NWA’s Ice Cube talks about the influence of crack on their hit song “Dopeman” and the contradiction of how drug money destroyed the community and propelled his career. “Dopeman” Is one of the illest songs ever made because it takes you deep into the drug dealer’s perspective on selling drugs. The crack dealer was evil but we should still seek to understand what drove him and when we look into his soul we find that like the fiends he served, he too was an addict, but he was addicted to power and money. Crack dealers and their culture had a deep influence on hiphop culture and the Black community. In this ep we go into “Dopeman” with The D.O.C. from NWA and talk to several former drug dealers about how dealers changed the world around them.
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Touré [00:00:00] The ’80s were shaped by crack dealers doing evil things.
Alpo Martinez [00:00:05] We have murders two blocks away from the White House.
Touré [00:00:06] That’s Alpo Martinez, eighties street legend, speaking from prison to Feds magazine years ago,
Alpo Martinez [00:00:14] When we built this big drug deal in D.C., it was such a big deal. That was such a big thing. This female started running her mouth about a situation that she never really know nothing about. And my man got so upset at that. Then he just said, You know what? She got to go. She talked too much.
Touré [00:00:30] But they were a major influence on hip-hop because, in America, we love gangsters.
Nelson George [00:00:36] There’s something quintessentially American about the glorification of gangster. My name’s Nelson George, and I was the executive producer of American Gangster on BET. There’s something about us as a nation that we have our official values, and then we have our real values.
Touré [00:00:51] Are official values include chastising drug dealers, but our real values include lionizing them.
NWA’s “Dopeman” [00:01:01] Dopeman Dopeman.
Touré [00:01:01] We know they’re evil. We know they’re hurting the community. We know they’re murdering people and ruining lives. But at the same time, many of us are in awe of their outlaw status. Their success at evading the law, their propensity for violence, their power in the shadowy underworld. The leaders of the underworld have had a huge impact on Hip hop and Black America.
Ice Cube [00:01:27] It turned our world upside down.
Touré [00:01:29] That’s the man himself. Ice Cube.
Ice Cube [00:01:32] When I had the license, really to, to be able to write the kind of songs that I wanted to write and write this, then I went for it, you know, and it was Dopeman was one of the first ones because I just saw the whole record, you know, from start to finish.
Touré [00:01:49] This is Being Black, the eighties. I’m Touré. And this is a look at an epic decade through the lens of some of the great songs of the era, not necessarily the best songs, but the songs that speak best to the issues that shaped the eighties. This time we’re diving into N.W.A.’s Dopeman and the drug dealers’ influence on Black America in the Eighties.
NWA’s “Dopeman” [00:02:15] Kick in the bass.
Touré [00:02:15] That insane synth line from N.W.A’s 1987 song, Dopeman, always makes me lose my mind that some scrunch-up-your-face type thunk right there. Dr. Dre produced that beat. He interpolated that synth line from the Ohio Players’ song Funky Worm. And when I closed my eyes and hear that line. I see that line curving in the air like the letter “S,” like smoke wafting up and out from a crack pipe and the beat. The beat is thumping hard as hell like a crackhead’s heart. After taking a big hit, at least, that’s how I hear it. Royce Da, 5’9, hears it like this.
Royce Da 5’9 [00:03:30] I was thinking of like the defibrillator when it’s flatlining, and then it goes straight. You know what I’m saying? Whoa. You know what I’m saying? Like, that’s how I. That’s how it hit me.
Touré [00:03:42] A defibrillator? Yes! Like the patient is dying, like from a crack overdose, before the song even starts. And after Dr. Dre is amazing build up. Here comes Ice Cube playing the part of the drug-slinging dopeman who’s warming up.
NWA’s “Dopeman” [00:04:00] It was once said by a man who couldn’t quit. Dopeman, please, can I have another hit? The dopeman said Cluck, I don’t give a shit.
Touré [00:04:09] Cube’s drug dealer is furious, ruthless, remorseless, and angry. You can feel the rage gushing out of him. The sort of rage that seems common in crack dealers and makes people afraid of them. One of the things that comes through in that record is the anger that the dopeman feels. Here’s Ice Cube again.
Ice Cube [00:04:31] You know, I’m really, you know, kind of explaining how it goes down, but also releasing the frustration that I have with their lifestyle ultimately because I’ve seen it, you know, tear down family members.
Touré [00:04:45] Biba Adams is from Detroit. She’s an editor at TheGrio, and she did a deep study on drug dealer culture in college.
Biba Adams [00:04:53] I think these are angry young men. These are angry people who are, you know, growing up under tough circumstances. There’s no opportunity out there for them. Then this comes along, and it was even more anger because you have to have that anger as your shield. You have to be angry to be able to even pull a trigger, you know, at another human being. And so I think that the anger really was a protective thing. Anger is a great motivator as well. When you can say I’m angry at the country for keeping me from opportunity, I’m angry at this. I’m angry that. It can be a really good excuse to do bad things.
Touré [00:05:32] Dopeman is powered by the anger of young black L.A. People who grew up in streets that prepared them for battle.
The DOC rapper [00:05:41] I flew to L.A., and it was just like Vietnam.
Touré [00:05:44] That’s the legendary rapper, the D.O.C.
The DOC rapper [00:05:48] Hi this is D.O.C.. The sixth member, some say, of N.W.A.
Touré [00:05:52] He said Compton in the eighties at night was scary.
The DOC rapper [00:05:57] I pray the young guys in Los Angeles. They weren’t raised for war. Those guys were raised for combat, so they didn’t have any other goal in mind. But just by any means necessary. You’re not going to survive in South Central unless you are battle tested and already was a late, serious fakers to come outside and pontificate on how life is supposed to be. You better bring some motherfucking gun players or something if you’re going to be outside. You raised the fight, you know. You’re raised to be out on the street against those motherfuckers on that street.
Touré [00:06:34] That’s the vibe of dopeman. Cube’s talking about a young man who’s got an Uzi and a temper, and he’s angry at everything, including his customers. One of the song’s biggest ideas is that the crack dealer hates his customers.
NWA’s “Dopeman” [00:06:52] Living in Compton, California CA. His Uzi’s up your ass if he don’t get paid. Nigga beggin’ for a credit, he’s knocking out teeth. Clocking much dollars on the first and fifteenth.
Touré [00:07:01] A good capitalist is supposed to love his customers. They’re the ones making him rich. But crack dealers had a whole different relationship with the fiends.
Samson Styles [00:07:10] So that added. So as far as if you’re not going to care about yourself, I’m damn sure not going to care about you. So that also permeated within, you know, the atmosphere of drug dealers.
Touré [00:07:22] That’s my man Samson.
Samson Styles [00:07:24] My name is Samson Styles. So you was looked down upon if you used drugs, even though I making money from you, still look down for using.
Touré [00:07:33] Sampson was in the streets for years.
Samson Styles [00:07:36] I grew up in the streets. Once the crack game came into existence, I got heavy into that. I went from selling crack to robbing crack dealers, going back to selling crack again. I hustled in North Carolina, Virginia, Ohio. People that’s ask from the streets, they know me. You know, I did seven years in prison. I’ve been shot five times, everything that the street had to over. I participated and now overcame and became a broadcast award-winning journalist, and changed my life.
Touré [00:08:08] Sampson and others said Cube’s sense of disdain for the crackheads was widespread among dealers, and it came from the fact that crackheads seem to care nothing for themselves. How can you respect someone who doesn’t have self-respect? This is Nelson George.
Nelson George [00:08:24] The crackhead was looked down upon and vilified, and made fun of. It was a very derogatory way of viewing the customer. You know, in theory, the Coke user had money. It was more refined. There’s a big difference between a Coke dealer from the seventies and a crack dealer. I can speak to this because my father’s sold cocaine for a long time in Harlem. He said he used to say his clients were the kings and queens and heads of state, and that is cocaine was an expensive drug to use, whereas crack so is Coke is like a fine sirloin steak. Crack is McDonald’s. So the relationship with the customer is that of a mass-market product. Get him in. Get him out.
Touré [00:09:04] In the eighties, the economic structure of Black America led to a handful of crack dealers, most of them young men holding a massive percentage of the wealth in the community. Ice Cube says he’s.
NWA’s “Dopeman” [00:09:16] Rocking much dollars on the first and fifteenth.
Touré [00:09:18] Meaning whenever the welfare checks roll in, the money flows to him. It’s almost like the community was playing a game of Monopoly where the crack dealers had Broadway and Park Place, and they had hotels on them, and no one else had any property, so their bankroll was gigantic, and everyone else’s was small.
Kevin Chiles [00:09:37] It felt like money was falling out of the sky. I’m Kevin Chiles. Currently, I’m CEO of Don Diva magazine. I’m also the author of The Crack Era. It’s called A Rise to Fall and the Redemption of Kevin Childs. I spent a little bit of time incarcerated for running what’s considered it’s called the CCE, Continuing Criminal Enterprise, which considered me to be a kingpin.
Touré [00:09:57] Kevin made a ton of money in the streets.
Kevin Chiles [00:10:01] And the money came really fat. I was probably 90, 20 years old when I see my first million dollars a year. Two before that, I didn’t know where my meals was coming from, and now here I am. I could travel the world; I could buy pretty much anything I want.
Touré [00:10:13] When the drug dealers held a gigantic share of the community’s wealth, they had an outsized say in what happened in the community, in what businesses or institutions started or continued, and which ones didn’t. For example, the entire existence of NWA flows out of Eazy-E making money in the drug game and investing it into the launch of NWA and his label Ruthless Records.
The DOC rapper [00:10:38] The story goes that it was all Eazy’s money, and that’s pretty much the truth. And Eazy got his money by any means necessary.
Touré [00:10:52] So I asked Cube if easy having his own money from the street gave them the freedom to say whatever. Part of what powered NWA was. Y’all were standing on Eazy’s money that he had made on the street, so you could say whatever you want.
Ice Cube [00:11:07] He was a dopeman. And, you know, at the end of the day, you know, I seen him put rocks in his. We had a shot of that in the movie a little bit. We put in stubbornness, speakers pull it out, served. Do his thing. And so we didn’t care where the money came from. It was like studio time; just go. We can do anything we want to do, say anything we want to say. Yep, go for it. And it was the freedom that we needed to make a record like Dopeman.
Touré [00:11:35] The song Dopeman may not have ever existed without drug money. I mean, as raw and real as hip hop was, N.W.A. Stood out for how honest and aggressive they were about life on the street and the feelings of the hood.
NWA [00:11:49] Fuck the police coming straight from the underground.
Touré [00:11:51] They probably would have scared a lot of labels away or at least had labels rejecting their most honest, raw stuff.
NWA’s “Dopeman” [00:11:58] Guys like I caue the Dopeman hit her.
The DOC rapper [00:12:01] Yeah, it was a song when my, my, my debut called Bridget, and it was the one song that was in the tradition of those guys. Those guys was music, and Atlantic made me take that shit right off, you know? It was, like, no. That didn’t really work for us. That goes back to your point about the freedom to put out what you want to put out. It’s my opinion that NWA could put out in those songs like “Fuck tha Police” really only because they had that money, Eazy’s money behind when they were doing independent music, and you didn’t have the confines of the machine telling you what you could and couldn’t say.
Touré [00:12:40] They had enough money to run their own label. So they could get on the mic and say whatever they wanted. A lot of the hip-hop industry was aided and abetted by drug money. This is Royce, the 5’9
Royce Da 5’9 [00:12:52] I remember just hearing distinctive stories about Alpo, like, invested money into stuff related to labels. Bad Boy.
Touré [00:13:00] Kevin Child said the same thing.
Kevin Chiles [00:13:02] You know, I had more of an association with Roc-A-Fella.
Touré [00:13:05] On the great podcast Louder Than a Riot, Too Short said.
Too Short [00:13:08] Crack had a lot to do with why Too Short succeeded because the crack money financed basically hip hop nationwide. Before I signed to Jive Records. Everything I ever did was funded by cocaine. Everything. I can’t go to Bank of America. I couldn’t walk into Wells Fargo, say all I need is five grand to start the company. It was 50 banks that I knew of in Oakland. Fifty different dudes that I knew they had to bag that might be interested in taking a small a small piece of their earnings helped me start Too short.
The DOC rapper [00:13:44] The drug money just offered the guys at the bottom the opportunity to get in on the ground floor. I really believed that was a blessing because, just for that very reason, for that without that, you don’t a lot a lot of young entrepreneurs building themselves up in and having access to billions of dollars.
Touré [00:14:06] A lot of hip-hop artists got help from crack dealers.
Kevin Chiles [00:14:10] Even in the instance of L.L. Cool J, there was times that he would wear our jewelry or use our cars as props in the video. This is early on in his career. It’s not just him; it’s a bunch of rappers. They knew us. And when they want to do a video, the would borrow our cars, our jewelry, you know, we would, like I said, dress them up.
Touré [00:14:26] And many artists got direction from crack dealers.
Jim Jones [00:14:29] Every rapper should be thankful for the hustlers that came up before them.
Touré [00:14:34] That’s the rapper Jim Jones from Dipset.
Jim Jones [00:14:38] The eighties, lifestyle, and nineties lifestyle something that we still emulate and glorify today. When we came as we wanted to be, just like the dudes be seen on the corner with the new sneakers and the jewelry on, with the prettiest girls in all the fly cars. We didn’t know about anything else but what we saw. We didn’t know the circumstances. We didn’t know it was bad. If it was good, we just knew we wanted that. They wanted to be fly like that. All the musicians want to be like the drug dealers. And starting from back, as far as I remember from like LL Cool J and things like that. Like he wanted, he had one of the hustlers from my project, Big Dave, who probably was one of the richest dudes to come out of Harlem, had his car on the cover of one of his albums and things like that.
Touré [00:15:18] Big drug dealers who had more money than they knew what to do with. Often helped people by giving them money so they could be athletes or launched businesses. Nelson George saw that.
Nelson George [00:15:29] There were a lot of video stores, barbershops, beauty salons that were had drug money funded into a candy stores, rim shops, stuff like that.
Touré [00:15:38] Kevin Charles lived that.
Kevin Chiles [00:15:40] So there was kids who played basketball and went off to college that we helped to finance, that we sponsored trips all the time for whatever was actually I in the early days of the Rucker. I financed the Rucker that’s infamous today. I was instrumental in that. And I got, I mean, for years at a time, I actually paid to pay for the referees, to pay for the trophies whenever they fell short a certain kind of way. So there’s a lot of things like that that we did that was behind the scenes, but we didn’t do it for the gratification of somebody saying that we did it. We did it because, you know, it was our community. We understood what certain people were doing, and we assisted them, hoping that in some kind of way, you know, they reciprocated. So somewhere down the road, I know that the community that that I helped destroy, there was a mindset of mine that I figured I would offset by giving back equally.
Touré [00:16:27] For deeper than providing money itself. For some people, the crack dealers provided the inspiration to be entrepreneurial. Samson Syles talked about that.
Samson Styles [00:16:37] We always taught coming up, then, to be your own boss, even if he was working for someone temporarily. That big dream is to get your own connect, to get your own product, to have their own workers, to have your own black, to have your own stuff going and all. And that transformed, you know, into legal businesses as well. And a lot of the drug dealers back then, you’ll see them with a cab stand or a grocery store or pool hall, bar. And this kind of inspired, you know, that youth coming up. They wanted their own stuff. They didn’t want the drugs. They might have wanted the bar. They wanted to have a pool hall. They wanted to have a cab stand, So it kind of forced that entrepreneurial spirit. Before that, I remember coming up and with my mother basically saying, you know, go to school so you could get a good job; it was basically go to school so you could get a good job and work for some kind of be miserable. I seen my father miserable working for someone. The government. He was a dental technician, and he always was angry. So I think the drug dealers in the ’80, they definitely impacted the entrepreneurial spirit that exists within the black community today.
Touré [00:17:47] Kevin Chiles remembers when Diddy, who used to be called Puffy or Puff, was young, like before he started Bad Boy, and how the energy and the example of Harlem dealers inspired him.
Kevin Chiles [00:18:01] Puff, at the time when he was just starting, he would hang out at Harlem quite a bit, you know, So he but basically gone at a certain degree of credibility for hanging with the guys uptown, you know, and seeing what almost all we were doing in the street as far as marketing our products. He sort of took that concept. It, you know, just used it in the music business.
Touré [00:18:21] A lot of hip hop’s entrepreneurial spirit flows from the example of the crack dealer.
Samson Styles [00:18:28] But, you know, the people make the Jay-Z’s and the Dame Dash’s, and you know the Master P’s, the Too Shorts. They all were inspired by the East, by the crack epidemic.
Touré [00:18:39] To say nothing of how hip hop went from rappers in the mid-eighties saying, I see drug dealers to rappers in the late eighties and nineties saying, I am a drug dealer or I was a drug dealer. At one point, it was almost like a necessary part of an MCs resume to be able to say he’s been a drug dealer. Niggas went from getting on the mic and calling out evil to saying; I am the monster.
Breaking Bad [00:19:05] I am the one who knocks.
Biba Adams [00:19:08] I don’t think hip-hop culture.
Touré [00:19:09] That’s Biba Adams.
Biba Adams [00:19:10] I don’t think the hip hop generation; I don’t think the hip hop industry as an as an economic industry and a huge driver of black economic success, which it doesn’t get its props for. I don’t think it would exist without the crack epidemic. I know 100%. I knew a drug dealer that was a woman. Her name was Pig. I remember that. That was her nickname. And she had a Mustang. 5.0. You had to have a 5.0, especially here in Detroit. And you know, seeing her with big knots didn’t make me want to sell drugs, but there was something about her that I admired. I admired that she was fresh; I admired that her hair was done. I admired that she had a nice car. She had all this swag and that she was doing her own thing. And especially that she was doing it in a male industry. And I know. I mean, I haven’t forgotten Pig to this day. And I probably that was I was I had like I’m 14 years old. I definitely think that seeing success created in me personally the idea that I could try anything. I could do almost anything, you know, that anything was possible. If you put your mind to it and you put your grind to it, and you know, you hustle. So I still live with that spirit in me.
Touré [00:20:22] Now, a word from our sponsors.
Biggie Smalls [00:20:29] It’s The Ten crack Commandments.
Touré [00:20:31] In 1997, a decade after N.W.A.’s Dopeman, Biggie dropped Ten Crack Commandments, laying down the laws of the crack game. Nothing about the game had changed since Cube’s day. Ten Crack Commandments could have dropped in ’87, except for one thing. The song’s perspective is an example of how hip hop’s response to crack had changed, where Ice Cube was talking about someone else. Biggie was saying he himself was a dealer. He is the monster. And so his song reveals part of how eighties crack dealers felt. It helps us understand part of why Cube’s character in Dopeman was so angry. The number one thing that stands out when I go through Big’s Commandments is this over and over. Big is saying you can’t trust anyone. That’s the majority of the lessons on the song. You can’t trust your hood.
Biggie Smalls [00:21:26] Never let no one know how much dough you hold.
Touré [00:21:30] You can’t trust your crew.
Biggie Smalls [00:21:31] Them cats who squeeze your guns can hold jobs too.
Touré [00:21:34] Don’t talk to cops.
Biggie Smalls [00:21:36] If nigga think you snitchin’, they ait trying to listen.
Touré [00:21:38] In law number three, he comes right out and says it.
Biggie Smalls [00:21:41] Number three. Never trust nobody. Your mom’sll set up that ass, probably gassed up. Hoodied and masked shit for a fast buck. She be lying in the bushes to light up that ass up.
Touré [00:21:52] You can’t even trust Mom’s damn. Big’s exaggerating for comedic purposes here. I’ve met his mom. She’s a saint. But she did inadvertently mess with his crack this one time. His man D Roc was on my other podcast Touré Show, and he told me the story.
D Roc [00:22:09] We are after we finished cooking, you know what I mean? And we said, you know, set it on the windowsill to dry in his room. You know he had that window with the fire escape? So we sat it there and think we maybe went downstairs. Definitely no smoking in the house. Forget that. You know what I mean? So we went downstairs to smoke, and then we came back up. Soon as he opened the door, she was like, right at the door. I was like, I know how many times I got to tell you about leaving his dishes in your room, you know, at night, put it in the sink. So he looked at me. He’s like, What dishes? She’s like the dish left on the windowsill with the hard mashed potatoes. We was like, He’s like, All right ma. He was trying like brush by real quick to, like, get to the kitchen and say no. Is that I’m all right? Right, right. So we went to the kitchen. We just opened as you didn’t put it in actual sink. The good thing is she scraped it in the garbage first and then washed the plate. So, you know, there’s like, I’ll grab the garbage like, we was digging through that garbage, like homeless people. We had, like, barbecue sauce. Everything on it. Yeah. I’ll tell you, and it’s still wet.
Touré [00:23:09] But that’s not what Big’s talking about in this song. Drug dealers got a lot of money, and they can’t call the police, so they’re a target. And a lot of people are constantly thinking about robbing them. So they had to be distrustful of everyone, including family. A marijuana dealer I know once told me that his blood brother had just taken $250,000 that he had in a safe. And it gets way worse than that. Sampson knows all about that.
Samson Styles [00:23:38] It was people that were kidnapping members of their own families for money and stuff like it brought out the ugliness in a lot of people. So you had to just be on guard at all times.
Touré [00:23:49] Here’s Nelson George again.
Nelson George [00:23:51] I look at all of those crack-era narratives. It’s a paranoid lifestyle. You’re doing something that’s patently illegal that involved large sums of cash, and that there’s always a threat of violence in terms of you being robbed as a dealer. You’ve been betrayed to the police. You’ve even in dealing with this wherever you wholesale or retail your drugs from. There’s always a chance you’re getting beat on the deal. I mean, that’s one thing that I really think about. In fact, the whole crack era was, quite honestly, was a sense of paranoia.
Touré [00:24:22] In the eighties, the war on drugs put one in three young black men in the grip of the criminal justice system at some level. So there were a lot of people in the hood who were incentivized to tell the police things in order to help themselves. Sometimes they told the police the truth; sometimes they lied. So everyone had to be paranoid about who they were talking to and who they were seen talking to. What does it do to a community when so many people are afraid of so many people in the community? In the Ten Crack Commandments, Big is far from angry. He’s cool. He’s laid back. Really. He seems detached, which is representative of how the crack era brought about a sense of desensitization. The homicide rate went through the roof during the crack era between the late eighties and the early nineties; the murder rate in America was higher than it’s ever been. So many people got used to seeing dead bodies and mourning people. And many of us grew cold. It happened to Samson.
Samson Styles [00:25:29] I think if that happened during the crack era, man, it desensitized a majority of people, a majority of people coming up at that time. They’d know someone or witnessed someone getting killed, getting murdered. I could count over 100 people that I’d know personally that passed away, that got murdered. You know, and I can’t count how many I’ve seen with my own eyes.
Touré [00:25:51] Happened to Kevin Chiles
Kevin Chiles [00:25:53] You know, you could be at a barbershop, and somebody could have lost their life. And it’s just literally barbershop conversation. This is a casual conversation. You can know someone who was sentenced to 20, 30 years, and you just it just rolls off your mouth like, hey, you know, so-and-so just got 30 years. It’s just we just normalized sort of behavior. I think a lot of us live with a lot of trauma unresolved trauma.
Touré [00:26:13] The trauma caused by the widespread murder. And the ubiquitous fear of murder led to many people becoming very unemotional.
Kevin Chiles [00:26:22] You couldn’t be like no soft smile and happy-go-lucky drug dealer. You just couldn’t., right? You had to suppress that. You know, if something made you laugh, you couldn’t laugh in public, really, you know, you had to just like and hold the rest of that in, you know, because people look at you as that, that’s a weakness. Your favorite song the come on in the club, and you couldn’t dance. You just bob your head, and you know, because you got to jewelry on, you don’t nobody tried you. You got business in the streets going on. You got women that you’re seeing that you don’t want them to think that they could try to set you up to get robbed because they have to know that there severe consequences. So it robbed you of your soul, and it created this image that really was a false image because people held that they could take their true feeling by. So, you know, being hard, being hardened at that time, that’s what was also glorified. You know, not laughing. Oh, he’s serious.
Touré [00:27:19] That impulse to be unemotional traveled throughout the generation far beyond the crack dealers. I mean, so many Black male role models were unemotional, were dead serious. And that’s what we thought being a man was. And that stunted the emotional development of a whole generation of Black men. It happened to me. It happened to Royce Da, 5’9.
Royce Da 5’9 [00:27:43] It had an effect on me, for sure. I mean, what it is, is just suppressive feeling. So after you suppress them for so long, I know speaking to me, I suppressed them for so long that it just became like. Like a reaction, just like a go-to. It’s like a trigger. So I got to a point where nothing I felt like nothing bothered me. And by the time I got to my grandma’s funeral and in ’97, I remember sitting there, and I couldn’t cry. I was looking at everybody else crying, and I was thinking to myself, I want to cry. Why am I not crying? I know I look crazy. How come everybody else is crying, and I’m not crying? And I was trying to find it, and I couldn’t find it. You know what I mean? It was like, I don’t know if I was numb or if I just tucked it away so many times that I lost the ability to be able to feel in that way. And it never goes anywhere. You just take it, and you put it somewhere, but it comes back in many ways, you know? I mean, mine came back in the form of alcoholism and all kinds of just trauma.
Touré [00:28:40] Both Biggie and Eazy-E died far too young. Big was murdered on the streets. Eazy died of AIDS. Their deaths are part of the trauma we all dealt with. Hip-hop culture has been through a lot of death, both iconic figures and civilians who are part of the culture. All that death has caused that trauma that we’re talking about and led to people’s souls being paralyzed, their emotions being frozen, and also to a lot of squandered humanity. Biggie and Easy, as well as Tupac and many others who died or got locked away in prison, are emblematic of the thousands and thousands and thousands of young black lives lost. This is Nelson George.
Nelson George [00:29:28] There is an entire generation of really potentially brilliant people, a really interesting or innovative people who just died stupidly and young. Biggie and Tupac to me or metaphors more that everyone talks about them, but they are metaphors for scores and scores of people who didn’t make it past 25. That’s just a loss that will never calculate how much potential human potential was squandered. In acts of violence, though the loss of smart, creative talent was just, it’s just immense. And it was over a corner, a corner that’s now probably has has a Bed Bath Beyond on it.
Touré [00:30:06] Being Black in the eighties is quite often about tragedy and heartbreak. The crack trade in the war on drugs put millions in prison or in the cemetery, or in the grip of addiction that damaged their lives. But being Black in the eighties is also about us taking steps forward. It’s a complicated period. It’s also about the rise of hip-hop and the industry around it that created millionaires and solid jobs and a culture that would take over the world. It’s also about finally winning the long, hard battle to create a holiday for Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. That’s why Stevie Wonder’s song Happy Birthday is the subject of our next episode of Being Black in the Eighties. I’m Touré, and this was Being Black the Eighties. The next episode of this show is already available, and soon we’ll be back with Being Black The Seventies. This podcast was produced by me Touré and Jesse Cannon and scored by Will Brooks, with additional production by Brian de Meglio and executive production from Regina Griffin. Thank you for listening to this podcast from theGrio Black Podcast Network. Please tell a friend and check out the other shows on theGrio Black Podcast Network, including Blackest Questions with Chrissy Grier, Dear Culture with Panama, Jackson, TheGri Daily with Michael Harriot, and Writing Black with Maiyish Kai.
