“You know, I’m going to record my own album,” he told her.
Wilson burst out laughing.
“No,” he said. “I’m serious.”54
Three years after the 1992 release of The Chronic, Jay-Z still hadn’t launched a solo debut. A young photographer named Jonathan Mannion was among the first to learn that the rapper had plans of his own: Jay-Z and his business partners, Kareem “Biggs” Burke and Damon Dash, invited Mannion to propose cover art for Heir to the Throne—the working title of the record that turned into 1996’s Reasonable Doubt.
After shopping the record to the major labels and getting turned down, the trio had decided to press on and release it through their own Roc-A-Fella Records. A classic Jay-Z triple entendre, the name references the glitzy lifestyle embodied by the world’s first billionaire, John D. Rockefeller; the draconian drug laws bearing his family’s name, which Jay-Z flouted to form the basis of his own fortune; and what might happen to a fellow who got in his way. Just as Ruthless had with N.W.A., Jay-Z and his partners wrangled a distribution deal from Priority Records, this time in partnership with another indie label, called Freeze.
Mannion brought an unusual style of negotiating to his first meeting at Roc-A-Fella’s dingy downtown Manhattan office.
“I’m going to do [the album art] for three hundred dollars less than your lowest bid,” the photographer declared.55
“What does that even mean?” asked Dash.
“It means if Cousin Jimmy’s going to do it for a thousand dollars, I’m going to do it for seven hundred dollars. If someone’s shooting for five hundred dollars, I’ll do it for two hundred dollars. Someone offers you to do it for free, I guess I owe you three hundred dollars.”
“I don’t even get it.”
“I just want my expenses covered—I have a very clear vision for what this should feel like,” replied Mannion. “The Versace linen, speedboat, drug money, Miami, Scarface-y kind of thing? No, no, no, no. That’s not where you need to be. You need to be… surveillance, John Gotti, well-dressed, sharp, tailored, Brooklyn, roots, smoking, steamy, black-and-white.”
“That’s it.” Jay-Z had decided. “Let’s go.”
His look may have come together at the last minute, but the album itself overflowed with rugged beats by Christopher “DJ Premier” Martin and Clark Kent, along with guest appearances by Blige and Notorious B.I.G. The latter became friends with Jay-Z after Kent accidentally played Biggie the track for “Brooklyn’s Finest,” which he’d already promised to Jay-Z. The chunky wordsmith insisted on appearing on the track and, unannounced, accompanied Kent to his next recording session with Jay-Z. Biggie was so impressed by his new acquaintance’s verses that he went home to work on his half of the duet before recording it two months later. (Jay-Z also inspired him to memorize his rhymes rather than write them down.)56
Two days after Jay-Z’s initial meeting with Mannion, the rapper and Dash showed up with a new album title—Reasonable Doubt—and an understated black-and-white suits-and-fedoras wardrobe to match. The cover photo of an album known for its grim tales of the crime-ridden underworld was taken on the roof of a grand prewar building on Manhattan’s sleepy Upper West Side. For interior shots, Mannion took Jay-Z to the derelict docks along the nearby Hudson River, where a cluster of Trump towers would soon sprout.
“He definitely lets people [talk], and he reads people in that way,” says Mannion of Jay-Z. “He listens more than he speaks, and I think that when he does speak, it makes what he says… more calculated, or more carefully delivered.”
The artistic and business calculations paid off handsomely. Jay-Z’s dexterous rhymes and skillful rendering of a hustler’s life went on to sell 420,000 units its first year (perhaps double that if bootleg street sales are taken into account).57 The record “established Jay as one of his generation’s premier rappers,” wrote Rolling Stone in a review that placed Reasonable Doubt in the top fifteen debut albums of all time, ahead of work by legends like Bruce Springsteen and Jimi Hendrix.
As Reasonable Doubt took off, the Roc-A-Fella trio pressed Freeze and Priority for unpaid royalties. When the labels came up short, Jay-Z was able to arrange his release, along with the rights to his master recordings—a low-pressure task for someone accustomed to much higher-stakes negotiations in the street. The savvy move left him free to shop an already-hot album to major labels for a second run; Def Jam then brought him on board by purchasing one-third of Roc-A-Fella for $1.5 million. Jay-Z and his partners would retain two-thirds of their company, and therefore two-thirds of profits, while Simmons’s label would pay for recording, videos, and promotion.58
Even after his initial success, though, Jay-Z told anyone who would listen that he had planned to release Reasonable Doubt—now widely considered to be one of hip-hop’s best albums—and then fade back into the underworld,59 a sort of hip-hop Keyser Söze maneuver, while perhaps leaving the task of running Roc-A-Fella entirely to Dash.
“Jay was very quiet for a long time,” says Rosenblum, who planned the launch party for Reasonable Doubt, of the rapper’s business chops. “Nobody knew that he was anything other than an artist.”60
Branson and I have long since finished our glasses of Malbec, and he’s now waxing philosophical about the difference between young Puffy, the eager party promoter he once knew, and grown Diddy, the calculating centimillionaire selling the Bad Boy dream on a global level. I ask Branson what set Diddy apart.
“I praise him,” he says. “I call him Jimmy Clean Hands. You know what that reference is? You see Once Upon a Time in America?”61
He grins.
“There was a part where they had a labor leader that was dealing with elements of the mob,” Branson continues. “The labor leader didn’t want an affiliation with the mob… [Diddy] wants to be a part of certain things, and certain things he wants to not be a part of, like he doesn’t have an affiliation with that. He had the affiliation when it chose to benefit him.”
Branson speaks delicately about what exactly Diddy did or didn’t want to be a part of, but his point is clear: the Bad Boy founder has long played a balancing game with his geographical identity. As Diddy’s career evolved, he frequently invoked the American Gangster version of Harlem—his father’s Harlem—in building his swaggering persona. But he lived a life that was becoming more and more like the Malbec and fancy cheese edition.
Suge Knight probed this paradox as he ascended the hip-hop hierarchy, testing Diddy and just about everyone else in his path. Like most bullies, he generally threw his weight around until someone had the nerve to stand up to him. That was Branson’s read, anyway, after finding himself in Knight’s orbit while dabbling in artist management during the 1990s. On one occasion, he hosted Knight for drinks at his Harlem speakeasy.
“Suge is not a scary guy,” he says. “If I had the option to be in that same room, and a particular artist was a friend of mine, Suge wouldn’t be putting that kind of pressure on him because I wouldn’t allow it. Not no tough-guy stuff… Sometimes you can defuse a situation with a simple conversation.”
Branson pauses.
“Some of these guys are not tough guys, they’re not street guys, they’re fucking musicians,” he continues. “They might be in a situation where somebody might say something or act a certain way, and they could be a little scared.”
“So the artists who got into these situations with Suge: it was less because of Suge, but more because they were artists?” I ask. “And he was a little bit…”
“A little more aggressive,” says Branson. “They might not know how to handle that.”
CHAPTER 4
Studio Gangsters
If you take the Cross Bronx Expressway across the George Washington Bridge and drive west for two hours—as the skyscrapers of New York give way to the fragrant bogs of New Jersey, and then to the rolling hills of Pennsylvania—you might just have the pleasure of meeting someone even less likely than Robert Moses to spawn anything having to do with hip-hop. He
r name is Voletta Wallace.
The Jehovah’s Witness mother of Notorious B.I.G. makes her home on a hilltop in the Poconos. On the late summer day I drive out to meet her, she ushers me through her bright orange kitchen into a living room filled with plants—some real, some fake—and a plush, emerald-colored carpet. The green walls are covered with framed mementos of her son, mostly striking mafioso poses: a profile painting in which he’s pulling a brown fedora down over his brow, a head-on shot of him wearing opaque sunglasses and puffing a cigar, a portrait of him sporting a pin-striped suit and a cane. The latter was left over from a VH1 Hip Hop Honors event—not that Voletta necessarily knows what that is.
“I had no concept of rap,” she says, curling the words in her thick Jamaican accent. “I thought it was just kids making noise… [My son was] in his room with his friends and I heard things and I would yell and scream, ‘Will you stop that noise?’ I guess they were laughing at me.”1
Trim and sprightly in a white dress and fuzzy slippers, Voletta looks to be in her midfifties but is at least a decade older than that. She speaks slowly and crisply, rolling every syllable around in her mouth as though savoring a morsel of filet mignon. When she makes a particularly strong point, she lets her words linger in the air with the certainty of a true believer.
Voletta doesn’t seem to care much for hip-hop music, but it’s clear where her son got his love of the spoken word—something she first realized when he was eighteen and told her he’d gotten a record deal. “I’m hearing this name ‘Puffy,’” she explains. “I’m hearing names that I never heard of before. I’m resenting those people… They’re encouraging him to make music, and he can’t sing.” But Biggie was determined to convince her that he’d found his calling.
“Do you see this music, what I’m pursuing here, Mom?” he said.
“You don’t know music,” she told her son. “You can’t even sing.”
“Mom, I don’t sing. I rap.”
“Forget it. I don’t want to hear about it.”
“Ma, I’m going into the music business… You want me to be an upstanding citizen, to do good in life?”
“Yes. What mother wouldn’t?”
“You want me to excel in something that’s going to make you proud. That’s what I’m doing.”
Voletta smiles.
“He was so serious about it,” she recalls. “I said, you know what? I’m not going to fight him anymore. He’s over eighteen. I’m not going to fight him. ‘Do what you want to do—you’re happy doing it.’”
One morning shortly thereafter, Voletta turned on her radio and heard her son’s voice.
“I thought, My God, that’s Christopher’s voice,” she says. “And it sounds good.”
She pauses.
“That was my best friend,” she continues. “That best friend was also my son… He was the nicest, kindest, gentlest young man you would ever want to meet. That rugged thug persona you see out there? When he was around his mother and his mother’s friends, he was a gentleman. The sweetest human being you would ever want to meet.”
The popular understanding of the East Coast–West Coast feud that rocked hip-hop during its adolescence is, like most popular understandings of war, gravely lacking. And like most conflicts, this one was avoidable. Many East Coast acts had great respect for their West Coast counterparts, and vice versa. Eazy-E once found himself in an elevator with the members of Run-D.M.C.; in a sign of respect, the Queens legends started rapping “Boyz-n-the-Hood.”2 Even Biggie and Tupac were good friends before a series of unfortunate events turned them into mortal enemies.
The man often at the center of the violence was Suge Knight, unsurprising in the context of his Saddam Hussein–level early-1990s aggression, but a bit of a shock given the reputation he had prior to turning the rap world into his personal Lord of the Flies island. “He wasn’t a problem guy at all,” said Wayne Nunnely, who coached Knight during his stint as a defensive end at the University of Las Vegas. “You didn’t really see that street roughness about him.”3
Even some of those who dealt with Knight at the peak of his brutality have a similar perspective. “I’ve dealt with gangsters in City Island, where they threatened I was going to end up in the trunk of a car,” entertainment attorney Donald David told me. “My sense is [Suge] is a studio gangster… not a professional criminal.”4
Emboldened by his success in strong-arming Eazy to get Dre and his pals out of their Ruthless contracts, Knight began to realize that most of hip-hop’s power players weren’t actually gangsters either. East Coast moguls like Russell Simmons and Diddy grew up in middle-class, suburban settings; Biggie was a mama’s boy who exaggerated his family’s financial struggles. After he rapped on “Juicy” about being “the opposite of a winner” and asked, “Remember when I used to eat sardines for dinner?,” a friend of Voletta’s voiced mild shock at her culinary choices.
“Excuse me?” Voletta said.
“He said he had sardines for dinner, how poor he was,” the friend replied.
Recalling the episode today, Voletta shakes her head: “The way he talk about this stuff? Oh, please.”5
The same held true for his California counterparts. A relative of Dr. Dre once expressed surprise that he’d become a successful hip-hop artist, given that “he always seemed kind of square.”6 Even N.W.A.’s middle-aged Jewish manager could tell that the group’s members weren’t as dangerous as their lyrics suggested. “None of them had shot anyone in their lives,” Jerry Heller wrote. “They were auto-documentarians, playing gangstas, playing bad guys.”7
In some cases, they began to act the part. For Dre, that included instances of domestic violence and—in a span of just a few booze-fueled weeks in mid-1992—assaulting a record producer in Los Angeles and brawling at a New Orleans watering hole. This resulted in a sentence of sixty days’ house arrest for Dre. “I was wild, the people around me were wild,” he later said. “There was no one around to say, ‘Yo, we don’t need to do that. That’s not cool.’”8
But Knight took all this to another level. At some point in the early 1990s, it seems to have dawned on him that he could threaten, intimidate, and bully his way to the top of the business—and not have to worry about anyone trying to stop him. The music business has always had its share of nefarious characters, but most executives still weren’t accustomed to physical displays of force by three-hundred-pound former football players. For years, nobody really stood up to Knight, including Dre and Iovine.
Ominous rumors about Knight began to circulate as he started to throw his weight around with abandon. In one tale, the former bodyguard was sitting on an otherwise-dreary panel at an industry conference when someone lobbed him a vague question about his thoughts on the music business. “It’s like the street business,” he said, calmly placing a gun on the table. “And that’s how I handle it.”9
Another story had Knight showing up at Vanilla Ice’s hotel room and holding the rapper over the edge of a fifteenth-floor balcony until he agreed to transfer $3 to $4 million worth of “Ice Ice Baby” publishing rights to one of Knight’s cronies. “Signed ’em [over],” Ice later told ABC News. “And walked away alive.”10 Knight denied the story, but it bolstered his increasingly fierce reputation anyway. “I don’t know if that became a wives’ tale or if that was true,” says The Fader’s Rob Stone of the hotel balcony story. “I remember believing it was true.”11
Even as late as 1995, though, Diddy seemed to be on decent terms with Knight. “Me and Suge, we close… No problems or anything like that,” he told Vibe that year for a story on Blige.12 But tension bubbled in private. By the mid-1990s, insiders whispered that Knight was trying to encroach on Diddy’s working relationship with Blige by becoming her manager; more quietly, some speculated that Knight was also dating the mother of Diddy’s child.
Chenise Wilson remembers throwing a party with Diddy at a downtown New York club called the Grand at around this time, with Clark Kent serving as DJ. Suge and Dr. Dre rolled i
n before Diddy arrived, and Wilson alerted him. “Puff might have taken a long time to come host the party once he knew they was coming,” she says. “Puff mostly tried to keep it easy, but Suge is a different kind of dude.”13
Yet Knight and Dre stayed until the wee hours, and it seemed Diddy’s brand of all-inclusive partying had won the day, at least until the Source Awards in August 1995. In the middle of the ceremony staged by one of hip-hop’s leading publications, Knight sauntered up to the stage to accept the Motion Picture Soundtrack of the Year award for Death Row’s Above the Rim, which featured acts including Dre and Snoop, as well as the recently incarcerated Tupac Shakur, whom Knight hoped to sign to Death Row.
“I’d like to tell Tupac keep his guard up, we ride with him,” said Knight, clad in a bright red shirt, looking like a gang-affiliated Kool-Aid Man. “And one other thing I’d like to say: any artist… who don’t wanna have to worry about the day the producer tryin’ to be all in the videos, all on the records, dancing, come to Death Row.”14
Stone was sitting toward the front of the crowd in the theater at Madison Square Garden and could hardly believe his ears. “That’s where the first real altercation was between Puff and Suge,” he recalls, before adding a point that many observers forget. “Puff just tried to defuse it. He’s like, ‘It’s all love. There’s enough [money] for everybody.’ He was really smart about it. Then it just spun out of control.”15
Wars of words and manufactured feuds involving celebrities have been around as long as show business itself. Old-time entertainers like Bing Crosby and Bob Hope exchanged barbs, calling each other an assortment of names, including “shovel head” and “mattress hip.”16 Similarly, early hip-hop had its share of verbal altercations: Kool Moe Dee versus Busy Bee, Rakim versus Big Daddy Kane. But none of them escalated in the way that the Death Row–Bad Boy feud did.
Knight’s next step was to follow through on his plan to sign Shakur, already seething over a still-unsolved attack at New York’s Quad Studios in November 1994. He was robbed and shot five times by a group of men in the lobby; Diddy, Biggie, and Andre Harrell were in a studio upstairs. Upon learning this—and hearing the Biggie track “Who Shot Ya,” released two months after the incident—Shakur became convinced that he’d been set up, as he explained to Vibe magazine in 1995. Biggie’s reported attempt to visit Shakur in the hospital didn’t sway him, nor did the fact that the song in question had been written before the shooting and had been slated for a Blige album.
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