Table of Contents
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. . . TIL THE COPS COME KNOCKIN’
E-Book Extra, excerpt from The Plot Against Hip Hop
Dedicated to the woman who taught me to read—
my mother, Arizona B. George.
Special thanks: Samson for the fight club, Alan Leeds for the access,
the UK Stunners for the fun (RIP the Queen of Clubz), and the
now departed “record men” (Joe Medlin, Jack Gibson,
Dave Clark) for embodying Edge.
I’VE GOT DREAMS TO REMEMBER
D Hunter had been having sad, traumatic, musical, sometimes unspeakable, oft times prophetic dreams since he was eight. All three of his brothers had been murdered in Brownsville by then, so there was no doubt that this trauma had twisted up homeboy’s subconscious.
But did these dreams really contain prophecies? He never understood them while they were happening. Not until well after the fact was their truth revealed. He certainly didn’t think he deserved foresight and he sure as hell didn’t want it, since it felt more an affliction than a comfort. D’s dream on his last night living in Manhattan had gone like this:
A soul singer, resplendent in a shark fin–silver suit with three buttons open on his white shirt, was onstage at some Chitlin’ Circuit palace that could have been Harlem’s Apollo, Chicago’s Regal, Philly’s Uptown, or DC’s Howard back when a Negro’s big-city life was trapped within a few square miles per metropolis.
But the soul singer wasn’t singing. From his open mouth came the percussive sounds of bass, drums, and even keyboards, as if Doug E. Fresh had been teleported back to the ’60s. Break beats—“Funky Drummer,” “Dance to the Drummer’s Beat,” “Tramp,” songs recorded before D was born and reanimated by DJs and B-boys—exploded in a barrage of rhythm.
D sat alone, orchestra center, row E, seat twenty-four, his eyes locked with the shark skin–suited beat boxer as the lights went down and the singer became a living black-light poster with his teeth, cuff links, and pocket square radiating a blue neon glow.
