The Lost Treasures of R&B
Page 17
“Bloods in Soho? Hmmm. That’s some new shit.”
“Yeah, well, I need to find them. They drove off in a Range Rover.” D gave the young man the details he knew about what they looked like.
Ray Ray said, “You know this ain’t the Mafia. It’s not like it’s one family. Niggas be freelancing all over the place.”
“I’ll give you $200 for your time and another $800 if you find out something useful.”
“Well,” Ray Ray responded, “I better make myself useful.”
CHAPTER 4
NEVER SEEN A MAN CRY UNTIL I SEEN A MAN DIE
The cuts on Dwayne’s neck and face were sealed for the funeral and the morticians even managed to put on his trademark lopsided grin so that the writer would face eternity with that same mischievous look that those who knew him best so treasured. The local Baptist church on Orange was filled with a who’s-who of the folks Dwayne had written about so eloquently—Spike Lee, Anita Baker, Whitney Houston, Chuck D, Prince, Vernon Reid, and so many others. Many of his subjects had become friends.
With all this black pop royalty at the funeral, there was one person conspicuous by his absence. Walter Gibbs had known Dwayne since both were young hustling dudes trying to make it in the intense, innovative New York of the early 1980s. Dwayne had chronicled his parties and profiled the acts he managed. Walter had become rich; Dwayne had become respected. A huge wreath with Gibbs’s name on it at the funeral parlor led several mourners to wonder aloud, “Where the fuck is Gibbs?” D didn’t speculate. He just filed the fact away.
Dwayne had been one of those people who everybody knew, who connected people like spokes on a wheel. D was younger than most of the artists there and yet he’d been touched by Dwayne Robinson too. Russell Simmons, who’d known Dwayne well since they first met years back at a roller disco in Queens, gave an amusing eulogy about their adventures in rap’s formative years. Anita Baker, Dwayne’s favorite singer, performed “No One in the World,” a song not ideally suited for a funeral but one Dwayne’s wife said he would have wanted.
The casket wasn’t too heavy. D had been the pallbearer in many previous funerals, so he’d come to appreciate a light corpse, no matter how heartless that was. Dwayne’s spirit, his essence, had been taken by a killer or killers unknown. What was inside the box that D helped carry meant nothing compared to the collective memory of what Dwayne had achieved during his unexpectedly brief life.
At one point D sat down in the living room of the Robinson’s comfy three-story home with a plate in his lap, listening more than talking as people dined on soul food and sweet-potato pie and reminisced about Dwayne and the world that shaped him. D soon found himself, quite happily, squeezed into a corner with Grandmaster Flash and Kool Moe Dee talking about a rap tour circa 1984. He asked if Moe had any idea why Dwayne was carrying a copy of his famous battle during his last night on earth.
“I wish I knew,” Moe said. “I wish I knew. We’d stayed in contact over the years. Any time he did a reading or had an event in Los Angeles, he’d invite me. We’d talk about the ’80s. In fact, he seemed very interested in the period around ’88, ’89. Talked about doing a book. Guess we’ll never know what he was up to.”
Danielle Robinson, a petite woman whose graying hair contrasted with bright, youthful black eyes, came over and offered D another plate. He felt awkward about being the last person to see her husband alive; he was embarrassed in her presence. When he told her he was already full, Danielle reached out and took his large hands in her slender fingers. “My husband really liked you,” she said.
“Oh,” he replied, fumbling for words, “he was great to me. Like a big brother who made sure you listened to all the right records and read all the right books.”
“Thank you for trying to save him.”
Again D struggled in response, making sounds and not syllables before falling into silence and feeling a tear drop from one eye. Suddenly the little woman had her arms around the waist of the massive man, offering comforting words as he wept. In her kindness, Danielle allowed D to go upstairs, away from the eyes of those gathered in the living room, to a guest bathroom on the second floor where he could wash his face and regain his composure. Perhaps, he thought, I’m not as used to death as I tell myself.
D was standing at the top of the landing when he noticed more stairs leading to the attic where Dwayne kept his office. He’d been up there once to do an interview about the trials of bodyguarding rap stars for a script the writer had been working on. D knew it would be an intrusion, maybe a touch disrespectful, but he couldn’t help himself. He headed up the stairs.
A large black-and-white photo of a screaming Otis Redding in a sharkskin suit was taped to the door. The singer had been a favorite of Dwayne’s mother, and D’s mother had liked him too—though she was more of the Teddy Pendergrass generation of black-love men. D would have preferred to linger on that convergence of taste, but opening the door to Dwayne’s office welcomed him to a harsh new reality.
The room was a shambles. Manuscript pages strewn across the floor. An old mahogany desk overturned. CDs and books were sliding onto the floor from a ceiling-high bookcase. Judging by the white cords still plugged into outlets, Dwayne’s computers had been removed. Ironically, the framed pictures on the wall looked untouched: Dwayne with Anita Baker, with Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, with Eazy-E, with Q-Tip. D stared at the disarray and the photos and thought he was gonna tear up again, but he pushed the feeling back down. It was enough having to tell Danielle her house had been broken into during her husband’s funeral. He wasn’t going to do it looking like a whiny bitch.
Danielle waited until most of the guests had left before calling the police.
“This is terrible,” she said.
D sat silent, unsure for a moment what to say on a day that had turned from very sad to horrible. “Was he working on a book?”
“Yes. He was calling it The Plot Against Hip Hop.”
“Hell of a title.”
“I thought so too. I thought it sounded melodramatic. But he kept telling me it was his best book yet. The one he’d be remembered for. And now this.”
D held Danielle Robinson, feeling her shake as she endured another loss, another violation of her world. “It was all a dream.” That’s what D said.
* * *
The Montclair police were remarkably nice. One of the patrolmen told D that Dwayne had gotten name recording artists to perform at charitable events in the area over the years and was extremely well liked in town. D gave the cop, a brother named Fred Harris, his card and asked him to let him know what they found. He also made sure he passed on Fly Ty’s number since this robbery made Dwayne’s murder clearly more than a gang initiation. Dwayne had died for “something.” It wasn’t random. Not at all.
When Fred asked about getting some club security in the city for extra dollars, D knew he had a useful new friend.
On the way back to Manhattan, D mulled over the latest turn in Dwayne Robinson’s murder and took some stock of his own life. D often felt like his existence had been just a series of unsolved mysteries. He didn’t know where his father was; he didn’t know why his brothers had been shot; he didn’t understand why God had allowed him to contract the HIV virus. But Dwayne’s death? There was an answer to that. It was something he could solve, something he could know the truth about.
End of Excerpt
More about The Plot Against Hip Hop.
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The Plot Against Hip Hop is available in paperback and e-book editions. Our print books are available from our website and in online and brick & mortar bookstores everywhere. The digital edition is available wherever e-books are sold.
A bad-ass noir novel set in hip hop culture, by best-selling and critically-acclaimed author Nelson George.
Finalist for the 2012 NAACP Image Award in Literature
George is an ace at interlacing the real dramas of the world . . . the book’s slim length and flyweight depth could make it an artifac
t of this particular zeitgeist in American history. Playas and haters and celebrity cameos fuel a novel that is wickedly entertaining while being frozen in time. —Kirkus Reviews
"This hard-boiled tale is jazzed up with authentic street slang and name-dropping (Biggie, Mary J. Blige, Lil Wayne, and Chuck D) . . . George’s tightly packaged mystery pivots on a believable conspiracy . . . and his street cred shines in his descriptions of Harlem and Brownsville’s mean streets."—Library Journal
"George is a well-known, respected hip-hop chronicler . . . Now he adds crime fiction to his resume with a carefully plotted crime novel peopled by believable characters and real-life hip-hop personalities."—Booklist
"George’s prose sparkles with an effortless humanity, bringing his characters to life in a way that seems true and beautiful. The story—and the conspiracy behind it—is one we all need to hear as consumers and creators in the post-hardcore hip-hop world."—Shelf Awareness
"Part procedural murder mystery, part conspiracy-theory manifesto, Nelson George’s The Plot Against Hip Hop reads like the PTSD fever dream of a renegade who’s done several tours of duty in the trenches . . . Plot‘s combination of record-biz knowledge and ghetto fabulosity could have been written only by venerable music journalist Nelson George, who knows his hip-hop history . . . The writing is as New York as ‘Empire State of Mind,’ and D is a detective compelling enough to anchor a series."—Time Out New York
"A breakbeat detective story . . . George invents as much as he curates, as outlandish conspiracy theories clash with real-life figures. But what makes the book such a fascinating read is its simultaneous strict adherence to hip-hop’s archetypes and tropes while candidly acknowledging the absurdity of the music’s current big-business era. There’s a late-capitalism logic at work here. If this book had been written in the early ’90s, it would have been about the insurgent artistry of hip-hop musicians and the social-justice strides the genre was effecting. Today, it’s a procedural about the death of principles." —Time Out Chicago
"The Plot Against Hip Hop is a quick-moving murder mystery that educates its audience on Hip Hop’s pioneer generation along the way . . . it is a nostalgic look at a magical and manic moment in time."—New York Journal of Books
THE PLOT AGAINST HIP HOP is a noir novel set in the world of hip hop culture. The stabbing murder of esteemed music critic Dwayne Robinson in a Soho office building is dismissed by the NYPD as a gang initiation. But his old friend, bodyguard/security expert D Hunter, suspects there’s much more to his death. An old cassette tape, the theft of a manuscript Robinson was working on, and some veiled threats suggest there are larger forces at work.
D Hunter’s investigation into his mentor’s murder leads into a parallel history of hip hop, a place where renegade government agents, behind-the-scenes power brokers, and paranoid journalists know a truth that only a few hardcore fans suspect. This rewrite of hip hop history mixes real-life figures including Jay-Z, Kanye West, and Russell Simmons with characters pulled from the culture’s hidden world, such as the Illuminati, FBI agents, and West Coast gangstas that roam the hard streets D Hunter walks down.
D Hunter is a tough, black-clad product of crime-ridden Brownsville, Brooklyn, a man whose family has been devastated by violence and who has dedicated himself to protecting people in an age of insecurity. Hunter has his own secrets, his own vulnerabilities, which he fights to overcome as he becomes a reluctant private eye. After reading The Plot Against Hip Hop, you’ll never hear the music the same way.
NELSON GEORGE is an author, filmmaker, and lifelong resident of Brooklyn. His novels include the first two in his D Hunter mystery series, The Accidental Hunter and The Plot Against Hip Hop. Among his many nonfiction works are The Death of Rhythm & Blues, Hip Hop America, and the recently published The Hippest Trip in America: Soul Train and the Evolution of Culture & Style. As a filmmaker he’s directed the documentaries Brooklyn Boheme for Revolt, The Announcement for ESPN, and Finding the Funk for VH1.
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form, by any means, including mechanical, electronic, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without the prior written consent of the publisher.
Published by Akashic Books
©2014 by Salar Abdoh
Hardcover ISBN: 978-1-61775-341-1
Paperback ISBN: 978-1-61775-316-9 E-ISBN: 978-1-61775-327-5
Library of Congress Control Number: 2014938793
First printing
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