Daniel Price - Slick

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.

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!

Yes, but were they all innocent? As usual, it was CNN that had the time to bite into the underripe portion of the story, namely Bryan Edison and his merry band of Bitch Fiends. For today the network was content to simply get the questions out there. The L.A. County sheriff’s office refused to comment on that part of the investigation but at least confirmed that there was an investigation. You had to hand it to the folks at AOL-Time Warner-Turner. They sure knew how to foreshadow. They even threw in a few dozen mentions of Hunta, marking him up as next week’s grillhouse special.

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It took considerable effort to make myself late for the meeting. I ended up circling the Beverly Center for twenty minutes before making the final turn into L’Ermitage. There weren’t any quote-hungry reporters waiting outside the hotel, which meant someone had done a good job misleading the press. No doubt a gaggle of newsfolk were holding a camera-light vigil outside the gates of Casa de Hunta, in Silverlake. I pitied his mailman.

I took a deep breath in the elevator, gathering my wits and senses. Confronted by the clear scope of the project, not to mention my inexperience with the rap world, I couldn’t shake that “first day of school” feeling. That was fine as long as I didn’t show it. Being a celebrity’s crisis manager is like being the emperor’s new tailor. You have to earn his absolute confidence if you want him to wear the air you crafted. Still, I wished I had come into the situation knowing more. I’d spent the whole afternoon researching Hunta. Most of what I’d read was spoon-fed crap created by people like me: puff pieces full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

I knocked on the door to Suite 511, which opened to a square-headed, bear-size bodyguard. I could have used his stretched black T-shirt as a hammock.

“You Scott Singer?”

“Only if you’re happy to see him.”

He smirked politely, as if he’d never heard that joke before. “ID?”

I showed him my driver’s license.

“Lift your arms, please.”

He patted me down, just in case I was a pistol-packing publicist.

“Since we’re getting to know each other better,” I said, “what’s your name?”

“Just call me Big Bank.”

Too many bon mots entered my caffeinated mind, all of them in danger of being poorly received. I felt the primal need to prove to this excessively large man that he didn’t scare me, which pretty much proved that he did.

“What’s that in your shirt pocket?”

“Just my Palm Pilot, “ I said, showing him. “Can’t leave home without it.”

The best bodyguards made upward of five hundred dollars a day. Those were the ones who knew how to protect their clients from extortion as well as physical threats. For all Big Bank knew, I was carrying a digital recording device disguised as a Palm Pilot. I turned it on for him.

He nodded. “All right. You’re cool. Come in.”

Another satisfied customer. There was a neat little spy shop on Olympic Boulevard that an associate of mine turned me on to. Some of their gadgets were so fancy that you’d half expect Q to come out of the back room and demonstrate them. My handy toy—$850 after tax — was a digital recording device disguised as a Palm Pilot. It captured seventy minutes of audio on a removable chip the size of an airmail stamp ($92 each). Even better, it had a “Boss” button that displayed a snapshot of a Palm OS desktop, allowing me to trick the sharper tools in the shed, like Big Bank. As soon as I demonstrated it for him, it began recording.