When I’m asked how it is that I became a crime writer, I usually talk about how when I was ten years old, my brother Lee (who also became a crime writer) went off to college—this was in the early 80s—and left me with a couple grocery bags stuffed with mysteries, crime novels, and thrillers, which he would then periodically refill when he came home for the holidays. So before puberty hit I’d already devoured Donald Westlake’s Parker and Dortmunder novels, Robert B. Parker’s entire Spenser series, everything Elmore Leonard and Lawrence Block had written to that point, Ross MacDonald’s Archer books, truly some of the greats. But also, pivotally, stacks of the Not-So-Greats: Dime-store paperbacks that were usually number forty-eight in what seemed to be an infinite stretch of books written by a people who may or may not have ever existed, each installment precisely one hundred and eighty pages long, almost all involving a cagey assassin who had to single-handedly bring down the Mafia, or the KGB, or a secret organization with aims to rule the world.
When the books I read featured a strong anti-hero, that’s typically what appealed to me most: A person walking into chaos and righting some of the wrongs. Or none of the wrongs. Just clearing the deck. Then getting out just in time, not sticking around to collect taxes. Red Harvest? Yeah. That worked. This love then turned into something a bit darker, which is to say books primarily about the bad guy, about the bank robber, about the killer, about the gangster. The Killer Inside Me both revolted and compelled me. The Friends of Eddie Coyle brought me into a world—and a mindset—that I’d never quite experienced, even more so than The Godfather, whose pageantry seemed phony to me. I was always more interested in how a guy decided to wear the black hat versus how he decided to wear a tailored black suit, how one goes from needing money to robbing a bank, how someone decides to do a favor for a guy that involves killing a guy, develops a taste for it, starts to do professionally. And in that way, I also started working backwards, reading the Gold Medal pulps, and Westerns, becoming familiar with how the assassin began as the lone gunman striding the west.
So. Not all that unusual, really. Kind of like how Dexter was raised by his father to be a serial killer, except I was raised to write about crooks and criminals by my evil older brother.
And then something pivotal happened. It was the fall of 1988. I was 17 years old, living in Palm Springs, working a long-con at a hotel pool for a guy called the Tan Man (no, really—it’s a long story, but it involves robbing tourists of their money in exchange for ersatz sun tan lotion, which was really just baby oil…), all of which meant I had enough money in my pocket to go to the Wherehouse and buy whatever I wanted. And I wanted the new tape by NWA. I remember ripping it open and shoving it into the stereo of my Nissan Sentra. Fifteen seconds later, I heard the words that would change the way I looked at writing bad guys:
Straight outta Compton, crazy motherfucker named Ice Cube
***
Thirty years on, this opening salvo from Ice Cube still rattles me. I’d heard plenty of early hardcore rap by the time Straight Outta Compton came out—the year before, for instance, every suburban kid in Palm Springs was bumping Too $hort’s Born to Mack and “Dope Man” and “Boyz-N-The-Hood” off of the NWA compilation album NWA and the Posse (which I recognize is absurd to imagine: golf courses, Bob Hope, and Eazy-motherfucking-E, but that’s how it absolutely was)—the difference here was that the narrative had changed. This wasn’t a third-person story anymore, nor was there any equivocation, instead, this was a first person narrator telling you that he was a crazy motherfucker, which tells the listener, in seconds, that anything can happen. And then, two verses later, an entire genre is born when Eazy-E raps:
See, I don’t give a fuck, that’s the problem
I see a motherfucking cop, I don’t dodge him.
Plenty of the anti-heroes I’d loved reading about did not, naturally, give a fuck either. But they never said it. Or if they did speak to their existential nature, they did a fair amount of hemming and hawing on it. Sam Spade may not have given a fuck, in many cases, but the closest he came to saying so was this, in The Maltese Falcon:
“You’ll never understand me, but I’ll try once more and then we’ll give it up. Listen. When a man’s partner is killed he’s supposed to do something about it. It doesn’t make any difference what you thought of him. He was your partner and you’re supposed to do something about it. Then it happens we were in the detective business. Well, when one of your organization gets killed it’s bad business to let the killer get away—bad for that one organization and bad for every detective everywhere. Third, I’m a detective and expecting me to run criminals down and let them go free is like asking a dog to catch a rabbit and let it go. It can be done, all right, and sometimes it is done, but it’s not the natural thing.”
Now, of course, the chief difference here—apart from the obvious differentiation in form—is that Ice Cube and Eazy-E have positioned themselves as gangsters while Spade was obviously a detective, but we’re still talking about a code of conduct. Sam Spade was a crazy motherfucker, too. In Elmore Leonard’s Swag, the code is a list of ten things:
- Always be polite on the job, say please and thank you.
- Never say more than is necessary.
- Never call your partner by name—unless you use a made-up name.
- Dress well. Never look suspicious or like a bum.
- Never use your own car. (Details to come.)
- Never count the take in the car.
- Never flash money in a bar or with women.
- Never go back to an old bar or hangout once you have moved up.
- Never tell anyone your business. Never tell a junkie even your name.
- Never associate with people known to be in crime.
That was definitely a guy who gave a fuck.
The rest of Straight Outta Compton would only go on to solidify this new fictional conceit in my mind, about this shift in power dynamic, where the street gangster didn’t adhere to any of the rules of pleasant society, where you could write a first person narrator as the baddest person on the planet, as a crazy motherfucker, but somehow not totally alienate the listener (or a reader, eventually). Michael Corleone may have been the smoothest gangster ever, but he was nevertheless still the kind of person who would testify in front of a senate sub-committee. It didn’t seem to me that MC Ren, NWA’s “villain in black,” would make that same choice, all of which seemed revolutionary. Here, in gangster rap, the bad guy was the hero, there was no scale that got evened out, and yet somehow it was still entertaining. I wanted to tell stories like that.
***
Of course there was plenty to not appreciate about the burgeoning form: the rote misogyny, homophobia, and, often, anti-Semitism…and, likewise, in the crime fiction I was reading, too, both of the classic variety and what amounted to contemporary work, these same issues kept popping up as well. And what is painfully obvious: there were no women, period, that weren’t either an object or in a body bag. It would be another few years before Vicki Hendricks’ Miami Purity flipped me upside down again, in a similar way. But when I was 17, I was just amazed with what these rappers could get away with.
It’s always the getting away with it that can doom any artist, be they rappers or writers. Because once you achieve the shock value, there has to be substance and, eventually reflection, if you want to keep pace with your audience. As gangster rap blossomed, an unusual thing began to happen, which is that what began as this response to the streets started to take on the cliches of old gangster stories, the original view of Ice Cube about not giving a fuck, about dodging the cops, instead began to incorporate tropes of organized crime, both real and imagined. The Geto Boys, for instance, who were positioned to be more shocking and more violent, and thus more real than NWA, gained part of their popularity by cutting in bits and pieces of dialog from the film Scarface, building whole albums around samples from the film. From this point forward, gangster rap became littered with references to Mob lore—the number of songs which drop John Gotti in their lyrics must number in the thousands by this point, everyone from Dr. Dre to Notorious BIG to, in recent years, Migos—and the very aesthetic began to mimic classic gangster and crime fiction, rising from nothing to something, on the back of a criminal enterprise: Jay-Z started out hustling with his “Godfather flow” in 1996, eventually knew his rights by “99 Problems” and, now, has gone totally legit, dropping all pretense of the gangster in favor of the not just a business, man, but a corporation. In the more underground gangster rap, there was plenty of talk about specific street gangs—Bloods and Crips et al—but perhaps it’s no surprise that what became most commercially viable in terms of gangster rap in the 90s immediately began to morph into pastiches from The Godfather, Goodfellas, and Scarface, with a real life character as notorious as Suge Knight, who oversaw the gangster rap label Death Row, constantly appearing in media photos portrayed as a Don; a case, it turned out, of truth and fiction morphing.
Plenty of the anti-heroes I’d loved reading about did not, naturally, give a fuck either. But they never said it. Or if they did speak to their existential nature, they did a fair amount of hemming and hawing on it.The why of this can also be traced back to a simple issue: Many of the gangster rappers simply were not gangsters and thus they were writing about what they didn’t know—an edict I believe in as a writer of novels—which resulted in some trite records. Still, the cliché persisted to the point now that the Mob references are almost comical in nature. No one thinks Childish Gambino is a criminal, after all, but the Gambino Crime Family is alive and well in New York, running drugs and doing the odd extortion and/or wholesale beating.
As a young crime writer, my fascination with gangster rap waxed and waned—I loved the idea of creating characters who could exist outside of societal norms, but the fact, too, was that it’s easier to do that if there’s a good beat and a passive audience. Reading requires attention to the material whereas you can listen to gangster rap and enjoy it without ever paying attention to the lyrics simply because the music is appealing. And so I began to find that I needed gangster rap to tell me a story, or give me a documentary experience, not just be about how crazy a criminal might be – in short, I began to develop the need for believable characters. A song like “How I Could Just Kill A Man” by Cypress Hill, for instance, took me back to the thrill of reading noir fiction for the first time, when I learned the reasons why people made terrible choice. Here, you learn that the narrator can kill a man because he’s living in a world where existence is moment to moment, and to merely make a living, you need to be willing to risk your life:
How do you know where I’m at when you haven’t been where I’ve been
Understand where I’m coming from
When you’re up on the hill, in your big home
I’m out here, risking my dome
Just for a bucket, or a fast ducat
Just to stay alive, aiyyo I gotta say “fuck it”
This was a level of realism that I found exciting. It was also a life I’d never live and, honestly, was unlikely to get a first-hand view of anytime soon. But like many other gangster rappers of the era, great success pulled the bands away from the subjects that made them so initially compelling, or, at the very least, made their stories less believable. Once you know a rapper has gone multi-platinum, it’s harder to believe they’re so intimately connected to the life they’re rapping about, which is how the first gangster rap stars, like 2Pac, ended up rapping about the fine cognac and champagne they were drinking, the diamonds they were wearing, the cars they were driving. By 2008, for instance, Ice Cube wasn’t writing about ’64 Impalas anymore, not in “Gangsta Rap Made Me Do It,” his ode to how much of a gangster he still is, despite, you know, all the movies for children and whatnot:
I keep it gangsta and why should change that
Fuck you old motherfuckers tryin to change rap
But aren’t you the same cat that sat back when they brought cocaine back
I’m tryin to get me a Maybach
Personally, the veneer started to rub off in the early 90s, when I moved to Los Angeles for college and began to run into members of the world’s most notorious group at places like TGIFridays, Einstein’s Bagels, and Houston’s—Eazy-E practically held office hours at the TGIFridays in Woodland Hills—the gangsters who lived in my ears as ubiquitous as the screenwriters and novelists I encountered daily as I tried to learn the trade. Once you see Dr. Dre picking up a dozen bagels and some schmere, it’s hard to believe he’s popping one-time with his gat.
***
For the most part, I gave up gangster rap from about 1995 onward. I frankly found it too seeped in violence toward women, which is interesting because crime fiction itself was in the same place—the success of The Silence of the Lambs ushered in an era of crime novels predicated on unusual serial killers torturing and killing women—and, in large part, remains there, though fiction about organized crime, specifically, tends to abhor the killing of women (they are not “in the game,” as it were). But when I began writing a new series of books about organized crime and street gangs— 2014’s Gangsterland and 2017’s Gangster Nation and, at some point in the near future, Death of a Gangster—which take place over a five year period between 1998 and 2003, I found myself digging back into the genre, to find out what I’d missed, to get a view of the street again, and to act as a soundtrack when I wrote, all much to my wife’s derision.
“How can you listen to this?” she’d ask.
“It’s not real,” I’d say. I’d go through the litany of excuses: It’s like reading a book or watching a movie, people playing at a thing, no different than me writing about killers while I sit in my Pottery Barn house. But it all became harder and harder to justify the more I listened to the old music I’d loved and the more I dove into the new acts. Because, in fact, the bad things were worse—the objectification of women is stomach-churning—the good things more difficult to locate. The bravado of young men with nothing to lose, which used to appeal to me, now makes me sad. I came across a gangster rapper I particularly liked—Tee Grizzley—his song “First Day Out” ubiquitous in 2017. It was, in my view, the perfect distillation of the old school gangster ethos mixed with the present day, Tee Grizzley being bad enough to not give a fuck…but being savvy enough to employ a lawyer:
Feds was on me, what you know about related through money
I don’t know nothing, I just used to see ’em walk to the coney
I fuck with bitches my body count go from Pershing to Cody
Any further questions, you can take that up with the lawyer
The first couple listens were thrilling…until I did the research and found that I was literally listening to the true story of a man who’d done time for home invasion robbery and came out with a recording contract. I was repulsed, both by the truth and by my own hypocrisy. I want to write with a realistic spin…but I don’t want the actual reality? I believe in the rehabilitation of criminals, that art can help anyone learn empathy, but when I found that I was listening to truth I didn’t want to bounce to it in my headphones? And then I heard another of Grizzley’s songs, which seemed to address this very issue, “Win”:
How you gon’ motivate the youth, rapping that gangster shit?
This what they like, so I’ma make the shit
But even still, this my life, I gotta claim this shit
The challenge, naturally, is that the youth aren’t great with nuance. Just as I, at 17, found someone announcing themselves as a crazy motherfucker narratively alluring, so, too, might a kid think, well, Tee Grizzley made his millions by being a violent criminal, doing his time and coming out with an authentic story to tell over a ferocious beat, that seems like an easy path…
So is gangster rap, then, merely another form of crime fiction? To me, it can be in a way other musical forms have never quite approached.Of course, that’s not going to be the case for most—Donald Westlake and Lawrence Block didn’t turn me into a hitman, they just made me want to write about hitmen—and so, too, can a kid look at Ice Cube and Dr. Dre and Jay-Z and see what they really were: Not gangsters, but cinematographers. Or, at least, not gangsters for the long haul, because as Too $hort once rapped, gangsters don’t live that long. Not long enough to become media empires, anyway.
So is gangster rap, then, merely another form of crime fiction? To me, it can be in a way other musical forms have never quite approached. The outlaw has always existed in country music, both classic and contemporary, but in a more genteel way: no one believed Kris Kristofferson was pulling off heists. But that, too, is the strange thing: No one believes I’m out killing people merely because I write about doing so. It’s not the same for gangster rappers—there is a component of stylized fear that went a long way toward selling records back in the day, but when 2Pac and Biggie were eventually murdered, well, it all became all too real. So maybe gangster rap isn’t crime fiction. Maybe it’s crime fiction and true crime mixed into one.
And maybe that’s why, even through my own objections, I still find myself drawn to gangster rap, even when I reject all that it glorifies. Because as a writer of crime fiction, I’m still trying to find that moment when a character says something as vivid as Ice Cube’s initial pronouncement, that statement of fact that shifts a narrative, that influences a generation, and which strikes fear into the reader by telling them something they should already know: There’s someone out there who doesn’t give a fuck, maybe you should take the time to figure out why, before it’s too late.
