below.

"Hey, y'aw, gimme a four-piece wing-ding."

"Hot saw, kethchuh, sall-peppuh?" asks the blank-faced little man behind the plastic shield.

"Yeah, all that," mouths the kid in the burgundy acrylic parka. He nudges his partner and goes back to his conversation.

"We don't have to double-team him, y'aw. I got my shit on me. I'm gonna shoot him in his fuckin' head."

Both boys look to be about 13 years old, but I am not surprised. This is one of the hottest corners in the city. I order some french fries, and then I spot Tommy Wilson. Tommy manages the Sun Laundrymat across the street, giving out change, bleach, and soap powder, and sweeping up after closing. He's an intelligent, honest, hardworking 22-year old. I treat him to some fries and a Coke. It is unusually warm--almost 60 degrees--so we go outside to talk.

"A lot of people think a Yo is a rapper," he says, "or has something to do with rap music. It's not about that. Yo is a code word for a young drug dealer. When you want to buy some 'get high', you just go on the corner and ask, 'What you got, y'aw?' or 'You got that stuff, y'aw?' They sell their drugs in vitamin capsules you can buy in any health food store."

"You can always spot an Yo. Anytime you see a 15-or16-year old boy, like them kids over there"--Tommy points across the street to a swarm of kids lined up in front of Cyrus Israel's Dayland Records, a video/poolroom--"wearin' two and three 'Mr. T' solid gold chains around their necks--and them chains go for no less than $1500 a piece--you know them boys is sellin'. Anytime you see a boy on a Honda scooter, and his supplier bought the scooter to transport his merchandise. Some of the older Yo's around 18, 19, drive Mazdas, Cressidas and Maximas.

"A lot of these boys is addicts themselves. You don't have to sell drugs to make money; some boys become 'testers', and rent out their arms and noses to sell product, especially heroin. But that's dangerous, because if the heroin is too potent, or if a dealer is using rat poison, then it's over. The boys who use their own product are the ones to watch out for. They are the type who spend all their money on drugs, using product, buying more product, and when they don't have enough for clothes or whatever, they'll go an kill somebody, and take what they need.

"About three months ago, two boys tried to take me off, right on the corner. It was about 1 in the mornin', and I was comin' from this girl's house. I had on this brand-new leather coat, which cost me $300. Then these two big boys"--Tommy is about 5'4"--"both of them was over 6 feet and 200 pounds, walked up on me. They looked young, maybe 16, and they had the big 'dukey' "--referring to the size of the links on the chain, which look like steel--"rope chains. I knew what was up.

One boy stood in front of me, the other went behind me. The boy in front had real puffy hands, like balloons, and I knew he was an addict. He told me, 'Gimme your coat.' I said, 'You gonna have to kill me and take it.' I always carry a .22 on me when I'm out late like that. Not that I'm tryin' to be a gangster or nothin', but I work too hard for people to be takin' my stuff. So when this boy made his move, I pointed my coat pocket at his chest and shot him twice, right through the coat pocket. When he dropped, I swung around and shot his boy in the leg once, and he went down screaming. I started to run, but the police car rolled up behind me. Ain't that a bitch? They had seen the whole thing, but they didn't try to stop it. I guess they like to see us killing each other.

"The first boy I shot admitted to the cops that was trying to rob me. He only did that because he thought he was going to die that night, one of the cops told me later. They charges have been dropped."

Tommy says it's easy to get a gun, as simple as going to any corner and asking for it.

"I could go down the street right now," he says, "and get almost any kind of gun I want. A .22 will run you no more than $30. A .357 or .38 automatic, no more than $75. Nine-millimeters and Uzi's go for about $130."

I ask him what the parents have to say about their kids selling drugs and killing people.

"You might not believe this," he says with a half-smirk, "but some of the parents are in on what their kids are doing. A lot of boys come from welfare families, and the parents let the boys sell drugs to fill in for the time the check money is not around. The money is good, up to $300 a day, maybe more. The parents even hook up a special room for the customers and show their kids special knocks on the door to tell the difference between customers and neighbors.

"I know a girl on Division Street whose family got busted in a surprise raid--everybody in her family was selling or helping her two brothers, who are 15 and 18--because the family across the street set them up. They were jealous of all their customers, and they didn't have any business."

It is 1:30am, and Tommy and I are standing outside the carryout watching a group of boys outside of Cyrus Israel's doing a real cool shimmy-and-shake to the gunshot funk of Schoolly-D's "P.S.K." I notice a mountain of a teenager, standing by himself on the corner. He's about 6'4" and can't weight less than 230 pounds of pure muscle. He is aloof, guarded, unaffected by the music, danger, or the block itself. I exist, therefore, I am. He is dressed in a black leather jacket, black hooded sweat shirt, and black Filas, and he is holding a long white flower box.

"Who is that?," I ask.

"He owns Pulaski," says Tommy, "The boy don't play, neither. He has killed seven or eight people and ain't been caught yet. Don't mess with him, he's the man. He'll take you out in a minute. That's FTD."

...P is for the people
Who can't understand
How one homeboy became a man
S is for the way
You scream and shout
One by one
I'm knocking you out...
--Schoolly-D, "P.S.K.--What Does It Mean?"

The 8pm sun settles behind Douglass High School, slower than a red-ball jet, faster than a puff of rosy smoke from a Chinese cherry bomb. Jogging on the school's running track in mid-August is an uphill battle against sticky sweat, choking heat, and terrorist gnats, but the rings of fat hula-hooping my waist force me to fight back. It's my 31st time around, and just one more lap--that elusive eighth mile--will be my last.

At the halfway point, I notice three boys, no older than 15, rattling the wobbly fence surrounding the track and football field like caged, chubby, pimple-faced adolescent animals trying to escape their own fears, anxiety, boredom. Deep down I can sense that they want to jeer, to try to test me. Chump the sweaty, out-of-breath sucker's hand, push his buttons, and see if the jack-in-the-hot-box pops up with any static. Just because he's big don't mean he can fight. Homeding is probably a toy. Let's wind him up, y'aw.

"Hey-hey-hey/It's F-a-a-a-t Albert/And I'm gonna lose some weight too-day-hay..." the "fatboys" sing in unison. I try to ignore them, but they keep it up. A crowd starts to gather from the bus stop nearby. My ignorance and ego take over. I run over to the fence, and we trade a few choice words. Slowly the boys back away from the fence. Sensing the worse, the crowd begins to dissolve.

"Hey, stay right there, Fat Albert,if you think you so bad!" says one of the boys as they walk away. "I'm gonna go home and get my shit, OK? So wait there, OK?"

My heart races and my temple throbs. I know that this kid, barely out of childhood, is talking about getting his gun. Shaken and dizzy, I try to finish the lap, but instead I run upstairs and off the track, all the way to my house.

Later that night, I hear on the 11 o'clock news that there were two more murders on Pulaski and North avenues a few blocks away from where I'd been running. The victims are black boys, 16 and 17. There are no suspects, but police have a description of a young black, between 15 and 16. I turn off the TV, and the room shrinks into silent darkness.

...Went to the bathroom
to wash up
Put some soap on my face
And put my hand upon a cup
I said "Mirror mirror
On the wall
Who is the top choice of them all?"
The was a rubble dubble
Five minutes it lasted
The mirror said
"You are, you conceited bastid"...

The Yo Boys are standing in front of Cyrus Israel's video parlor. Israel, a handsome man of medium height with salt and pepper hair and a sandalwood complexion, doesn't allow them to sell drugs inside, so the Yos, congregate in front of the store's gunmetal gray doors. For months I have been anxious to go inside and look around, but I needed someone to watch my back in case something happened. I had offered to pay to older guys who had grown up on the streets and who were weekend "horse heads" (heroin sniffers) to go in with me, but, perhaps out of fear, they never showed up when it was time to meet.

Around 5 one afternoon I decide to go in alone. The place is dotted with a few boys playing video games. As I hit the door, one boy eyes me coldly, all the while chalking his cue at the pool table. The room is small, and the stench of incense pulls the walls closer together. There is a long, rectangular slice of mirror on onew of the paneled walls, thrown at a crazy slant that gives the place the off-balance feel of a carnival fun house.

The guttural, slurred northern drawl of the boys on the video machines captures my attention. They talk strange in Baltimore: "Ay, Larh-ee (Larry),why you tryin' to dug (dog) me, boo-ee (boy)? Watchu tryin' to dew, y'aw?"

It is time to make my move to talk to these Yos, get inside their world.

"Hey," I tough in a voice I hope won't break into falsetto,"you know a girl named Lee-Lee?" I proceed to describe this fictional character. "She owes me some money."

As I approach the pool player--this 15-year-old kid with the eyes of a mako shark--his attitude says, "Back off!"

"No, I ain't seen her. Never heard a' no Lee-Lee."

"OK, thanks, cheese."

I start to turn my back to leave, but this kid is looking at me so hard that that might be foolish. So I back out of the door slowly.

A few days later, SPIN photographer Robin Graubard arrives to take pictures. She wants to take shots at night. So we hire a cab and tell the driver, "North and Pulaski."

"I don't know," the driver hesitates, gripping the wheel more tightly. "I don't know about this. You know, a black man, a white woman with a camera, taking pictures in a cab at night."

The cab cruises down Pulaski while Robin adjusts the flash, seemingly impervious to the real and present danger around us. We come to the hot corner and Robin says, "Could you like, uh, slow down some more? Like, to a crawl?"

It's starting to get scary. And the driver is the first to sense it. "They pay people, spotters, to look out for snoops and things like this!" he says. "They can take the number on this cab and have me killed!"

"Like, nobody is thinking about taking your number," says Robin.

"How would you know?" I explode. "You're going to check out Amtrak in a few hours. You don't have to live here. Hey, we could get killed!"

"Nobody is gonna get killed!" she counters.

"Hey driver, forget it, this is crazy."

"No! Don't forget it, I've got a job to do! Let's do it!" protests Robin. This is happening as we ride down Pulaski. Robin places her lens on the edge of the car window and aims. FLASH! FLASH! The camera lights up the corner like an instant sunrise.

"Hey! What the fuck you doin'!" comes a curdling scream from the corner.

"Man, that was nothin', that was nothin'," Robin grumbles. "I gotta do it again. Could you almost not move at all? Can you understand that?"

"Can you understand that this is some wild shit?" I scream. "Please driver," I say reluctantly, "go around once more. I promise, it's the last time."

The driver grits his teeth. "I gotta family, you know? I don't wanna die tonight!"

"Me neither," I say.

We go around once again. Robin aims. FLASH! FLASH! FLASH!

"Hey, bitch," yells the same kid. "If you take another picture, I'm gonna shoot you!"

We take off.

Later, halfwitted and bathing in the eerie glow of my TV set, I hear what I don't need to hear. There was another killing. Two kids, between 17 and 18 years old, were shot on the steps of a house on Ettings Street, a few blocks from where we were tonight. I turn off the set and stare into the darkness. It just wasn't our time yet. But it was close enough.

...I should shoot you dead
P.S.K., we're makin' that green,
People always say
What the hell does that mean...

Read the entire In Cold Blood: The Baltimore Teen Murders cover story from the May 1986 issue of Spin Magazine, in my new anthology, "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," available exclusively on Kindle/Amazon. Amazon/Kindle has a free, downloadable app for all computers and mobile devices. Click here to go to the "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1:New Jack City Eats Its Young" Kindle store site.

"New Jack" Anthology Xcrpt: "Crack" (Spin Magazine-Feb. 1986)

2011-10-24T19:59:00.000-04:00

Crack

Spin Magazine Cover Story-February 1986

By Barry Michael Cooper

(This was the first national magazine story on the emerging crack cocaine epidemic in America, months before both Time and Newsweek.)

It is almost midnight in Harlem, and the colorless summer night has painted the row of tenement buildings, storefronts, sidewalks, cars, buses, and people in shades of the unknown in this concrete netherworld.

Is this a jungle? The young lions are dressed in black nylon T-shirts and black Lee carpenter jeans rolled up at bare ankles to showcase shiny black Bally loafers. Sinewy arms folded across their chests laden with gold medallions, a silent roar creasing their lips in the guise of a sneer, the young lions usher their prey in and out of video parlors and misty hallways.

Is this a war zone? Loud, rapid machine-gun fire, in the form of recorded digital drums, blasts from a glistening metal boom box, the modern teenager’s portable iron curtain, repeating the most damaging bursts of ammo, shooting down all hopes of retreat from its demanding groove. Thick marijuana smoke is suspended in the air.

Is this an island? A jet stream of water punches out of the mouth of an open fire hydrant. A few adults and children, barefoot and frying in the melting night, giggle and play, carefree, in the cooling flow. The river of water circles the block, separating this patch of Harlem from the rest of the free world. In the street, the water babies instinctively sidestep the steady flotilla of crushed beer cans, greasy wine bottles, and empty miniature manila envelopes of reefer. There are messages in these bottles, cries for help tossed in a curbside sea. The fleet stops at the corner of Eighth Avenue and capsizes into an already gutted drain of moldy, splintered, and stagnant dreams.

This is 145th Street, “Crack City.”

Crack is the latest drug in New York, and its use is becoming epidemic. These white pellets of prepackaged freebase (cocaine in its purest form) are extremely frightening. Frequent users--peer pressured 13-year-olds to 60-plus grandparents--don’t associate its use with the savage addiction of heroin or the hallucinogenic insanity of angel dust, its two predecessors in Harlem’s crippling drug trilogy. But in the last year, crack has become the drug of choice; the exhilarating rush of its 5-to-15 minute high brings a distorted sense of power, a king-of-the-hill nirvana. Like Huxley’s “soma” in Brave New World, crack is, for many, escape, booster, stabilizer, and status quo. Known on the street as “the white genie in the bottle” (it is sold in vials), a rub of the crack lantern grants the wish for temporary residence in the dreamstate of your own design.

The crack phenomenon is so new that not much is known about it (or maybe the facts are not available to the general public) by the N.Y.P.D. or any other law enforcement agency.

Dressed in Sergio Valente jeans, Etonic T-shirt, and sneakers, the Harlem detective is small and wiry, with a deep tan and salt and pepper hair. In the Street Narcotics unit of the 33rd precinct, he speaks in hushed tones, and his mannerisms are closely guarded, as if the body language shouldn’t be talkative, either.

“I’ve seen some BMW’s, Mercedes, and Volvo’s with Jersey, Connecticut, and even Massachusetts license plates on 145th Street, where young, rich white kids are going to buy crack. How they are finding out about this, I don’t know, but soon it won’t be confined to the black community. It will be widespread.

“I can recall hearing about it in the last year or so. It looks almost like chips of soap, and sometimes when the dealers sell bad stuff, that’s what they use--chips of soap.”

There are only two kinds of places to purchase crack: basehouses and crack spots. A crack spot is like a take-out only service, operated from an apartment (with a small hole drilled in the door, through which goods and money are exchanged), a storefront, or a video arcade (such as the ones that line 145th Street between Seventh and Eighth Avenues)> Because freebasing requires elaborate paraphernalia, i.e., a small glass pipe and a pint-sized acetylene torch, basehouses have come into existence. They are similar to opium dens or heroin “shooting galleries,” where people gather to get high. A basehouse can be an apartment, an abandoned tenement, or an affluent building. Inside the more active ones there are usually four men: two at the door and two in the middle of the room, watching everyone and everything, armed with Berettas, Uzis, and MAC 10s. The room is stripped bare except for a long rectangular table, which has numbers written on the top from one to five. Behind each number are rows of vials of crack. Scattered around the basehouse are chairs and card tables, each with a pipe and a torch on top. Admission to the basehouse is $3, as is separate rental of a pipe and torch. The crack ranges from $10-$50 a bottle (hence the markings on the table). Sitting time is 15 minutes. To stay longer is to pay another $9. To try and take a bottle of crack without paying is to be chopped and grated by rounds of automatic gunfire.

“A lot of people seem to be freebasing in Harlem these days,” says Special Narcotics Prosecutor Sterling Johnson. ‘That’s what they call ‘sucking on that glass dick [the pipe crack is smoked in].’ That’s what’s happening. People are getting high. Dope dealers that had a million dollars yesterday are stone broke now. And they’ll tell you, ‘This is my woman, she never fails me. Base.’ You go up to the Riverton Projects [135th and Fifth Avenue] on a Sunday morning, and you’ll see some of the people getting out of their cars--women sucking on the glass dick, dudes sucking on that glass dick, and they’re in love.”

Cocaine’s absorption into the bloodstream depends on how it’s taken. Use through the mucous membranes, including the rectum, vagina, urethra, and nasal mucosa, and intravenous consumption (shooting up) produces effects within 30 seconds to a minute. Snorting coke produces effects in one to three minutes. On the other hand, taking cocaine orally may not produce intoxication until 30 minutes after use. The most rapid-acting method is smoking or freebasing, in which the substance is absorbed by the small blood vessels in the lungs, moves to the left side of the heart and then goes directly to the brain--in less than eight seconds.

On the late summer night in Harlem, Gary Martin is slowly being crushed by the murderous white avalanche. He is both a user and a salesman of crack. The beat he walks on this summer Friday night is familiar; he can recognize the pain and depression he sees on this path.

“The way I’ve made base,” says Martin, “is to get a little shake bottle [similar to a thermometer, but shorter], a half-gram of cocaine, a little bit of baking soda, which cleans the ‘cut’ [additive] off of the coke, and a little water inside. You cover the top, and place it into a pot of boiling water, and let it boil from three to five minutes. After that, you take it out--and since it’s in its purest form, you won’t see anything but pure liquid. You take out a few ice cubes, crush them, dropping a few chips inside the shake bottle and the remainder around the outside of it until the cocaine cools. After that, your pour the substance onto a silk scarf, which strains out any remaining baking soda. Sometimes it solidifies in pieces, and sometimes it’s in a big ball. If that happens, you take a razor blade and cut it up. And that’s crack.”

A lot of people, including Martin, started freebasing after Richard Pryor burned himself while smoking the substance in 1979 (making freebase becomes deadly explosive when highly flammable chemicals, such as ether, are used instead of baking soda to clean the cut from the cocaine). When the price of coke dropped nearly two years ago due to a national cocaine glut, crack gained a lot of momentum. Some “dopeboy” (the Harlem terminology for a young drug pusher) got the idea that a lot of money could be made if he brought an ounce of cocaine (going for $1,900-$2,000 today), and made and packaged his own freebase. Take away the exclusivity, mystery, and danger surrounding freebase, and place it in the hands of the average Joe. Tiffany drugs at Woolworth prices...

Read the entire "Crack" feature story from the February 1986 issue of Spin Magazine, in my new anthology, "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," available exclusively on Kindle/Amazon. Amazon/Kindle has a free, downloadable app for all computers and mobile devices. Click here to go to the "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1:New Jack City Eats Its Young" Kindle store site.

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

2011-10-24T18:04:00.003-04:00

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.

Even in the "imaginarium" of television, Black people had visions of a better life. Florida Evans and her familia of J.J., Michael, and a married Thelma were no longer scratchin' and survivin', and finally moved out of the Cabrini-Green Houses in Chicago. George and Louise Jefferson were the proprietors of a chain of successful dry cleaners, that allowed them to move on up and live among the wealthy on the Upper East Side of New York City.

But the good times were cut short by the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979, which ushered in a former actor, laundry detergent shill, and poster boy for the Republican Ruling Class, by the name of Ronald Wilson Reagan. The Reagan Ideal was a get-one-for-The-Gipper return to an America the RRC was more comfortable with; white, Republican, racist, repressively transgressive, remunerated, and removed. Removed from the plight of the poor (Black and White folks, too), the blight of minorities, and the financial apoplexy of the middle class. The Reaganites were a coterie who took their White Parties on Sutton Place and in Santa Barbara, literally and seriously. This was an America the Reaganites saw as the dawning of a new day for old prejudices wrapped in a new ideology. President Reagan called it, "Morning in America."

However, for many others, that "Morning" became their own personal Mourning in America, and crack was the assassin. Crack was the explosion that shook fear into the Black Boomers and began to turn the purpose of the Mountaintop Children into an avalanche of nightmarish apathy. In the African-American community, crack was a dream-killer, a bank (and drug proceeds) builder, a cradle-robber, and prison-stocker, and a tomb-filler.

Crack was a circuit breaker in the psychic fuse box of African American advancement. Crack rewired the motherboard of the descendants of the Motherland, reprogramming them into the 20th century slaves of a new pharm-land, where the cash crops of cooked cocaine had been reaped from the infertility of their very own hopes and dreams. Crack cocaine vaporized the ‘80s into a stagnant era odorized with the acrid, postmortem stank of aborted and unfulfilled wishes. Crack created a generation that swooned in the ferocious vertigo of convoluted American game theory; game theory played out on invisible Ouija boards located at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue in Washington, DC, with pieces marked “Oliver North,” “Contra,” “Guns,” and “Cocaine.” A rigged contest with politically loaded dice, prejudicially marked cards, and scores tallied (and settled) by the finality of zero-sum conclusions.

The splintering of the RRC’s erstwhile pursuit of happiness in this New Republic, was divvied up in a variety of ways; to whom and how that pursuit of happiness was dispensed depended on what portion of the social prism you belonged to. The darker the pigmentation in that social prism, ofttimes, the more oblique the despair during the 1980s.

Ironically, it is in this death-star environment of crack, that I became an investigative reporter, who would go on to write three well-known films; “New Jack City,” the 1991 Warner Brothers production that made stars out of Wesley Snipes, Chris Rock, Ice-T, Allen Payne, and Mario Van Peebles, and 1994’s duo of “Sugar Hill,” (which also starred Snipes along with Michael Wright, Clarence Williams, III, the late O.L. Duke, and the Abe Vigoda of “The Godfather” fame), and “Above The Rim,” which starred the late Tupac Shakur. Examining the scourge of crack helped shape my voice, point-of-view, and career as an investigative journalist in the mid-to late ‘80s...

Read the entire "Mourning In America" introductory essay, in my new anthology, "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," available exclusively on Kindle/Amazon. Amazon/Kindle has a free, downloadable app for all computers and mobile devices. Click here to go to the "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1:New Jack City Eats Its Young" Kindle store site.

"New Jack City Eats Its Young" Xcrpt: "The Diary Of Nino Brown"

2011-10-23T01:23:00.000-04:00

THE DIARY OF NINO BROWN

(THE UNTOLD STORY OF A STREET LEGEND)

A Short Story By Barry Michael Cooper

(This short story is a portion of a novella I have been writing for the past couple of years; it is both a prequel and a sequel to the 1991 Warner Brothers film I scripted, "New Jack City.")

This is not the slave narrative of a nigga chained to the drug game.

It is the damaged GPS of a gangster who got lost on the road to the riches.

This is the diary of Nino Brown.

Don't ask me why it took so long to come forward and tell his story. But it was not out of fear, because Nino is dead. It was not out of reprisals, because he had no friends.

However, Nino Brown did have a family, but now they're dead, too. Outside of his wife and two twin sons, there were no loved ones. Just a crowd of haters, an audience of salt-shakers who feared and despised this man. When they found out he was taking a dirt-nap forever, crooked judges toasted crooked cops, crooked cops toasted big ballers, and big ballers toasted shot-callers; flutes filled to the brim with Cristal and Krug and condescension, in between bites of lobster and fillet mignon spilling out of the sides of mouths framed in nervous laughter--and trying not to get butter and Worcestershire sauce on their Breguet and their Cartier and their Bulgari and their Kiton, and their Armani, and their Brioni, and their Hermes, and their Louis Vuitton, and their Zegna--from the cherry wood and Antelope leather private booths of expensive restaurants to the greasy-shine Formica countertops of fish and chip joints all over the country. Their secrets and their bling and their lives were safe. Nino Brown was dead and gone.

They sang songs. Schoolyard type: Ding, dong, the bitch is dead. That dirty rat bitch, that telling’-ass snitch, ding dong, wicked bitch is dead. They sang and sang, and sang, they drank gallons of big ticket champagne, they told stories of how they would have had the bitch-made turncoat killed: and then they looked over their shoulders, and their bodyguards shoulders, and their bodyguard’s bodyguard shoulders, and bought tougher body armor, and bigger guns, and for all of that, they still saw the specter of Nino Brown walking through the walls of their bedroom and winking and whispering, “Peekaboo, bitch-ass,” before emptying the clip from the Sig Sauer in their foreheads and torsos, they still woke up in the middle of the night (from that reoccurring nightmare), shaking in a cold sweat, fighting to get untangled from pissed up 1020-thread count Sferra sheets tucked into $7500 Duxiana Beds, grabbing the nine millimeters from under their pillows and aimed at shadows on the walls and stood at the window, peeking through the curtains, until either the sun came up or they fell asleep on their feet, nodding like dopefiends.

Just in case.

Of course--they hoped in the GOD they always blasphemed--that Nino Brown was really and truly dead, expired, not breathing anymore, six feet under, where the snails, and mulch, and dung, and weeds, kissed eternity and mingled with the dust and ashes. Dust to dust, asses to ashes. Nino--NIGGA?!--please be gone and come back no mo’. Where the undying worms were snacking on Nino Brown’s $8000 Garrick Anderson suit, but not his ghost. Because if Nino Brown was still inhaling, if he was still alive, then, well…

This is a man who inspired fear in the hearts of the fiercest cops, coldest scramblers, hardest hustlers, stick-up kids--and street dudes in general--like no other. Yet and still, they sing songs, of him being a government endorsed teller of tales: a bitch, a rat and a snitch.

Hmmm?...

The media--that Marshall McLuhan army of cathode ray (now plasma and LCD) carrion eaters, the digital vultures who chomp, tear, and feed on dead careers and those dying to be famous, literally and figuratively--speculated that he had talked to someone before his timely demise. He did.

He talked to me.

Nino Brown was supposed to have been in the Witness Protection Program. Relocated to parts unknown, had his name changed to “Nathan Brakeen”--even some cosmetic surgery to change the face.

I kept close tabs on Nino. I scoured through all of my notes from his trial almost 17 years ago, I even watched the movie New Jack City over and over, and scoured court transcripts from Nino's trial, looking for clues. And two clues that seem to stay with me, are the two names he--well, Wesley Snipes portraying Nino Brown--mentioned to Gee Money--portrayed by Allen Payne--in that scene in the Spotlite after-hours joint, where they declare their love and loyalty for one another: Pushead, and Blackie. These two names also came up in court, during his real life testimony. I knew these two people were a key to Nino Brown’s past. I just needed to use that info to open the door to Nino's soul.

So I began to dig, and dig deep. Chasing down lawyers he burned, cops he turned, and old bitter acquaintances, I followed a rumor that that Nino Brown had been relocated to Baltimore, MD, after making a pit stop in Scottsdale, Arizona, to get his cosmetic surgery, and to change his name and his life. Many people thought rumor melted into myth, but guess what?

The myth was true.

I won’t go into the specifics of how I located Nino Brown, or how I landed the interview with him. I made a promise to him before he died that I would keep silent about that, so I am going to keep that promise. Just rest assured that I was there when Nino was in so much excruciating pain from the car accident on May 8th, 2009 (his pale sapphire, Bentley Mulsanne flipped over the guard rail of I-83 South, remember? Witnesses that afternoon report seeing two teenagers riding on a Honda 4-wheel ATVs, besides the gleaming Bentley, and shooting the back tires out. The boys then yelled, tried to pop wheelies, but the ATVs wouldn’t cooperate. Both 4-wheel vehicles hydroplaned and pitched the two hitmen passengers vertically, before flipping over to crush and kill both boys--identified as Tayshuan Marcrief, 16, and Bilhal Freeston, 17, of East Baltimore--instantly.

However, the assassins completed their mission on that rainy evening. Nino and his wife Rebekka, along with their 4-year-old twins Nathaniel and Daniel, didn’t make it to their dinner at the tony Charleston Restaurant on South Exeter and Landcaster in Harbor East--Baltimore‘s version of Battery Park in New York City--where they were going to have a quiet dinner in the 2nd floor dinning room. Instead, the brakes on the $325,000 dream-machine malfunctioned, causing the vehicle to ice-skate into a figure-8 and somersault over the railing onto Guilford Avenue 20 stories below. Rebekka was decapitated from the section of the windshield that shattered and buckled into the sedan‘s front seat.

The back rear window caved in and dismembered the twins--Daniel and Nathaniel--separating their heads from their necks, and their arms from their shoulders, while they were still buckled in their car seats--as the car crashed upside-down onto the street, creating a small, fiery, crater), that he would literally moan for 15 minutes, even though a sea of morphine navigated throughout the canals of his veins; as the pins, rods, and screws from his wait to his ankles, kept his broken carcass in place.

But the pain Nino felt wasn’t a physical pain, or let me correct that, it wasn’t just physical. Nino Brown--whose skill set included teen executioner, pharm king, snitch, and then multi-millionaire record mogul and fashion magnate (his Kary Kash collection grossed more than $350 million last year), under the new, government-issued name Nathan Brakeen--was going through a psychic torture. The baggage of years of murder, mayhem, and destruction of others, was now manifesting itself in the ultimate metastasizing of an agonizing payback, that tore out the guts of his soul. And he wanted to tell his story before there was nothing left. Not that that would stop his intense pain. “But at least,” he told me the day right before he died, “it would slow it down a little bit.”

I have no idea of whether Nino Brown went to Heaven, or whether vanished into the silent darkness of Hell. I am just a writer, and truthfully, no mortal man knows those things anyway. He did talk about GOD, about belief, about faith--in the right things and wrong things--and about regret, which seemed to be his heaviest burden of all.

This is a tragic story. Tragic because what Nino Brown realized in his last days, is that he wanted a normal life. More than the hundreds of millions of dollars, more than the mad fame, Nino wanted unassuming; he wanted mundane. Nino Brown wanted boring. Boring enough to weave himself into the smooth and transparent fabric of the upper-middle class: boring enough to vote--he was a big supporter (and financial contributor) of President Barack Obama’s campaign, and even flew to see him speak in Iowa--boring enough to take Elizabeth and the twins to Lobsterfest at Red Lobster, boring enough to go on vacation to Disneyworld, or the Bahamas. Boring enough to carry the bags for wifey from the shopping-cart bay at Whole Foods and Trader Joe’s, to the huge-hide-a-body-in-the-trunk compartment of the Bentley Mulsanne, boring enough to kiss his babies as he buckles them up in their car seats. Boring enough to dream of the day he would film the Twins on his iPhone, when they had their first middle school basketball game.

Boring enough to look forward to the time he would teach his boys how not to crash the big body 600 Benz after they got their Learner’s Permit. Boring enough (and brave enough) to show his emotions and wipe tears from his eyes as they graduated magna cum laude from Howard or Harvard or Coppin State, or Morehouse, or Morgan, or NYU, or Fisk, or Wharton School Of Business, so they would be the next Barack Obama. Boring enough to fall asleep in his lazy boy in his den while MSNBC and CNN and CBS and ABC talked about somebody else killing and ruining the community. Nino Brown wanted peace, and quiet, and boring.

However, ghetto superstars are not afforded that luxury; not after killing more than 30 people, not after poisoning the masses and destroying communities with crack cocaine, not after creating a sonic drug economy that was getting millions of views on Vevo and YouTube, and in perpetual rotation on BET, and MTV, and Fuse, and VH-1. Ghetto superstars like Nino (now Nathan Brackeen) and are not afforded sympathy, after selling tens of millions of downloads on iTunes and Rhapsody, onto iPhones, Blackberry’s, Droids and iPads--the new aural crack pipes--thereby addicting a whole new generation on gangsta rap, so, too little, too late, Monsieur Untouchable. Sorry.

You may or may not chose to believe the truth of Nino Brown’s diary; that’s your choice. All I ask you to do is read it. From there, draw your own conclusions.

The next voice you hear will be that of Nino Brown. This is his story. In his words.

BOOK I.

LIVE! FROM NINO'S DEATHBED

THE FIRST BODY

JOHNS HOPKINS HOSPITAL

4TH FLOOR, I.C.U.

ROOM 413W

MAY 10TH, 2009

11:03A

The hospital suite is both huge and empty, with the exception of the hospital bed where Michael Nicholas "Nino" Brown/Nathan Brakeen lays in agony, held together by bolts, metal braces, morphine, and GOD's Grace.

The place smells like a strange perfume of chlorine, alcohol, piss, cotton, and wooden tongue depressors. The flicker of florescence from the neon over his bed and in the ceiling sparks the room with a clinically alabaster glaze, as if this place is an constant state of flux between life and death. It is overcast outside, with heavy smoky gray clouds. No rain. Not yet.

Eyes fluttering, Nino comes out of his haze and stares at me. As weak as he looks, there is a steely strength in his gaze. An IV bag filled with morphine fished a narrow plastic IV line underneath Nino's hospital gown and implanted somewhere--I'm assuming--on his abdomen. roll-away table next to his bed.

A little corner of blazing sun cut out a patch of monochromatic sky like a big lemon buzz saw. The odd palate of daylight painted the room in abstract shadows.

Nino looked at me as I pulled the hard metal seat next to his bed. He then stared somewhat absent-mindedly at the window.

Nino: Look at that.

Bmc: What's that?, I say as I glance over my shoulder at the window.

Nino: The dust. That's what we are, right? Where we start, and where we end.

I watched the silt twirl in the illuminated shafts piercing the wide-screen of glass, dancing a slow and deliberate ballet of silently softened grit.

Bmc: Yeah; ashes to ashes, and dust to dust.

Nino motions for me to turn my tape recorder on, but it's been on the whole time.

Nino: I got my first body when I was fifteen.

I believe his name was Kev. It was June 8th, 1978.

Dude had been skimming for some time from his crew chief, a scrambling kid by the name of Blackie. Blackie was down with the L.A.--Lenox Avenue--Boys. He paid me $600 and bought me a pair of brown suede British Walkers to slump a nigga. So I did.

The kid I killed--the kid named Kev--was nouveau riche; new ghetto money. New ghetto money (back in the day) always shopped on 125th Street, always talked loud, always called the Kojack car service (if they didn't have they own car) and ordered a Lincoln Town Car to take them (and they girl) to the Loewes movie theater on 86th Street and 3rd Avenue, and then to the Flaming Embers steak house on the corner of 86th, made the driver wait 3 hours, and then drive them (and they girl) to the Fort Lee Lodge Motel in New Jersey, and hit the driver off with $200 dollars, and made sure the driver picked them up in the morning, and drove them to the IHOP on 233 Street in the Bronx for breakfast. Those Sunday mornings at that IHOP on 233rd Street were always crowded with church people and scramblers: saints and sinners drowning their piety and transgression in a river of pecan pancake syrup. Crazy.

So as I remember it, yeah, the kid named Kev that I killed, was brand new money, because niggas making new ghetto money loved the R&B group Blue Magic, and he was talking about how Blue Magic rocked the Apollo when they came out in clown suits and sang Life Is A Three Ring Circus. Before he got to the part when Ted Mills, the kid with the high voice sang, "All of the ups and downs of the carousel/that I know so well...," I pulled the trigger. My body jerked, my stomach felt like it was going to come through me throat, and the world went on pause. I got woozy and my knees got weak. My fingers got wet and warm, and clammy. The nerves under the palm of my left hand--the hand that I write and shoot and now, kill with--jumped uncontrollably. I saw a flash of white-orange light as I smelled the heat, the fire, the powder, and the power of the bullets as they ripped out of the nozzle. I watched the bullets fasten to his neck like overweight nails before forcing themselves inside the skin. The back of his head opened up like a brown egg that fell on the kitchen floor and had blood and pink and white pieces of brain inside. His blood smelled sweetly sour, and the smell seemed to be stuck to the back of my throat and made it sore, like when you get strep throat. My heart pounded out an interior countdown of almost twenty seconds of silence, as the kid fell in slow-mo between an ice green Buick Park Avenue and a gray Audi, before his body leaned into the lip of the sidewalk in real time as the street came to life, and filled stony air with screams and people yelling, OH SHIT! OOOOOH...SHIIIIT!! KEV GOT SHOT!!!!!!!!!

The complete version of "The Diary of Nino Brown (The Untold Story of a Street Legend)" can be found in my new anthology, "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," available exclusively on Amazon/Kindle. In the event that you don't have a Kindle, not to worry; Amazon has a free, downloadable app for all computers and mobile devices. Click here to go directly to the Hooked On The American Dream-Vol. 1: New Jack City Eats Its Young Amazon page.

Video of Barry Michael Cooper Moderating The Planet Rock Doc Panel @ The Paley Center 12 September 2011

2011-09-23T12:02:00.000-04:00

from left to right: Melle Mel, Martin Targoff, Richard Lowe, Nelson George, Azie Faison, Ice T, Barry Michael Cooper-photo credit: Paley Center

By Barry Michael Cooper

Last Monday (12 September 2011), I was blessed to moderate the panel for the screening for VH1's groundbreaking documentary on the history of crack cocaine in America, "Planet Rock: The Story of Hip Hop and the Crack Generation."

Barry Michael Cooper-photo credit: S. Mack/Wireimage

Narrated and executive produced by actor, emcee, and burgeoning media mogul Ice T, and produced by Martin Targoff and Richard Lowe, "Planet Rock," is an unflinching and in depth examination of the crack cocaine epidemic in America during the 1980s, and the sweeping, cataclysmic effect it had on politics, economics, culture, and society as a whole. I was also honored to be a participant (and unofficial consultant) on the VH1 "Planet Rock" documentary.

Get More: VH1 Rock Docs, TV Shows, Full Episode Video, Reality TV Shows

Speaking of culture, crack cocaine had an enormous impact on Hip Hop, and more than 25 years later, how we listen and respond and absorb the music now, is much different from the time when rap music was about having a good time and positive empowerment (mainly among disenfranchised African-Americans and Latinos) during the regressive political construct engineered by the Reagan Administration.

Left to Right: Nelson George, Barry Michael Cooper, Azie Faison, Ice T-photo credit: Getty Images

If you haven't seen "Planet Rock" yet on VH1--it premiered last Sunday night on 18 September 2011--do yourself a favor and not only watch it, but DVR-it, too; it is informative, educational, and truly inspiring, television. The filmmakers--writer-producer Martin Targoff, and director-producer Richard Lowe--and the executive producers Ice T, Brad Abramson, and Stephen Mintz, are to be commended creating such a memorable, important, and historic film. I would not be surprised if they were nominated for an Emmy in 2012, GOD Willing.

Left to Right: Ice T, Barry Michael Cooper-photo credit: Michael Priest Photography/Paley Center

Immediately after the 12 September "Planet Rock" screening at the breathtaking Paley Center in midtown Manhattan, I hosted an engagingly intuitive and cogently spirited panel, which consisted of a few of the participants in the film; the producers Ice T, Martin Targoff, and Richard Lowe, Hip Hop legend Melle Mel, former crack dealer-turned filmmaker, author, and keen socio-observer Azie Faison, prolific author, filmmaker, cultural critic, and television producer, Nelson George. The discussion was dynamic, reflective, edgy, and honest. I was given an hour, but that passed like a minute. The audience wanted more, and so did I. Underneath this graph is a short clip from that night, and I am in the process of acquiring more clips from that momentous night. I will post more clips in the days/weeks to come, GOD Willing. In the meantime, you can live vicariously through this blog post.

The American Prattle (A Poem?)

2011-09-21T21:56:00.001-04:00

by Barry Michael Cooper

From pyre to gyre, revolving rings of crackling fire,
Shimmering waves of orange flame,
A gory island's infinity, cast in the light of incandescent pain,
Blood that licks the shores of Africa's terrain,
The innocent have nowhere to hide,
Porous fear seeps into the back-channel's scarlet tide,
The undertow of abduction swirling in the shock of cruel currents,
A starless night filling the shadows of the sea with unwilling servants,
Mapping the Middle Passage's watery, sepulchered plains;
Death before arrival and dying as we revive to maintain,
Forced onto the auction block (the 1st American peep show),
Bound in shackle and chain;
Aeons pass as Providence anoints a Sepia King,
Justice stands far away from him, petulantly covering her ears,
As Freedom struggles to ring; the eyes of Justice shut to truth,
And deaf to the song, that Freedom struggles to sing;
From pyre to gyre, revolving rings of crackling fire,
America smells the smoke of anomie, but ignores the alarm,
Choking on the political soot of overheated and rhetorical harm
Only to be consumed in the incineration of its own hypocritical desire
Only to be consumed in the flames of contradiction and righteous fire

My debut anthology of street journalism from the 1980s (and more current essays), "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," is now available on Kindle/Amazon. Click here to go to the Amazon site.

Xcrpt From The "New Jack City Eats Its Young" Anthology

2011-09-20T21:13:00.000-04:00

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-Indivisible-With-Liberty-And-Justice-For-All-America, a level playing field.

Even in the "imaginarium" of television, Black people had visions of a better life. Florida Evans and her familia of J.J., Michael, and a married Thelma were no longer scratchin' and survivin', and finally moved out of the Cabrini-Green Houses in Chicago. George and Louise Jefferson were the proprietors of a chain of successful dry cleaners, that allowed them to move on up and live among the wealthy on the Upper East Side of New York City.

But the good times were cut short by the Iran Hostage Crisis in 1979, which ushered in a former actor, laundry detergent shill, and poster boy for the Republican Ruling Class, by the name of Ronald Wilson Reagan. The Reagan Ideal was a get-one-for-The-Gipper return to an America the RRC was more comfortable with; white, Republican, racist, repressively transgressive, remunerated, and removed. Removed from the plight of the poor (Black and White folks, too), the blight of minorities, and the financial apoplexy of the middle class. The Reaganites were a coterie who took their White Parties on Sutton Place and in Santa Barbara, literally and seriously. This was an America the Reaganites saw as the dawning of a new day for old prejudices wrapped in a new ideology. President Reagan called it, "Morning in America."

However, for many others, that "Morning" became their own personal Mourning in America, and crack was the assassin. Crack was the explosion that shook fear into the Black Boomers and began to turn the purpose of the Mountaintop Children into an avalanche of nightmarish apathy. In the African-American community, crack was a dream-killer, a bank (and drug proceeds) builder, a cradle-robber, and prison-stocker, and a tomb-filler. Crack was the circuit-breaker in the psychic fuse-box of African-American advancement. Crack re-wired the descendants of the Motherland, reprogramming them into the 20th Century slaves of a new pharm-land, where the cash crops of cooked cocaine had been reaped from the infertility of their very own hopes and dreams...

My debut anthology of street journalism from the 1980s (and more current essays), "Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young," is now available on Kindle/Amazon. Click here to go to the Amazon site.

22 September 2011! New Jack City Eats Its Young!

2011-09-18T15:19:00.000-04:00

Hooked On The American Dream-Vol.1: New Jack City Eats Its Young, is a collection of my investigative reporting from the 1980s. It will include 'Kids Killing Kids: New Jack City Eats Its Young," the 1987 Village Voice cover story that was the blueprint/cornerstone for the hit 1991 Warner Bros film "New Jack City," which launched the careers of Wesley Snipes, Chris Rock, Ice-T, Allen Payne, and Mario Van Peebles. There's also "Crack," the February 1986 cover story in Spin Magazine (which was the first national story on the emerging crack cocaine epidemic), along with the the Village Voice feature stories "Teddy Riley's New Jack Swing," (the story where I coined the term "New Jack Swing") and the rare "The Larry Davis Show" (which was the foundation of the highly-rated episode I produced for the BET/BIO Channel crime doc series, "American Gangster"). Hooked On The American Dream Vol.1-New Jack City Eats Its Young will also include newer essays (including a section on the American music-film-fashion and business mogul Sean "Diddy" Combs titled "Sean John Combs: Once Upon A Time In America") and a short story titled "The Diary of Nino Brown (The Untold Story of a Street Legend)." Available on Kindle/Amazon Thursday, 22 September 2011, GOD Willing!

Game of Thrones (Watching Opulent Gangsters Draped In Gilded Lonelihood)

2011-08-12T01:37:00.065-04:00

by Barry Michael Cooper

The tag-team comitatus of Hip Hop's maharajahs--Jay-Z and Kanye West--is transported in a luxe due-seater on the D-flawless, rocky road to da riches. They are not a post-mod Frank and Sammy D. incarnate, but they are balling out of control as their bejewled sneakers squeak into a two-man weave of historical relevance that marries vintage obsessions and futurist intentions. An ol' head like me contextualizes it this way; Doc J fires the overhead pass to MJ, who kicks it off the hardwood to D. Rose, who completes the play with a finger-roll above the rim. On this pairing, Jay-Z and Kanye shoot and score. Bigtime.

While not as grave as Martin and Malcolm, or JFK and RFK, or Fidel and Che, Obama and Biden, or even Bush and Cheney, the oeuvre of Jay and 'Ye's brand new collaboration Watch The Throne manages to be both deadly serious and subconsciously political in its narrative. Watch The Throne subscribes to the politic of the nouveau riche; this is an album that escorts the listener into the corridors of power inhabited by two of the most influential co-regents in the current triptych of Hip Hop (the third being Sean "Diddy' Combs, who is not featured on this album). Make no mistake; these are two young Black men who have worked hard to wear the crown(s). And heavy is the head that wears the crown, or as another illustrious crown-wearer--the late, great painter, Jean Michael Basquiat--once said, "Most young kings get their heads cut off." Jay-Z and Kanye reflect the sensibilities of deft (and somewhat jaded) guillotine-dodgers, in what turns out to be an instant classic.

The music and the production and the lyrical prowess of both Jay and 'Ye are almost phenomenal on Watch The Throne. This is the first time in a long time that Rap Mu$ick, LLC has felt like real Hip Hop, and this is real Hip Hop that feels like 21st Century rock music. I would even venture to say that Watch The Throne might be Hip Hop's Exile On Main Street In A Chop-Shopped/Drop Top Maybach 62 Zepplin With A Backseat Full Of Bad Beeshes (see the clip for the wildly popular single Otis), and Jay and 'Ye are Mick and Keith before the nullification of heroin and the obfuscation of occult-ish ennui. Many listeners have complained about Jay-Z and Kanye's endless roll-call of the bon bon vie: Maybachs, Hermes, Hublots, Audomars, Countachs; but there appears to be a sly political undertone in that, too. The psychopathy of Watch The Throne is about the end of cocaine rap, the end of gangsta. Nicky Barnes, Freeway Ricky Ross, and Frank Lucas will never eat lunch with Warren Buffet, or Bill Gates, or vacation at the Hotel Du Cap, or hold a Amex black card with no limits and without looking over their shoulders. Those men will never be on the Forbes list for the wealthiest--legally wealthiest--players in the game. Those men will never be dinner guests at the White House with President Barack Obama and First Lady Michelle. Jay-Z and Kanye have done all of those things, and more.

As Jay-Z proclaims on Illest Motherf**ker Alive:"Know when to leave when the heat is coming, I learned that/this is where DeNiro would be/if he ain't turn back...this is what the ending of Scarface should feel like..." Throne tells the story of two survivalists who successfully navigated hazardous terrain of Plantation Crack's pharm-lands; literally (Jay scrambling red tops and blue tops in the hallways of the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn) and figuratively (Kanye having homeboys in the Chi who were demolished by the drug), and take a seat at the front of LBJ's Great Society bus, more than 40 years later. Like Nixon, Carter, Reagan, Bush, Clinton, Bush, and now Obama, Jay-Z and Kanye are part of the true American Power Elite. And that's real American Gangster, not hood-ensnared gangsta.

Still, some of Jay-Z and Kanye's swag on Throne, does indeed seem to suggest that they might be somewhat removed from the plight of the common man. Have they become too prosperous to empathize with everyday people? Maybe not; on one of the best tracks of the album, Murder To Excellence, Jay-Z and Kanye sync lamentation over Black on Black crime (specifically the horrific and bloody gun violence among the youth in Kanye's hometown of Chicago, where he intones the truly prodigious line, "It's time for us to us to stop and re-define Black power/41 souls/murdered in 50 hours") with swimming in affluence; "Hit the mall/pick up some Gucci".

This is a provocative quandary which speaks volumes not only about the content of Hip Hop, but the quality of Black life in post-millennial America; should the offspring of Mountaintop Children* (*that group of children--primarily African American--born at the rise of the Civil Rights movement; that social progeny of cultural and privilege and promise, hoisted onto the shoulders of history by ancestors who struggled, sweated, bled, and died to make this one-Nation-under-GOD-with-liberty-and-justice-for-all America a level playing field) be reduced to the grotesque choices of committing genocide or living like a Medici? Murdering the beat or murdering each other? Is there no reasonably safe (and sane) median between these two extremes?

There is a brutal honesty embedded in the ornate tapestry of Excellence and the entire album; Watch The Throne is really a cautionary tale of the pleading wishes and woeful tariffs to answered prayers. Access granted and affluence acquired doesn't always translate as being truly free. "Only spot a few blacks the higher I go," Jay says casually, "What's up to Will/shout out to O." Will Smith stopped making music a long time ago to concentrate on becoming the biggest box office star in the world, and Oprah Winfrey broke the ribbon in the billionaire race around the same time. What they have in common with Jay-Z and Kanye West is what Biggie and Puff told us over a decade ago, that mo' money means mo' problems. As much as they might want to help the suffering masses, there's only so much they can do for everybody (even Lady-O had to bring her long-running talk show to an end; e're body ain't gonna find a key to a new car underneath their seat).

What the covetous fail to realize as they salivate over the trappings of wealthy, is just that; the inordinate love of inanimate ducats is a trap. These celebs wage the same battle Fitzgerald's Gatsby fought as he shrank from the terrifying haint of Jay Gatz ice-grilling him in the gilded mirror; the fear of being unmasked, y'all. Money changes everything except for the deepest psychic layers of the truest players; they understand they will always be who they were before they bought a ticket to go...there. There being the top of the world, Ma. Contrary to popular belief, emperors do care what the plebs think about them; Nero may have fiddled while Rome burned, but after Jay-Z and Kanye West demolished a $500,000 dream machine in that Mad-Max-esque Spike Jonze clip, there was this disclaimer at the fini:

"The vehicle used in this visual will be offered up for auction. Proceeds will be donated towards the East African Drought Disaster."

The most searing image in that unforgettable Otis video, is that humongous American flag draped along the side of that abandoned factory complex. The flag underscores that this country is at some sort of economically apocalyptic crossroads, which has affected everyone, even millionaires and billionaires. This video is exciting, and Jonze and Jay-Z and Kanye have created something new; call it totemist chic or anthropological swank. I don't know what it is, but do I enjoy watching Jay and 'Ye having fun, screaming in muted m.o.s. and tearing-up half-million dollar toys, while flashpots spit fiery sparks into a starless sky. But while our Dynamic Duo may have gotten their swag back, scores of thousands of people will lose their homes and jobs the very same day Otis will tally more than 1 million Vevo views.

Despite their top one-percent tax status, the rich are not exempt from the suffering we are all feeling right now. As they toss and turn out of the 1020-thread count of Sferra tuxedo sheets--tucked into a $6500 Dux bed--their porcelain veneers gnash, as they try and choke down the undigested guilt of having too much. This nagging existential anxiety prompts these aristocats to wax Camus-like: What's the meaning/what's the meaning of life? Remember that Jay? How 'bout you, 'Ye? Of course not; that was over a decade and several Franck Muellers ago. Jay-Z and Kanye can now afford watches that are not only spring-loaded and wound to the dark side of the Moon, but cost enough to pull a block of abandoned homes in Baltimore out of foreclosure. Yeah, being rich is nice, but being rich comes with the decorous insomnia of refined paranoia. Crushing fear and smothering self-loathing is added with each zero in the burgeoning bank account. Make no mistake; the throne is positioned in a place where the air is very thin. And if you don't breathe carefully, you will suffocate. No matter who you are.

(Shout out to Gary "GMoney" Harris for hooking me up with Watch the Throne.

Raymond Jones: A Magnificent State of Humble Grace

2011-07-13T05:07:00.044-04:00

by Barry Michael Cooper

Never has one flown so high, while grounded in such graceful humility.

On Friday, 1 July 2011, a true musical revolutionary named Raymond Jones passed away. He was 52 years old. These are my mental Polaroids of not only a great musician, but a majestic human being and a real friend. GOD Rest his creative soul.

The journey of Raymond Jones began on 13 December 1958. I was born in June that same year. We--like many young African American children born at the rise of the Civil Rights/Sputnik/I Have A Dream/Ask Not What Your Country Can Do For You/By Any Means Necessary/Tune In Turn On aeon--were children of cultural promise and privilege.

Black children like Ray Jones, the illustrious filmmaker Spike Lee, virtuoso guitarists Ronnie Drayton and Vernon Reid, noted film producer and political observer Geoffrey Garfield, phenomenal essayist/music critic/theorist Greg Tate, prolific author/film/television producer Nelson George, American musical innovator Prince, the greatest entertainer who ever lived, the late Michael Jackson, and even the President of the United States, Barack Obama, are Mountaintop Children.

Mountaintop Children are the children hoisted onto the shoulders of history by ancestors who struggled, sweated, bled, and died to make this America--this one nation under GOD, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all America--a level playing field. The opus of Ray Jones not only reflected this momentous lineage--illustrated by his preternatural ability on the keyboards, his poetic and ingenious compositions for music and film, and his dynamically soul-searching narratives as a lyricist--but it underscored a Mountaintop Child's embedded sense of epos. Greatness. Ray's family expected him to rise to a sense of distinctive excellence.

Raymond Jones did not disappoint.

I was blessed to make the acquaintance of Ray in 1980, in our hometown of New York City. In the early 1980s, New York was a case study in the reductive absolutes of gigantic imperfections; a metropolis beautifully disfigured by its enriched poverty and synthesis of cultural segregation. A shiny, skyscraper-tall construction of urban apartheid built from serpentine politics, voodoo economics (inculcated by Wall Street witchcraft), Sistine graffito, cocaine kinships, battle-ready NYPD batons and pigment-skewed bullets; all used to spin the turnstile of social manipulation against a rising flood of multi-ethnic people. A diverse populace already uncombined by the divisive Babel-logues of tribal suspicion.

It was in this Johannesburgian environment that I met Raymond Jones. I was a newly minted freelance music critic for the Village Voice, the Soho News Weekly, and a few other publications. Ray was the keyboardist for the landmark pop-rock-dance-soul group Chic. The receptionist at the Voice handed me a phone message (Wow; remember those? Handwritten on the printed pink slips? Tempis fugit.) from Raymond Jones; Raymond Jones, keyboardist for the group Chic, and his telephone number. I remember calling Ray, and he told me he was a fan of my music reviews, especially my essay titled Buckaroos of the Bugaloo back in early 1980, which was the very first Voice piece on the emergence of Hip Hop out of the Bronx.

It was a mutual admiration society; I told Ray I was a fan of his work with Chic. I even remember telling him in that initial conversation, "Man, I saw you on TV with Chic, and the way you were dancing behind the keyboards during the performance of "Le Freak" in your dope Comme des Garcon jacket, I just knew you were from Harlem." Ray laughed and told me he was from Queens, NY. I told him it didn't matter; he was still Harlem-down. We laughed and bonded as friends.

I met up with Ray not long after that conversation, at the now-defunct NY rock cabaret, Max's Kansas City, in Union Square. In addition to freelancing for the Voice and the Soho News Weekly, I was writing a NY nightlife column--titled Barry Cooper's New York--for a small national magazine devoted to soul music, appropriately called, Soul Magazine. The editor of Soul was a white kid from the Philly area named J. Randy Taraborelli, who would later go on to make a name for himself writing several unauthorized biographies, including a lurid Michael Jackson tome.

That particular evening, I was covering a show by an up-and-coming Queens, NY-based Black rock band called Sirius, led by the aforementioned Ronnie Drayton. Sirius was a precursor/template to Living Color, Fishbone, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, and the Foo Fighters. The band consisted of Ronnie, drummer J.T. Lewis, the late Shaun Solomon on bass, Baltimore, MD, native Lloyd Jones on keyboards, and occasional vocalist, Peachena. The music of Sirius (a double-entendre which referenced the mythological Dog Star--the brightest in the night sky--and their "serious" approach to their vocation) was bold, soulful, heartfelt, fiery. Much of what the Red Hot Chili Peppers produced in the mid to late '80s sounded a lot like Sirius. Ronnie Drayton and his band Sirius were the future of American music

What I remember about that epochal night, sitting in that crowded audience of Max's with Ray Jones, Chic's Nile Rogers, and proto-punk guitarist and MKC fixture Johnny Thunders, was Ray's genuine excitement and enthusiasm as he seemed to absorb every note from that Sirius set. After the show, we all went backstage and congratulated Ronnie and the band, and Ray was just as overjoyed at their successful performance as they were, as if it was his own band.

It wasn't just that he and Ronnie Drayton grew up together in Queens and traveled in the same musical circles. Queens, NY in the '80s created some of the most greatest session musicians in the world: Ray, Ronnie, Return To Forever drummer Lenny White, keyboardists (including teen prodigy) Bernard Wright, Lesette Wilson, and Donald Blackmon, and the outstanding drummer Omar Hakm, to name a few. Locality had nothing to do with it; Ray's selfless nature beamed like the sun, as he cheered for Ronnie and his band to be successful.

That unique, unselfish trait in Ray's persona was a rare quality in a business fueled by jealousy, malevolence, and hatred. Ray supported his friends and his belief in them emboldened their success as well as his own. Ray's belief in the brilliant Vernon Reid shined bright, as Reid went on to create the seminal and paradigmatic band Living Color, along with co-founding the Black Rock Coalition with Greg Tate. Ray's belief in the genius of Spike Lee shined bright in his lush, majestic, and contemplative music for Lee's trailblazing films such as "School Daze," "Do The Right Thing," "Mo' Betta Blues," "Clockers," and "Get On The Bus".

I can remember telling Ray about this bold, brash, and brilliant young filmmaker I heard folks at the Voice buzzing about back in 1984. During that period, Ray Jones and Jeffrey Osborne--the dynamic R&B vocalist, who Ray transformed into a household name and a number one Billboard hit with "Stay With Me Tonight"--were looking for a young African American director for one of Jeffrey's music videos. Ray Jones eventually met up with Spike Lee, and the rest, as they say, is history. Playing Bernard Herrmann to Spike's Alfred Hitchcock, Ray's musical scores sculpted the emotional hieroglyphics of a memorable Spike Lee Joint deep into the American cinematic psyche. Even Ray's short-lived pairing with renown Chic vocalist Norma Jean Wright--as the duo State of Art--on Spike's 40 Acres record label, was dance music to make you think, long after the boom ceased to bap.

I learned a lot from my friendship with Ray Jones, especially about music. He loved all kinds of music; he was just as enthralled by Herbie Hancock and Oscar Peterson, as he was by Todd Rundgren and Kate Bush. Ray told me that the chord changes that Todd and Stevie Wonder used were connected to the healing qualities in music. I agreed with him.

Riding the subway to his house in Queens, NY (and when he drove to my neighborhood in Harlem to visit me) to debut a few of my sophomoric attempts at Hip Hop production, Ray Jones was never dismissive; he offered great critiques and encouraged me. But more than anything else, we talked about our role in the world. Discarding our adolescent exoskeletons, we were brand new Black men with brand new wings, floating on a jet-stream of ebullience and spiritual ascent. I would tell Ray about my new-found interest--after GOD took away my taste for coke in October of 1980--in the Apostle Paul and the New Testament, and he would tell me how Rainer Maria Rilke's Duino Elegies galvanized his creative process to write lyrics from the heart and not the bank account.

The last time I saw Ray Jones was in late 1984. He had come to Baltimore, MD--I moved there and got married--and met my wife and oldest Sun, who was a newborn at the time. He told me to take care of my family, be a good father, and stay positive. Meanwhile, Ray amassed an amazing oeuvre; he wrote an international dance smash for a German pop singer, Adele Bertei, titled "Build Me A Bridge", along with hits for Patti Labelle, Whitney Houston, Lisa Fischer, and others. In the late '90s, Keenan Ivory Wayans hired Ray to be the musical director for his talk show. Ray continued his work in film; he scored a indie comedy, Wasabi Tuna in 2003, and wrote and produced songs for the Malcolm Lee film Soul Men, starring Samuel L. Jackson and the late Bernie Mack in 2008.

I caught up with Ray a few years ago on YouTube and then Facebook. Ray's solo work on the other side of the millennial divide for his UEG music imprint--including the albums Naked Soul (1999), Intimate (2001), So Amazing: Songs From The Luther Vandross Songbook (2004), dedicated to the iconic vocalist and his good friend, and the thought-provoking Hillside Stories (2007)--not only exemplified the dedication to his craft, but his belief that great music will always endure. This is an ideal Ray eloquently described to a journalist back in October of 2001, in an interview for ChicTribute.com. Ray even managed to flip the script on Hip Hop back in April of this year, with his mesmerizing, nouveau-vintage remix of Ella Fitzgerald's "Hooray For Love"--on his Soundcloud.com/uegmusic site. Ray Jones didn't sample Ella; he created a work of art by revivifying her. Be it analog or 4G, the prodigious talent and sagacious vision of Raymond Jones will last forever. Only street lights change.

And so Providence has flashed its green light of transcendent golden rest for Raymond Jones. Back in the day, I remember Ray telling me that when he and Omar Hakim booked a really lucrative gig, they would say to each other, "Meet you at BMW." Surrounded by family, friends, and loved ones, Ray went took a more luxurious ride, on his peaceful journey to his long home on Monday, 11 July 2011. That long home as described by Solomon in Ecclesiastes 12; a pastoral abode located in a magnificent state of humble grace and filled with music, stars, comfort, beauty, and light. A sanctuary devoid of tears, sorrow, worry, and condemnation. A place of rest for weary royal travelers, because Raymond Jones was not only a singular musical talent, Raymond Jones was a king. Only he never had to flaunt his sovereignty. Ray knew that real power was sourced in deep wells of humility; wells that will refresh us each time we hear his euphoric music. Thank you Ray. Your friendship will live with me forever. And brother, I hope to meet you one day in GMW: GOD's Merciful World.

Dr. Dre (Chronic Symphonies Dressed in a Full Metal Jacket)

2011-06-22T05:10:00.026-04:00

by Barry Michael Cooper

"It's a difference between making beats and producing. I go in and I produce."

Andre "Dr. Dre" Young,
November 1998, Philadelphia, Pa.

From Kabul to Compton, the bloody and tattered garment of war is threaded with the needle of a full metal jacket. No matter what set you claim--Blood, Crip, Taliban, or Al Qaeda--bullets tailor the design of victory and defeat.

For almost three decades, Andre "Dr. Dre" Young has scored the Wagnerian operetta known as The Battle of South Central. From NWA, to Snoop, to Death Row, to Hip Hop's Great White Hope--Eminem--a Dr. Dre production was body-rocking in it's sound, thought-provoking in its perception, and cinematic in its vision. Unlike New York Hip Hop--which was driven by the claustrophobic rhythms of subways and etched in the shadows of skyscrapers that seemed to choke out the sunlight--Dre's California G-Funk was alfresco; a dark and breezy ticket to ride, even if it depicted a drive-by victim taking their last breath.

If Sean "Diddy" Combs is the Francis Ford Coppola of Hip Hop, then Dr. Dre is Hip Hop's Stanley Kubrick. Dre's productions are "Kubrickian" in the way he uses sound, the same way Kubrick uses space to frame drama and define character. It's what we don't see in Lolita and A Clockwork Orange that plays in the viewer's mind long after the film has ended. Dr. Dre's sonic transposition of Kubrick's spacial concepts are manifested as polyrhythmic landscapes; interlocking and aurally gorgeous fractions that swallows each listener whole. Like the spartan, pulsating bass and whiny Moog pitch wheel of Deep Cover (and even Nothin' But A G-Thing) that reveals the melodically adroit flow of the newcomer known as Snoop Dogg. Or the cartoonish but calculated guitar loop that translates the emotional pain of Marshall "Eminem" Mathers 1999 debut--The Slim Shady LP--into a lyrical diary of tortured paranoia. Dr. Dre's less is always more than what you bargained for. Which is why his productions are so addictive (did someone say, Detox?).

Listening to what Dr. Dre created with Eminem, I was reminded of an episode of Martin Lawrence's popular eponymous '90s sitcom, where Sean (played by the remarkably versatile character actor Jon Gries), the white engineer of Martin's very black talk show, attempts to pass off his 8-track demo tape of trailer park Hip Hop to Snoop at a house party. When Snoop fixes Sean with an incredulous gaze, the engineer warns him not to sleep on a "whole new audience". With the mega-success of Eminem in 1999, I wonder if Dr. Dre was on the set of Martin that day taking notes.

In 1998, Dr. Dre was a man in transition; he left Death Row Records amid a trail of whispers and lies, and created Aftermath Records in the fog of skepticism and derision. A few days after Thanksgiving of that year, Dr. Dre flew to Philadelphia, Pa., to appear in a video I directed titled Ask Yourself A Question, a track Dre produced for Ricardo "Kurupt' Brown's solo album, Kuruption. Like Dre, Kurupt--a somewhat spazzy but very talented emcee--was a recent Death Row escapee who decided to form his own label, too; Antra Music, in his hometown of Philadelphia.

En route to scout locations the day before the shoot, I asked Dr. Dre and Kurupt if I could film some behind-scenes-footage with them. They agreed. I shot almost two hours of Dre and Kurupt--who, at my suggestion, played two Philadelphia homicide detectives, on the trail of a serial killer dismembering dirty cops--and their relaxed conversation about life after Death Row turned into a tutorial on modern Hip Hop history. Dre talks about his time at Ruthless, how Snoop is a great character actor, and in response to the critics who felt he was falling off, Dr. Dre said the only thing he was falling off, was "diving boards".

In talking to Dr. Dre, I felt I was in the presence of man who was confident in his brilliance without gloating in the fact that he was a genius. Years later, with the global impact and immeasurable, game-changing success of Eminem, Dr. Dre not only proved the naysayers wrong; Dre's prolific creativity made the arc of his upward diving ability, nothing short of Olympic.

Check out part one of the documentary "Dr. Dre: Chronic Symphonies Dressed In a Full Metal Jacket", below (here's an interesting tidbit; after hearing the name "Simon" mentioned in the doc, I found out later that it referred to none other than Death Row co-founder Marion "Suge" Knight; as in "Simon says do this, Simon says do that..." Deep).

What If President Obama Really Was..."Dat Brother From Another Planet"?

2011-06-02T21:57:00.014-04:00

by Barry Michael Cooper

(Part One of a series titled, The New "Porniggraphy": The Fetishizing of an American President)

What if President Barack Hussein Obama really was Dat Brother From Another Planet? Would we be happy if he was The Man Who Fell To Earth, who Hit The Ground Running, trying to Do The Right Thing? Making health care accessible to all, and passing a stimulus package as a fulcrum to prevent the floorboards of the nation's economy--weakened by eight years of Bush-Whacking--from flattening the country into a Great Depression?

If President Obama had an invoice of Intergalactic Transport from Area 51, instead of a birth certificate, would it negate the capture and extermination of the psychopath responsible for the mass murder of more than three-thousand Americans on 11 September 2001, Osama Bin Laden?

What if online provocateur and serial killer of political careers, Andrew Breitbart (he with the Pee Wee Herman voice, Ted Bundy eyes, and a lead suspect in numerous character assassinations) leaked a surreptitious video showing a smear of Hunter-green blood on President Obama's knee, after a scrape from a B-ball game during the Christmas vacation in Hawaii--and after the he was able to lower the rate of unemployment to 7.5 percent by November 2011, and home owners were able to reach the shores of real-estate solvency, after drowning in the 2008 Tsunami of underwater mortgages--would we call for his impeachment? Or his execution?

If President Obama's over-sized ears were the most technologically advanced listening devices unknown to man, would he be able to hear the thoughts of those all over the world? The prayers of good will for his safety and his success? The anathematical maledictions for his death and failure?

If President Barack Hussein Obama is a visitor from another star system, is he able to walk through walls, and if so, does he visit Charles and David Koch, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, Dr. Cornell West, and the soldiers in the all-volunteer Hater Brigade--those responsible for this "New Porniggraphy", the fetishizing of an American President--as they snore in their sleep? Does he stand over them and laugh at their stupidity, or shed tears lamenting their weak character?

What if President Barack Hussein Obama really was Dat Brother From Another Planet? What if he was an extraterrestrial with a name we really couldn't pronounce, pigmented in a shade we've never seen, and an guided by an ideology we can't seem to grasp? Like all men really are created equal. Like America really is one nation under GOD? What if President Obama's bio--the son of a White Mother from Kansas and a Black Father from Kenya--was an anthropologically sexy and intriguing, but ultimately fictitious construct to expose U.S. as a nation of well-meaning, but socially, politically, and psychically-scarred misfits, injured by the self-inflicted wounds of hatred, suspicion, and fear?

What if finding out what made President Barack Hussein Obama tick, was an opportunity to give U.S. time to think about who we really are? Would we continue to be suspicious of this man? Would we learn to disagree with him when he is wrong, without hating him because he made a mistake? Or could we finally learn to appreciate the the positive results of his tenure in the Oval Office, even if we didn't love the alien? Probably not. After all, we're humans; the weirdest beings that ever existed.

The Talented Mr. Ro$$ (The Fake Autobiography of William L. Roberts)

2011-05-31T05:40:00.042-04:00

by Barry Michael Cooper

"He was dead...All right...Okay..Why the hell not? Why should he refute it? Why should he deny it? He, of all the people on earth, had a million reasons for being dead and staying dead! An intuitive sense of freedom flashed through his mind. Was there a slight chance here of being able to start all over again?"

Richard Wright,
The Outsider

"Men usually grow base by degrees. From me, in an instant, all virtue dropped bodily as a mantle...Death approaches; and the shadow which foreruns him has thrown a softening influence over my spirit...Have I not indeed been living in a dream? And am I not now dying a victim to the horror and the mystery of the wildest of all sublunary visions?"

Edgar Allan Poe,
William Wilson

"Everybody knows I'ma a lot of people's threats/Biggie Smalls in the flesh livin' life after my death"

Rick Ro$$, Tears of Joy,
from the album Teflon Don (2010)

In 2011, the struggle of Hip Hop continues, as it tries to free itself from the Gordian slip-knot of deception, tied by the lies of Rap Mu$ick-LLC's fraudulent whole-cloth.

No one knows this better than the former correctional officer, nouveau hood-riche prognosticator, and MC with "legend" potential, Rick Ro$$. For the swaggy Prime Minister of the F.L.A., Ro$$'s road to the riches is a speedy escape from the past; a journey choked in the vapors of a kush-induced amnesia. His cheeba hallucination goes a lil' sumthin' like dis: Ro$$ guns the vehicle; 200 miles and running. Out of nowhere, someone jumps in the middle of the highway. Startled, Ro$$ tries to slam on the brakes, but it's too late; the impact is quick and fatal. Ro$$ stops the car and gets out. The halogen headlights illuminate a lifeless and familiar face that paralyzes Rick Ro$$ with fear.

The dead man's name is William L. Roberts; Ro$$'s former life. His real life (more about that later).

Hip Hop was always defined by smart kids, including the secret backpackers who openly role-played as gun clappers. The genius of who they are is not so much in what they say, but how they said it: sentence construction, assonance, alliteration, turning metaphors into memorable talking points. The deployment of cultural, political, historical and social references which retrofit and replenish the genre. All of which are executed by rapt students of rap music; a coded shelter protecting their poetic souls from the prose of a hostile environment.

William L. Roberts is one of those smart kids, even if it's his alter-ego--Rick Ro$$--making all the noise right now, with the first release from his Maybach Music Group imprint, Self Made (is this another sly wink and nod to his re-invention?). Ro$$'s lyrical depth in charting the downward-spiral of bottom-feeders falling to the top of the underworld, puts him in the same masterclass of Dirty South Lit, alongside brilliant contemporaries such as T.I., Jeezy, and Lil Wayne.

Songs like Tears of Joy--with it's surprisingly powerful intro-snippet of former Black Panther Party member Bobby Seale defining the late Huey P. Newton's take on political power--transformed Ro$$'s last album (2010's Teflon Don) into a minor masterpiece:

"Lookin' in the mirror but I don't see much/Starin' in the streets so I don't sleep much/Watchin' the snakes so they don't creep up/...Last night I cried tears of joy/What did we do to deserve this?/Not to dwell on the the past but to keep it real/I gotta represent for Emmit Till/All the dead souls in the field/Lookin' at my Rolly it's about that time/White man had a problem with mine/And we suppose to be shy/The revolution's televised/Bobby's still on the rise..."

Ro$$'s tales from the hoody-hood strives for a lot more than gutter glam's status quo of six-figure rides, sex-starved starlets, and eight-digit I.R.A's. His is the complex, imploding psychopathy of a rydah; the crushing guilt of how the economics that allow you to live affluently in "White America" are supplied by--to quote from the incredible Freeway, in Scratchin' and Survivin--"servin' the smokers and scrapin' the beans to fiends", the wolves waiting to take it all away, and the ghost staring back at in the mirror whispering that it's all gone.

However, Rick Ro$$ has a bit of a problem--well, let's face it--he committed a murder. Ro$$ slumped&trunked his best friend, his most trusted confidant, and--after GOD and his family--the person who loved him more than anything else in the world: William L. Roberts. Rick Ro$$ bodied his former life.

When it was revealed a few years ago by the snarky, legal affidavit site, The Smoking Gun, that the outlaw rapper shouldering a duffel full of perico (William L. Roberts lifted his name and street CV from "Freeway" Ricky Ross, the former incarcerated, multi-millionaire Los Angeles drug kingpin, who in turn, sued the burgeoning rap star for several million because of the unauthorized use of his name and get-down), was actually a former law-enforcement officer who worked in the Florida Department of Corrections, Rick Ro$$ short-circuited. Initially, he denied the deceit, but then he begrudgingly admitted it.

I think Rick Ro$$ should go a step further, and embrace the masquerade: turn it into one of the most important Hip Hop albums of the decade. Tell us his story, his way: maybe William L. Roberts--the correctional officer--got tired of the 9-to-5, acquired a major cocaine connect in prison, quit his job and went on to change his name, his game, and his life. Ro$$ tantalizes listeners with tidbits of this kind of prescient storytelling on Teflon Don, in this lyric from Tears of Joy:

"Everybody knows I'ma a lot of people's threats/Biggie Smalls in the flesh/livin' life after my death"

And then there's this interesting portion of All The Money In The World, sung by Raphael Saadiq:

"Old memories won't go away/I remember them like it was yesterday/That time never felt so good/Just can't forget about you/You know I never would/And I never ever could/And don't think that I can/I know you understand/Yo/Rosay..."

It's true that Rick Ro$$ laments the death of his beloved Dad in the beginning of this track, but what if the "old memories that won't go away" also refers to the "demise" of William L. Roberts? How ill would that be?

Is it possible that Teflon Don was just an intriguing amuse-bouche that proceeds a full-on feast of an upcoming Hip Hop classic? I hope so. Rick Ro$$'s life is a modern take on the tale of the doppelganger--similar to Edgar Allan Poe's gripping short story William Wilson, or Dostoevsky's classic, The Double, or Richard Wright's existentially tragic tale of identity theft, The Outsider--one haunted and tortured by the constant reflection of themselves.

It's all about choices; just like the smart kids in the inner-city who feel the need to exchange their love of books, education, hard work, and legitimate success for the narrow and suffocatingly fatal parameters of the hustler's life. Hey kids, don't get it twisted: the biggest baller and shot caller On The Planet is a Black Man: President Barack Obama.

Rick Ro$$'s yarn of urban camouflage could be the breath of fresh air desperately needed to resuscitate the dead and stinking corpus of Rap Mu$ick, LLC.

This is an album that could take Hip Hop to another place. Call it The Swag of a Body Snatcher:When Rick Ro$$ Murked William L. Roberts. Diddy should produce from start to finish, as he is the master of the cinematic through-line. Not to say that Rick Ro$$ Is the next Biggie. He isn't. But like B.I.G., Ro$$'s road to the riches began in his head, navigated in the diamond-misted fog of Maybach sleep; it was all a dream.

(31 Dec 2011 postscript: A few months ago, Rick Ross suffered from some life-threatening seizures. Millions of Ross's fans and admirers of his profound talent--like this writer--kept Ross/Roberts in their prayers. By The Grace Of GOD, he survived. I pray Rick Ross will continue to be on the mend and get stronger in 2012, GOD Willing. I think this guy has a big future as a major MC. And that future will only get brighter, when Ross/Roberts realizes that his best, biggest, and most important album will come when he decides--as the late great MC Breed once said--that there's no future in your fronting.)

Gil Scott-Heron: A Life Without Commercial Interruption

2011-05-28T02:02:00.001-04:00

by Barry Michael Cooper

"The Revolution/will not go better with Coke/

...the Revolution will put you in the driver's seat/

the Revolution will not be televised/Not be televised/

the Revolution will be no rerun, Brother..."

Gil Scott Heron, The Revolution Will Not Be Televised

On Friday, 27 May 2011, the world of spoken-word lost its poet laureate, and Hip Hop is missing it's paterfamilias; Gil Scott-Heron died. He was 62. GOD Rest his soul.

When Gil Scott-Heron rejected the title "Godfather of Rap" it was with good reason. Money didn't own him; as a genuine post-modern griot, Gil Scott-Heron embraced poverty. Not that he was poor--he wasn't--or that he didn't like money (I'm sure he did). Gil Scott-Heron didn't love money, and therefore, money didn't own him. A true MC, a true Master of the Ceremony must be just that; a master, leader, and conductor of the ceremony, pageantry, and celebration. One who can lead the band without becoming a slave to the rhythm. Or the money. To embrace poverty means the corporate sponsors can't put a price ticket on your head, because if they can price you, then they can buy you, and if they can buy you, then they own you, and if they own you, then they can lock down and silence their caged bird when they disapprove of the song it sings.

Gil Scott-Heron said the Revolution wouldn't be televised but that was his reverse psych on an enthralled public. Gil Scott-Heron forecast a revolution of Black thought and American letters--an analog-to-4G broadband-of-a-broadcast--for more than 40 years. A waveform of a higher vibration.

The life and creativity of Gil Scott-Heron exemplified the true meaning of wealth in poverty, because he was free to say what was on his mind. And we were enriched by his platinum thoughts. As a true hunger artist, Gil Scott-Heron knew that his wealth in poverty was the vault of his soulful authenticity; protecting the riches of his heart, and money can't bankrupt a truth-tellers soul, overstand? Exeunt, noble Prince. We hardly knew thee, but what you allowed us to become acquainted with--the treasures stored in one of the greatest American literary minds this country has ever produced--changed us forever. No bottle could hold you. No crack could break you. The doves in all bedrooms will cry silently tonight as GOD steers your flight home. Many of us will rock something red, black and green in your memory. We have been saving it for just the right occasion.

Ghettofab Is Burning: The Cinematic Fire of Diddy's Gasoline Dreams

2011-05-19T22:29:00.028-04:00

By Barry Michael Cooper

"The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.
Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand..."

William Butler Yeats,
"The Second Coming (Slouching towards Bethlehem)"

Seven-ten pm. Good Friday, Two Thousand and Eleven, in the Year of our LORD. Two days before the Christian faithful celebrate the rise of their Redeemer and twenty-nine days before--according to some Biblical scholars--before Judgement Day, a chilling evening breeze blanketed the western stretch of 34th Street like an icy ancient quilt.

The Bad Boy/Ciroc foot soldiers swept the periphery outside the line of ticket holders and buyers with military precision; hoisting cutouts advertising both "Last Train To Paris" and Ciroc vodka at chest level like promotional artillery. I take another look at the time on my phone--7:22--and my ticket:

CIROC AND BET PRESENT
DIDDY DIRTY MONEY
COMING HOME TOUR
HAMMERSTEIN BALLROOM
311 WEST 34TH STREET, NYC
FRI APR 22 2O11 7PM

I don't know why I am thinking about Yeats and the beauty of his apocalyptic bullet points; maybe it's the 12-month rash of monstrously devastating earthquakes--from Haiti in January 2010 to New Zealand and Japan in 2011--that makes me feels as if Time's Gun is locked and loaded with this generation in its cross-hairs.

8:30 p.m.

I'm sitting waaaaaaaaaaaay back in the center balcony of the Hammerstein. The place is packed; sold out. My fifty-two year old eyes can't see a thing.

Sometimes I wonder if the Aragon flash of present-day Hip Hop has temporarily blinded me; blinking for clarity, I think it may have reached it's own fin de siecle.

Gone are the days when I got zooted during a D.E.G. Productions "Freak-a-Thon" at the Hotel Diplomat on 47th Street in 1977, and listening to DJ Hollywood and Junebug ask the crowd, "Say how do you take the bone out?" before we feverishly screamed back, "You don't; you leave it in!

Or me nervously watching the premier editor-eminence grise-grand poobah Robert Christgau rock back and forth in his chair at the Village Voice in early 1980, as he blue-penciled the final draft of my Hip Hop essay, "Buckaroos of the Bugaloo".

Or me and engineer Steve Breck in his Synthe Sound Studios on West 27th Street in Chelsea, programming a DMX drum computer with that DUU-DOOM-BLAT-DUU-BLAT-DOOM-BLAT "Sucker MC's" intro, for a Spoonie G track in 1982.

Or me buffing floors at two in the morning to the rhythm of Whodini's "Freaks Come Out At Night" spilling out of a co-worker's radio back in 1984 in the Western Electric plant in southeast Baltimore, a few days before the birth of my oldest Sun.

Or my two pre-school Suns trying to suppress their laughter as their Dad made a fool out of himself while trying to shaka-zulu to Teddy Riley and Guy's "Groove Me" in 1987.

Or me sitting behind Spike and Denzel in the Magno screening room in midtown Manhattan, and feeling the hairs stand on the back of my neck watching Rosie Perez box it out to Public Enemy's "Fight The Power" in a 1989 screening of "Do The Right Thing".

Or me and Al Payne sitting in his brand new Explorer outside of the Mondrian on the Sunset Strip--one autumnal Hollywood morning in 1992--nodding our heads to the sonic brilliance of C.L. Smooth and Pete Rock's "Ghettos of the Mind".

Or me taking a wrong turn into a line of fiends in an alley near Aisquith and East North Avenue in Baltimore, who were copping caps of Quiet Storm back in 1994, as a squad of strapped young pitchers recited Biggie's "Warning" as if it were ghetto liturgy.

Or me and my brother damn near getting choked up in the BLS towncar floating down Lenox Avenue like a gunmetal ghost--heading to JFK for a flight to LA--listening to Tupac breathe life into the lyrics of "So Many Tears" in 1995.

Or my puzzled amusement at a group of young, rich, white kids gunning drop-top Benzes and Beemers up and down Joppa Road in affluent Towson, Md., as P. Diddy's "All About The Benjamins" blew the woofers out of their Blaupunkts and painted the air that 1997 July afternoon with teal shades of opulent anarchy.

Or me sitting with Dr. Dre in an Italian restaurant on Delaware Avenue in Philadelphia--right after Thanksgiving in 1998 and the day before I directed him playing a homicide detective in Kurupt's "Ask Yourself a Question"--and listening in awe as he described the visuals that would frame "My Name Is", a video for his new artist, Marshall "Eminem" Mathers.

Or my rapt attention to the dark, gothic, and Rilke-like power of Jay-Z's unparalleled poetic genius, as I listened to "There's Been a Murder" on repeat--in my junior suite at the Paramount--and scrolling through digital footage I shot in Times Square with the legendary Michael Wright and the late, great, O.L. Duke in 2000.

Or me floating on a cloud of elation and pride in 2008, as I watched "Paused In Time", the ground-breaking documentary on Baltimore Hip Hop, produced and directed by my two adult Suns.

These are a few of the moments when Hip Hop bequeathed my psyche with exhilaration, promise, and inspiration; with just two turntables and one mic, the 'hood could dream like Martin, step forward like Kennedy, and speak globally like Malcolm. Hip Hop was transforming its listeners around the world into a group of soulful archeologists, looking to mine the deepest riches of unity and understanding from this Planet Rock.

However, I'm beginning to feel bereft of that nirvana. It's almost as if I'm the victim of a slowly progressive form of Hip Hop Alzheimers; I don't even recognize it anymore. I can't distinguish whether it's a melody or a gasping series of flat-lining blips emanating from the music I embraced 34 years ago.

Having morphed into a 16-bar threnody of those dying to be famous, the dirge formally known as Hip Hop, has been co-opted into both a corporation and an abberation of the culture. Say hello to the bad guy, Rap Mu$ick, LLC; a sexy and digital folklore used to merchandise music, language, film, television, goods, services, and sociology.

Which brings me right back to Hammerstein and (the irony of?) the excitement I'm beginning to feel for Hip Hop again, as I experience Diddy's "Coming Home" tour. Hands down, this is the best Hip Hop concert I've ever seen.

It wasn't just the guest appearances by Ja Rule, the phenomenal Faith Evans, Ashanti, the incredible Q-Tip, Black Rob and others. It wasn't just the breathtaking million-dollar lighting and stage design, which was Bellagio-meets-Kraftwork-meets-Baz Luhrmann. Nor was it the sinewy, lush, and effervescent gorgeousness of Dawn Richard and Kalenna Harper's vocals. The Coming Home Tour is really the opera titled "Last Train to Paris"; the stage adaptation of Sean Puff Daddy Diddy John Combs epic film titled Ghettofabulous. The movie that turned an intern at Andre Harrell's Uptown Records into the Michael Jackson of Hip Hop.

Similar to the way Jackson's "Billie Jean" (along with the short films that accompanied "Beat It" and "Thriller") transformed Black Music into post-modern pop, Diddy's Ghettofabulous ethos (Mary J. Blige, Heavy D, Jodeci, Notorious B.I.G., Ma$e, Jennier Lopez, Danity Kane, Sean John couture, Diddy Dirty Money, and others) extended Hip Hop's reach into The Great Society by creating and defining it's mythology with the impact of the short film/music video (it should also be noted that the Ghettofabulous Movement gained prominence, maximum visibility and acceptance during the great epoch of Black written, directed, and produced films of the early-to-mid 1990s).

This thought occurred to me as I watched the three minute documentary broadcast onstage, during a Diddy Dirty Money costume change. It was older, VHS home movie footage of Diddy, Biggie, Mary, and others, from the early days of Uptown and Bad Boy. The initial reaction of the audience was silent surprise--we were caught off-guard--and then a near deafening roar of excitement and appreciation. It was as if Diddy wanted to remind all of us, that if it wasn't for him there would be no Ghettofabulous; his Harlem-ized appropriation of Malle-Godard-Truffaut-Rohmer's "New Wave". With the help of fellow auteurs Hype Williams and Paul Hunter, Diddy Bertolucci'd himself as the movement's Last Emperor.

If there was no Ghettofabulous there would be no Kanye and Pharrell hobnobbing at Cannes and the Hotel Du Cap. If there was no Ghettofabulous, there would be no Mary J. Blige for a young Britney Spears to emulate into mega-stardom.

If there was no Ghettofabulous, there would be no Tale of The Two Justins; Timberlake would still be fronting a boy band, instead of singing Timbaland's unreleased, super-duper Ginuwine tracks. Bieber would be an ambitious and unknown pre-teen pop-locking in some Toronto metro station. Instead, The Two Justins are--because of Ghettofabulous--moving a gazillion iTune downloads and bum-rushing the stage as a pair of talented "King(s) of Pop" wannabes.

Yes, Jay-Z and Nas are the greatest rappers alive (with Eminem, Kanye, Lil Wayne, Jadakiss, Andre 3000, Big Boi, Lupe Fiasco, T.I., Jeezy, Rick Ro$$, and Nikki Minaj on their heels), and Biggie and Tupac are the greatest that ever lived; but even Brando, Pacino, and De Niro needed Francis Ford Coppola to guide them to greatness.

Diddy=Coppola=The Godfather.

As Sean Combs sits in his director's chair and waits for the last train to Paris to take him--and Hip Hop--in a new direction, he covers his ears; the block is crowded with too many new kids whining in auto tune. Puffy is getting bored because he has outgrown childish things.

Whether this Saturday is the end of the world or not, Sean Combs longs to exchange dirty money for a clean heart, because even Bad Boys have to grow up. Au revoir, les enfants.

The Earthquake Diaries (Apocalypse...Now???)

2011-05-13T21:11:00.040-04:00

by Barry Michael Cooper

"And great earthquakes shall be in divers places, and famines, and pestilences; and fearful sights and great signs shall there be from heaven."

Luke 21:11

Another day, another earthquake. A few days ago--11 May--there was a 5.3 earthquake in Lorca, Spain; ten reported casualties, scores injured. Let's rewind: on 22 February 2011, 181 people died in a frightening 6.3 earthquake that upended Canterbury region of Christchurch, New Zealand. Less than a month later--on 11 March--Japan was rocked not only by a devastating 9.0 earthquake--the most powerful earthquake to ever hit Japan--but a deadly tsunami that fractured a nuclear facility and claimed the lives of almost 15,000 people.

Five days later, on 16 March, Chile was rocked by a 5.3 tremor. Last year, on 10 January 2010, an earthquake leveled most of Haiti with almost 500,000 deaths. In April, 327 tornadoes tore through the Southeast, claiming almost 400 lives; the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Association (NOAA) estimates that since the start of 2011, the U.S. has been hit with 881 twisters, the deadliest outbreak in U.S. history.

On Tuesday, 10 May 2011, parts of Memphis, Tenn., was submerged underwater, as the swollen banks of the Mississippi River flooded that city. Yesterday--12 May--Mount Etna erupted in Italy, painting the nighttime Sicilian skyline in spectacular fiery orange hues of lava and ash. How about the baffling reports of dead birds falling out of the sky, and millions of fish washing up on shores across the globe?

What's going on?

There is a Christian broadcaster named Harold Camping, who has done a series of mathematical calculations tied to the books in the Bible, along with the Hebrew calendars, and he believes that Judgement Day will commence on 21 May 2011. That's right; next Saturday. Of course, Camping has been written off as another nutcase and religious huckster, who in fact, predicted that the world would end back on 7 September 1994. So much for that prediction.

Despite all of this, I have to say, Harold Camping is a very competent and faithful Bible teacher. I know this, because I have listened to many of his Bible studies, and he always says, "Don't trust me; trust the Bible." I have learned a lot as I listen to the ministry of Family Radio, but as Camping has correctly stated, I don't trust him, or any other Bible teacher. Or any minister.

Let me say this; I am a flawed, screwed up guy; pride, adultery, anger, etc. An anxious glutton standing in line at life's transgressive buffet. I have absolutely no desire to judge others, except main man staring me back in the mirror. Which is why I need JESUS CHRIST as my LORD and SAVIOR. I trust GOD and the Bible alone. Period. I believe the Bible is the only way to study GOD's WORD. I take no man's word as gospel.

Like the Bereans in Acts 17:10-11, who "searched the scriptures daily, whether those things were so...", I want to read the Bible for myself, study the Bible for myself, and pray and ask GOD for HIS Saving Grace, Guidance, Mercy and Wisdom to understand what I am reading. As I compare scriptures with other scriptures, and I am always blown away by the absolute cohesiveness of the Bible--both Old and New Testament--and how it all holds together. It is amazing, breathtaking, and liberating, to say the least.

I left the church almost ten years ago, because I didn't feel I was getting the full impact and exegesis--that complete interpretation--of Scripture. Though I gleaned much insight at the church I attended (a great Christian ministry, with folks I love dearly), I truly believe GOD has revealed a lot more to me in HIS Word in the last decade, via prayerful and careful study, and the use of the Strong's Exhaustive Concordance, which translates each word in the Bible from the original Hebrew, Greek, and Aramaic text.

As far as 21 May 2011 being the day that CHRIST returns, initially, I was extremely skeptical. Especially when I read this passage in Matthew 24: 36, as CHRIST spoke to his disciples, who inquired about the time of HIS return:

"But of that day and hour knoweth no man, no, not the angels of heaven, but my Father only."

For years I held on to that, but recently, I began to read a few more verses in that same chapter of Matthew 24, and the importance of watching:

"Watch therefore: for ye know not what hour your Lord doth come.
But know this, that if the goodman of the house had known in what watch the thief would come, he would have watched, and would not have suffered his house to be broken up.
Therefore be ye also ready: for in such an hour as ye think not the Son of man cometh."

Matthew 24:42-44

I then cross-referenced the word watch in Matthew 24 with a passage in Mark 13:33-37, as CHRIST warns HIS disciples to watch:

"Take ye heed, watch and pray: for ye know not when the time is.
For the Son of Man is as a man taking a far journey, who left his house, and gave authority to his servants, and to every man his work, and commanded the porter to watch.
Watch ye therefore: for ye know not when the master of the house cometh, at even, or at midnight, or at the cockcrowing, or in the morning:
Lest coming suddenly he find you sleeping.
And what I say unto you I say unto all, Watch."

Luke the physician--and an apostle of CHRIST--examines the word watch in Luke 21:34-36:

"And take heed to yourselves, lest at any time your hearts be overcharged with surfeiting, and drunkenness, and cares of this life, and so that day come upon you unawares.
For as a snare shall it come on all them that dwell on the face of the whole earth. Watch ye therefore, and pray always, that ye may be accounted worthy to escape all these things that shall come to pass, and to stand before the Son of man."

Here is my man the Apostle Paul warning the believers to watch, in I Thessalonians 5:1-6

"But of the times and the seasons, brethren, ye have no need that I write unto you.
For yourselves know perfectly that the day of the Lord so cometh as a thief in the night.
For when they shall say, Peace and safety; then sudden destruction cometh upon them, as travail upon a woman with child; and they shall not escape.
But ye, brethren, are not in darkness, that that day should overtake you as a thief.
Ye are all the children of light, and the children of the day: we are not of the night, nor of darkness.
Therefore let us not sleep, as do others; but let us watch and be sober."

And this is CHRIST admonishing the church in Sardis in Revelation 3:2-3 to watch:

"Be watchful, and strengthen the things which remain, that are ready to die: for I have not found thy works perfect before God.
Remember therefore how thou hast received and heard, and hold fast, and repent. If therefore thou shalt not watch, I will come on thee as a thief, and thou shalt not know what hour I will come upon thee."

The word watch is a constant theme through those Biblical passages, and it's a word that GOD does not want us to ignore. Therefore I'm beginning to believe that the calculations leading to 21 May 2011 are very accurate.

In the meantime--LORD Willing--I'm going to love GOD, my family, my heart, and my friends, post on Hooked on the American Dream, monitor the Cirque Du Foole'-- a.k.a., politics--and global events on MSNBC, CNN, NY Times, Wash Po, BBC News, and Reuters, watch my favorite films and documentaries, wondering if Hip Hop has reached it's own fin de siecle, and thinking up ideas for essays, docs, scripted television, novels, and indie films.

However, my priority is to continue to be steadfast in my watching, reading and studying the Bible, and most importantly, I will be praying to GOD to have mercy on a rotten sinner like me. I do believe all of these disasters is GOD warning all of us that HE Is on HIS Way. Whatever happens on 21 May 2011 is GOD's Will, and a monumental reminder to me of this one fact; this world is not going to last forever.

President Obama's "Trump" Card

2011-04-29T20:48:00.040-04:00

President Obama's "Trump" Card (or, "The Donald's Transparent Fraudulence as an Invisible Bully)

Political Satire by Barry Michael Cooper

(A 6:30am WH conference call from 29 April 2011)

WH Secretary: Mr. President, Mr. Plouffe; Mr. Trump is on the line.

Trump: Mr. President, David. My two most favorite people in the world. And I mean that.

President Obama: You sure about that? A little birdy says you told a crowd of folks at the Trump International Hotel and Tower, that--and I quote--"Our leaders are stupid, they are stupid people.It's just very, very, sad." An expletive-filled rant. Wow. It's like that, D-Money?

Trump. Come on, Mr. President. The Krug was flowing, I was talking to a bunch of drunks; it boils down to two words: Vegas, baby. And don't believe everything you read on AP. I love you guys. You know that. Dave-O, help me out here.

David Plouffe: The man. The myth. The coif. The Donald. Dude, you are most definitely the man of the hour right now; still, I don't think you love us more than Hot Birther Mama Orly Taitz. And since you jumped into the soup D-Money, me thinks old girl is crushing on you something serious. You two would make the perfect couple. You know...the hair?

(Laughter.)

David Plouffe: D-Money, you're leading in the polls as a GOP presidential candidate. Your star is rising at Fox News. NBC Universal better watch out. I can see it now: Fox News Presents Donald Trump's "Republican Apprentice". Contestants include Michael Steele, Scott Walker...and of course your thang-thang, Orly Taitz.

(More laughter.)

Trump: Enough with that wacky broad already. I'm beginning to stress out, especially after Lawrence O'Donnell ragging me out on MSNBC the other night on The Last Word, and demanding that NBC disclose whether they are renewing another season of The Apprentice--the biggest and only hit on NBC this season, I might add--

(Even more laughter.)

President Obama: Donald; his ire was not directed at you. He was talking to the execs at NBC Entertainment. O'Donnell was definitely on his game that night. One of his best shows.

Trump: His ire? Yeah, I know he's Irish. With a name like O'Donnell, duh? Irish.

(Raucous laughter.)

Trump: What's so funny?

President Obama: The complete, unadulterated bliss of your ignorance. However, I gotta respect your Man Of La Mancha. Your quixotic game is awesome.

Trump: My what?

President Obama: It's a Harvard Law Review thing: you wouldn't understand.

David Plouffe: Which brings us to why the President and I wanted to have this chat with you. You did a great job with fomenting this recent "Birther" debate-

Trump: Whoa, excuse me, excuse me Plouffe; I love you, I think you're one sharp young politcal guy, but I take offense to you saying I was foaming at the mouth. Come on guys, I'll admit I can be a little over the top, but a little respect, please. Por que...

President Obama and David Plouffe: Say what?

President Obama (to Plouffe in an amused whisper): This dude should be on Def Comedy Jam.

Trump: I heard that Mr. President. And by the way, Russell Simmons is a very good friend of mine.

David Plouffe: Interesting; would you consider Russell, a brilliant African-American multi-media mogul, one of The Blacks?

Trump: You better believe it. My ace boon coo-

President Obama: Okay, Einstein, fall back. No need to dig a deeper hole for yourself. You know, the first time I heard you use that term--The Blacks--I said to myself, "This dude is not as dumb as he looks. I thought, Trump is fan of the French poet and playwright Jean Genet, and his thought-provoking, controversial play, The Blacks, which examines the color black, with all of its racial and cultural definitions. Did you know James Earl Jones starred in the original 1961 American production at the St. Marks Playhouse? One of his first roles before he blew up Broadway with his searing portrayal of Jack Johnson in The Great White Hope; a theme close to your heart, D-Money (the President chuckles). You know, there's a memorable line from The Blacks that says, "By stretching language we'll distort it sufficiently to wrap ourselves in it and hide". Sounds like a prescient commentary on the present day political environment. Wouldn't you agree?

Trump: Get out! Jean Nate' is a guy? I thought it was a French chick who made great smelling bubble bath for the ladies, I gotta admit, I used to use that stuff before I went on dates as a teenager. Man (Trump gets excited), I'm telling you, I got so much action when I wore that-

President Obama (interrupts Trump's reverie): ...and then I watched your interview with Savannah Guthrie on The Today Show, and said..."Nahhhh".

David Plouffe: Look, Donald, you did a great job with (whispers to President Obama) how should I phrase this? I think he's struggling with some remedial high school English issues.

President Obama (whispers to Plouffe): I would say "stirred up" as opposed to "foment".

David Plouffe (in a whisper to the President): Perfect.

David Plouffe (back to Trump): Yes, when you...stirred up...the Birther debate, it was a phenomenally strong move to the basket. I mean it became both a game changer and a carpet bomb within the GOP, and so much so that John Boehner, Eric Cantor--even freakin' Michelle Bachmann and Karl Rove--now publicly admit they know that President Barach Obama is an American who was born in Hawaii. Rove even cautions the GOP to distance itself from this issue, as it has the potential to irrevocably damage the party.

President Obama: And it was the perfect set up for my press conference the other day when I presented my long form birth certificate from Hawaii. Now the GOP slander machine is back-peddling so fast, they look like Mike Jackson Moonwalking on Motown 25.

Trump (in an excited, but horrible imitation of Michael Jackson): Shamone! Hee Hee Hee! You know I'm Bad, bad, really really really Bad. Did you know MJ stayed at Mar-a-Lago-

President Obama (interrupting Trump): Man, please! You know MJ didn't stay at no damn Mar-a-Lago. Come on now?! Calm down, D-Money.

David Plouffe: Look Donald, everything was going according to plan; the plan we talked about over that private dinner you hosted for us at Uncle Jack's Steakhouse on 9th Avenue back in February of this year. You leaning Democratic is an open secret; 54% of the $1.3 million in political donations that you have made over the years, has gone to our team. Harry Reid, Ed Rendell, and Rahm Emmanuel know and love your pockets. Quid pro quo is a dirty game but it takes clean money wash each others back, so, boom; you needed to raise the sagging ratings of your Celebrity Apprentice franchise, and the President needed not only to dead that dumb-ass "Birther" issue, but to place a truth bomb under the GOP's shrinking Big Tent of a circus. And it worked, D-Money; as our Inside Man, you blew up--your ratings and profile shot up exponentially--while the Republicans imploded as their Barack Obama emigre enigma was exposed for what it was: a hoax.

President Obama: But then you went "off book", D-Money, calling me and my administration "stupid" during your Vegas stand-up act, and then the "How did this guy get into an Ivy League school" schtick earlier in the week. What's up with that?

David Plouffe: Donald, we told you at that dinner; "No freestyling, unless you clear it with us". You remember us telling you that?

Trump (sounds chastised): Look guys, you're right, but this I needed to extend the publicity. Mr. President, you're the smartest man I ever met. I mean, come on, you just told me something I never knew before; Jean Nate’ was a guy, and he did more than just make great smelling bath bubbles that helped a young insecure guy--Moi--get laid in high school. That's huuuge! The Birther thing was exciting, but it kind of overwhelmed me. Lets' get real; Karl Rove is gonna make sure I don't secure a place on the GOP ticket, and he is most assuredly going to cock-block my attempts of finding a home over at Fox News. Can I be honest?; the presidential bid--had I ever declared my candidacy--was toast from the giddy-up. After Lawrence O'Donnell finishes brow beating You-Know-Who at NBC Entertainment, this will be the last season of The Apprentice. And on top of that, that little sawed-off, Bostonian carpetbagger Bloomberg, comes to the Big Apple-

President Obama (interrupts): -And steals your swaggy as "The King of New York", while you're reduced to leasing the Trump name to properties you don't even own. And you can't front forever, especially when the haters are waiting to stab you in the back. I feel you D-Money.

Trump (voice rises in anger): That munchkin is the reason I stopped speaking to Fifty Cent! Fiddy tells me he's doing a remix of I Get Money (I Run New York), and wants me in a cameo doing the stanky-leg in the lobby of Trump Towers. Okay?! A week watching the blacks on BET trying to get my steps right, and for what?! Fiddy calls me at the last minute and says he's giving the cameo to the president of the Lollipop Guild?! And then they shelve the video when they find out that that munchkin Bloomberg is a horrible dancer? I mean...after a while, it gets to be bit much (trails off into silent sobs)

David Plouffe: Donald, are you crying?

Trump (clears his throat): Nah. Bad allergies. And a sinus infection. I guess I'm saying, I don't want to disappear.

President Obama: Believe it or not, that's another great line from Genet's play, The Blacks.

Trump: No, not the blacks; a white guy said that. Me.

President Obama (sounds mildly flustered): Donald, I have a briefing with my economic advisers in 15 minutes. and then I am flying to Alabama, to inspect the damage on the ground and offer support to the families who lost loved ones, lost their homes, and lost their hope, in that devastating outbreak of tornadoes this week. This is a serious job, my friend. Hundreds of millions of livelihoods and lives depend on the person sitting in this Oval Office on 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. This is not a game. This is not a joke. This is not about a debate of race or lineage or education. Nor is it a platform for some fake-ass reality show, or a stunt to increase TV ratings. This is a real call to duty. This is about the service of a lifetime to the greatest country on the planet. Are you really ready for that, Donald Trump? Of course not. Anyways, I enjoyed talking to you. I hope everything works out, and thanks for all of your invaluable help in crippling the GOP's leverage with the Birther debate.

David Plouffe: We appreciate your due diligence Donald.

Trump: You guys, wait; what do I do now?

President Obama: You have a great family. You are an astute business man. You have that hustler spirit. You'll figure it out. You always do. Besides, there's always Mar-a-Lago. And Jean Nate’.

Mediaite-GOP Official: President Obama Is From the Planet of the Apes

2011-04-18T19:02:00.001-04:00

(Story reported by Frances Martel for Mediaite)

Today’s installment of “heinous, unacceptable racism disguised as ‘jokes’” features a Republican official on Orange County, California, President Obama, and monkeys in photoshop. GOP official Marilyn Davenport is coming under fire for sending other Republican officials an email depicting President Obama as a chimpanzee, in the arms of chimpanzee “parents,” claiming, “Now you know why– no birth certificate! [sic].” Davenport is sticking to her guns, blaming the media for making too much of a fuss.

Among Davenport’s detractors (including, one would hope, “everyone else”), local news station KCAL caught up with former California Republican chairman Michael Schroder, who correctly posited: “no average person would send this out and feel comfortable with this, that this was just a joke.” Then again, Schroder also notes Davenport doesn’t come into this embarrassment with a clean slate– among the people in Orange County Republican politics she has defended are an official who sent an email with an illustration of the White House covered in watermelons and an official who opposed the installation of grass near beaches on the point that “grass attracts Mexicans.”

(Click here to read the full story on the Mediaite website.)

Vanity Fair-Mod Character Study As Classic Film; Antonioni's "Blow Up"

2011-04-15T21:20:00.000-04:00

Poster for "Blow Up". the 1966 Modernist classic directed by Michelangelo Antonioni: dreamchimney.com

(Interview with '60s model and "Blow Up" actress Jill Kennington by Philippe Garner for the 15 April 2011 online issue of Vanity Fair)

Forty-five years ago, English model Jill Kennington agreed to appear in an art-house film—one that would memorably capture the energy of London’s 1960s fashion and art scenes. Michelangelo Antonioni’s 1966 classic, Blow-Up—his first English-language film—was a sensation, and earned the Italian modernist Oscar nominations for directing and writing. Today, Kennington discusses her participation in Blow-Up and the real-world London atmosphere it depicted with Philippe Garner, international head of 20th-century decorative art and design at Christie’s. With David Alan Mellor, Garner has co-written a book that analyzes and contextualizes the film: Antonioni’s Blow-Up. (Steidl).

Philippe Garner: Jill, your role in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up created an indelible image that has become emblematic of the London scene in the 60s. How did it happen that you got cast for the film?

Jill Kennington: I remember excited whispers going round London: “Antonioni is going to make a movie here!” He was very well known to me for his beautiful and often strange films, so I was intrigued, but it took a while to understand that he was interested in the London 60s scene—in particular the world of fashion photographers and models. I then often saw him sort of skulking around, not wanting to be noticed, alone, just taking it all in, both in the trendy discotheques, watching, and in my favorite Italian restaurant, San Lorenzo. One day he turned up on a shoot I was doing for Queen magazine at David Montgomery’s studio. I remember there were two other girls; we were introduced, told he was just going to watch and to ignore him. This was very easy, as he just faded away to a gray figure alone at the back. I was a bit disappointed that the shoot was quite abstract and graphic, not typically my type of work. Of course, only when the filming started, with five girls, could I see how that shoot had given him ideas and inspiration.

(click here to read the full story on the Vanity Fair website)

Mediaite-President Obama and The "Birthers"; Clowning The Clowns

2011-04-15T20:45:00.000-04:00

President Obama talking to ABC News about the "Birthers": ABC News/Mediaite

(Story reported by Colby Hall for Mediaite)

George Stephanopoulos scored a major scoop tonight by getting Barack Obama to offer his own insight on the birther controversy recently brought back into the news cycle by the presidential/promotional campaign of reality television host Donald Trump. Stephanopoulos described Obama’s reaction to being questioned about his birthplace: “He grabbed at the chance with a big smile – saying he thinks the whole issue will be a problem for Republicans.

(Click here to read the full post and watch the ABC.News video on the Mediaite website.)

Yahoo News-This Just In: President Obama Is NOT A Wimp...

2011-04-15T14:36:00.000-04:00

President Barack Obama: Yahoo News

(Story reported by Yahoo News)

Yesterday, President Obama delivered some of his harshest criticism yet of his recent battle with Republicans to fund the government.

However, Obama may not have intended for everybody to hear him.

While listening to an audio feed from a Chicago fundraiser Thursday night, CBS News reporter Mark Knoller heard Obama speaking with donors after other reporters had left the room. That's when the president really opened up about his disdain for the recent GOP pushback:

"I said, 'You want to repeal health care? Go at it. We'll have that debate. You're not going to be able to do that by nickel-and-diming me in the budget. You think we're stupid?'" the president reportedly said.

Obama also complained about GOP attempts to attach a bill to the resolution to fund the government that would defund women's health services provider Planned Parenthood.

"Put it in a separate bill," the president said he told House Speaker John Boehner and his staff. "We'll call it up. And if you think you can overturn my veto, try it. But don't try to sneak this through."

The president also made clear he is no fan of Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.), the GOP's Budget Committee chairman.

"When Paul Ryan says his priority is to make sure, he's just being America's accountant ... This is the same guy that voted for two wars that were unpaid for, voted for the Bush tax cuts that were unpaid for, voted for the prescription drug bill that cost as much as my health care bill--but wasn't paid for," Obama reportedly said.

(Click here to read the full story watch the CBS.com video on the Yahoo News website)

NY Times-Gerald A. Lawson, Video Game Pioneer Dies at 70

2011-04-15T00:33:00.000-04:00

Gerald A. Lawson, video game pioneer: Maria J. Avila/Lopez/Mercury News

(Story reported by Bruce Weber for the NY Times)

Gerald A. Lawson, a largely self-taught engineer who became a pioneer in electronic video entertainment, creating the first home video game system with interchangeable game cartridges, died on Saturday in Mountain View, Calif. He was 70 and lived in Santa Clara, Calif.

The cause was complications of diabetes, said his wife, Catherine.

Before disc-based systems like PlayStation, Xbox and Wii transformed the video game industry, before techno-diversions like Grand Theft Auto and Madden NFL and even before Pac-Man and Donkey Kong became the obsession of millions of electronic gamers, it was Mr. Lawson who first made it possible to play a variety of video games at home.

In the mid-1970s, he was director of engineering and marketing for the newly formed video game division of Fairchild Semiconductor, and it was under his direction that the division brought to market in 1976 the Fairchild Channel F, a home console that allowed users to play different games contained on removable cartridges. Until then, home video game systems could play only games that were built into the machines themselves. Mr. Lawson’s ideas anticipated — if they did not entirely enable — a colossal international business.

(Click here to read the full story on the NY Times website. May GOD Rest the soul of this brilliant modern American inventor, and may HE Bless the Lawson family in their time of grief and need.)

Hooked On The American Dream

They Shoot Black Movies...Don't They?

James McBride: "Being a Maid"

"THE LARRY DAVIS SHOW" (and the full "American Gangster" episode)

"The Peace Sign" (Barry Michael Cooper's 1990 Directorial Debut)

More Video From The Planet Rock Panel@The Paley Center-12.September.2011:Melle Mel

More Video From The Planet Rock Panel@The Paley Center-12.September.2011: Azie Faison

More Video From The Planet Rock Panel@The Paley Center-12.September.2011: Nelson George

AP: Blogger Attacked At KFC-Points Finger At Hip Hop Star

New Jack Epoch (2008 Liner Notes From New Jack Swing Gold Anthology)

AP Exclusive: Hip Hop Star Melts Down In Press Conference After Botched Suicide Attempt

Breaking News: Hip Hop Star Found Dead In Paris

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

"New Jack" Anthology Xcrpt: "Crack" (Spin Magazine-Feb. 1986)

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

"New Jack City Eats Its Young" Xcrpt: "The Diary Of Nino Brown"

Video of Barry Michael Cooper Moderating The Planet Rock Doc Panel @ The Paley Center 12 September 2011

The American Prattle (A Poem?)

Xcrpt From The "New Jack City Eats Its Young" Anthology

22 September 2011! New Jack City Eats Its Young!

Game of Thrones (Watching Opulent Gangsters Draped In Gilded Lonelihood)

Raymond Jones: A Magnificent State of Humble Grace

Dr. Dre (Chronic Symphonies Dressed in a Full Metal Jacket)

What If President Obama Really Was..."Dat Brother From Another Planet"?

The Talented Mr. Ro$$ (The Fake Autobiography of William L. Roberts)

Gil Scott-Heron: A Life Without Commercial Interruption

Ghettofab Is Burning: The Cinematic Fire of Diddy's Gasoline Dreams

The Earthquake Diaries (Apocalypse...Now???)

President Obama's "Trump" Card

Mediaite-GOP Official: President Obama Is From the Planet of the Apes

Vanity Fair-Mod Character Study As Classic Film; Antonioni's "Blow Up"

Philippe Garner: Jill, your role in Michelangelo Antonioni’s Blow-Up created an indelible image that has become emblematic of the London scene in the 60s. How did it happen that you got cast for the film?

(click here to read the full story on the Vanity Fair website)

Mediaite-President Obama and The "Birthers"; Clowning The Clowns

Yahoo News-This Just In: President Obama Is NOT A Wimp...

NY Times-Gerald A. Lawson, Video Game Pioneer Dies at 70