“So that went well,” he said, in lieu of hello. “What did he want with you?”
“PR stuff.”
“Specifically?”
“I don’t know yet. You ever heard of Jeremy Sharpe?”
“No.”
“Well, look him up.”
I could always share proprietary knowledge with Ira. He’d never given me a compliment in his life but he would saw off his own legs before double-crossing me. He spun his chair and launched Internet Explorer on his souped-up Dell.
“So you just accepted a job without knowing what it entails,” he blurted.
“I didn’t accept anything yet.” I looked over his shoulder. “I think it’s Sharpe with an E.”
“Doesn’t matter.” He punched it into Google. The list came up. There were only ten items on the page, but they were merely the first of 8,912 hits. You may be wondering how a media-savvy fellow like myself had never heard of this man, who merited so many mentions plus a score of dedicated fan sites. The answer was right there in the titles of those digital shrines. Jeremy Sharpe was just an alter ego. A not-so-secret identity. To his legions of acolytes, he was simply the rapper known as Hunta.
“Shit.”
“Shit indeed,” said Ira. “It was nice knowing you.”
Ira did know me. He knew there was no way in hell I’d turn down a challenge like this. But that didn’t mean I had to be happy about it. If my life were a computer adventure game, this would be the part where I saved. That way if I screwed up or died, I could just come back to this very place and time and try a different approach, like walking away.
Convenient, right? Too bad my game didn’t have that feature. All I had — all I have now — is hindsight and a whole lot of regret. I can’t go back. But sometimes, just to piss myself off, I play a few rounds of What If…?
TWO. RAP
~ ~ ~
It had burst forth from the chest of disco. The New York City dance clubs, the quintessential social scene of the seventies, phased out cheesy cover bands in favor of the vinyl-spinning disc jockey. Thanks to the invention of the mixer, club DJs were free to creatively fade, scratch and shift to their heart’s content. The reggae “dub” style of Jamaican mix masters gradually introduced a signature prominence of beat over melody. Then came the art of the toast, in which eurhythmic DJs worked up the crowd by shouting to their own groove. Finally, they delegated the microphone duties to an accomplice called the MC.
And thus the rapper was born.
Of course that’s just an oversimplified breakdown from a white guy with Web access. I had to look this stuff up, even though I was only a hop, skip, and bridge away from the cultural genesis while it was happening. What can I say? The street revolution never made its way to my cul-de-sac. In fact, my cracker white ass didn’t get its first peep of the hip or the hop until a fine-looking Deborah Harry (you know, Blondie) got the fabulous Fab 5 Freddy to put the rap in her famous “Rapture.”
Sad? Perhaps. But I at least caught the tail end of hip-hop’s commercial fertilization. It was in 1984 that a young MTV served me my first full platter of rap, the music video for Run DMC’s “Rock Box.” Suddenly the business that began with a seven-inch single from the Sugar Hill Gang became a chart-topping, Adidas-plugging, Aerosmith-reviving crossover bonanza. It was Run’s brother, Russell Simmons, who cofounded Def Jam Records, rap’s first commercial empire. And in 1986 Yo! MTV Raps—hosted by the same Fab 5 Freddy — began channeling a steady infusion of urban groove into the homes and hearts of those who could afford basic cable.
Mostly what we got was the sanitized, glamorized version of the genre. Call it hip-pop. Nobody considered MC Hammer a particularly dangerous influence on our nation’s youth, unless one had a fear of parachute pants. Vanilla Ice was only bad in a musical sense. And Will Smith, the Fresh Prince himself, was a media darling even to parents who just didn’t understand him. Those were the salad days, when a rapper could throw his hands in the air and wave them like he just didn’t care.
But things done changed. Once heavy metal music went the way of the Go-Go’s, the middle- and upper-class youth of America lost their chief means of alarming their elders. Meanwhile, old-school purists be came increasingly dismayed by the vacuous Top 40 “crap rap” that turned an artistic revolution into a corporate cash cow. By the early 1990s, MC Hammer had become a cartoon version of himself, a glittery Stepin Fetchit who danced his way through Kentucky Fried Chicken ads while drugs, crime, and police brutality continued to decimate the boys in the ‘hood. Just as the economic downturn of the seventies and the heroin invasion brought about the hip-hop movement, it was the Reagan era and crack that created a mass demand and supply of hard-core gangsta rap.
So much has been written and said about this genre, from so many ignorant sources, that I’m reluctant to add myself to the mix. The word “gangsta” itself is a flimsy label, as overused and misapplied as “feminist” or “politically correct.” Unlike those, however, gangsta rap is one of those rare scapegoats enjoyed by all. Dan Quayle said it had no place in our society. Newt Gingrich openly encouraged advertisers to pull their spots from radio stations that played it. Even waffling übercentrist Bill Clinton got props from the soccer moms when he condemned Sister Souljah for her seemingly anti-whitey comments in The Washington Post.
Truth be told, I was more than happy to keep my distance, to remain quietly uninformed and nonjudgmental. But with a simple two-word inscription on a mini-videocassette, Annabelle Shane threw the issue onto the nation’s front burner, right along with Jeremy Sharpe, aka Hunta. I had four hours to learn everything I could about the original Bitch Fiend. So much for that comfortable space I’d put between myself and America’s war with the hip-hop nation. I guess I just picked my side, yo.
5. SUBTEXT
The story was out of Annabelle’s hands. Now that the media had a full day to dress up the event, it was purely a network affair.
The CBS Evening News ran a glossy four-minute eulogy of Annabelle Shane: honor student, beloved daughter, tragic symbol of a generation gone out of control. Over at ABC, Peter Jennings took a more macroscopic look at the carnage. What’s happening in our nation’s schools? How did they become so violent? More important, how can you tell if your child is on the edge? NBC picked the fruit off its own tree when it focused on the post-Melrose panic that’s infected the country. Over six hundred high schools sent their kids home early today. Another three hundred were closed entirely. Attendance rates in all remaining classes, kindergarten and up, were at their lowest since Columbine, the Titanic of school shootings. Once again, parents were afraid to drop their kids off at school. As well they should be. According to Ira, the chances of their offspring dying in an auto accident on the way to school were over nine hundred times greater than the odds of being shot by a classmate. The chances of their dying at home were only two hundred times greater. Despite all that, the L.A. Times ran a poignant piece on the rise in home schooling: it might just save your child’s life.
The one calm voice in the storm was Miranda, who spent eight hundred words highlighting the brief lives of the four students murdered by Annabelle. Yes, murdered. Once you read between her lines, it was obvious that Miranda was sick of all the double-standard knee-jerk empathy we adopted for our underage killers. Hey, assholes! This girl took innocent lives!