Decoded (13 page)

J
ean-Michel Basquiat was from Brooklyn, like me, although he spent most of his brief adult life in Soho, where he started off living in the streets as a graffiti artist who called himself SAMO. He later became a celebrity in the downtown scene in New York in the seventies and eighties. He was hanging with Madonna before she was famous and collaborated with Andy Warhol. He came onto the scene with a crew of graffiti writers but didn’t want to be boxed in with that movement, so when the graffiti scene died, he didn’t die with it. He moved in a white art world but flooded his art with black images, attitude, and icons. He wanted to be the most famous artist in the world. He was hip-hop when hip-hop was still in its cradle: If you look at the video for Blondie’s “Rapture,” the first rap song (using the word rap loosely) to play on MTV, you see Basquiat, young, skinny, standing in front of a set of turntables while Debbie Harry struts by. He played Spoonie Gee records at gallery openings. On the night he died—he was twenty-seven—Basquiat had been planning to see a Run-DMC show. When people asked him what his art was about, he’d hit them with the same three words: “Royalty, heroism, and the streets.”

When he died, in 1988, I’m not sure I knew who he was, even though he was a Brooklyn kid like me and not that much older. He was deep in a world that I really didn’t have much to do with—I was making money out of state and rhyming in Brooklyn, not hanging out with Andy Warhol at the Mudd Club. New York has a thousand universes in it that don’t always connect, but we do all walk the same streets, hear the same sirens, ride the same subways, see the same headlines in the
Post,
read the same writing on the walls. That shared landscape gets inside of all of us and, in some small way, unites us, makes us think we know each other even when we don’t.

Basquiat got his wish. He’s probably among the most famous artists in the world, two decades after his death. I own a few of his paintings. He’s known today, to some degree, as a painter that hip-hop seems to embrace. Part of that comes from his technique, which feels like hip-hop in the way it combined different traditions and techniques to create something new. He brought together elements of street art and European old masters. He combined painting and writing. He combined icons from Christianity and Santería and voodoo. He turned boxers and jazz musicians into kings with golden crowns. And on top of all that mixing and matching he added his own genius, which transformed the work into something completely fresh and original. The paintings don’t just sit on my walls, they move like crazy.

LIGHTS IS BLINDING

Basquiat’s work often deals with fame and success: the story of what happens when you actually get the thing you’d die for. One Basquiat print I own is called
Charles the First
—it’s about Charlie Parker, the jazz pioneer who died young of a heroin overdose, like Basquiat. In the corner of the painting are the words,
MOST
YOUNG
KINGS GET THIER HEAD CUT OFF
.

Like a lot of the art Basquiat created, that line has layers of meaning. The head could mean the literal head on your shoulders or it could be referring to your other head—to castration. I read it as a statement about what happens when you achieve a certain position. You become a target. People want to take your head, your crown, your title. They want to emasculate you, make you compromise or sacrifice in a way that no man, or woman, should. And you resist it until one day your albums aren’t moving and the shows aren’t filling up and it seems like the game might have moved on without you. Then you start to change, you do whatever you need to do to get back into that spotlight. And that’s when you’re walking dead. One way or another, they get you.

The cliché is, be careful what you wish for, because you might get it. Nearly every rapper who’s made it big—or has even been modestly successful—has had to deal with getting one of his heads chopped. Rappers like Pun, Big L, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Pimp C, among many, many others, have literally lost their lives just when they were about to peak. Rappers at the top of their game have been locked up, sometimes for long bids. The stories you hear can really make it seem like success can be a curse: rappers who’ve been dangled over balconies for their publishing money, driven out of their hometowns, fucked up by drugs, sued by their own families, betrayed by their best friends, sold out by their crews. There are rappers who blow up and blow through whole fortunes, squander every opportunity, and before you know it end up back on the block. The crazy thing is, we don’t even question it anymore. We take it for granted.

I remember when Hammer was the biggest star in the world, in the eighties. There were a lot of people who clowned him because of the big pants and the dancing, like he was the rapper from Disney World. But Hammer was from East Oakland. Even when he was spinning around with his pants billowing all around him, you could see in his eyes that this was still a nigga from the hood. So when he was in
Forbes
magazine with eight figures after his name, big pants and all, I was impressed. It was a huge moment for hip-hop. For a black rapper to make that kind of transition into the mainstream—and to get that kind of money—was unprecedented. A few years later, Hammer was filing for bankruptcy. Today when you see stars rise and fall like that, you just think, “Yep, he fucked it up.” But with Hammer, it was the first time we’d seen that kind of fast movement from the bottom to the top and back again. It’s no dis to Hammer to say that it was shocking to watch it happen. I’m sure he was as shocked as anyone.

And of course, two of the greatest rappers to ever do it were both murdered in their prime. The not-so-funny shit is that Pac and Biggie were perfectly safe before they started rapping; they weren’t being hunted by killers until they got into music. Biggie was on the streets before he started releasing music, but he never had squads of shooters (or the Feds) coming after him until he was famous. And Pac wasn’t even heavy in the street. It wasn’t till he was a rapper that he started getting shot at, locked up, stalked by the cops—and eventually murdered.

I was reminded of this when I recorded “Moment of Clarity” with Eminem for
The Black Album.
It was 2003 and he was on top of the music world—three major multiplatinum albums, twenty million sold, a number one film with
8 Mile,
and on and on. He was probably the biggest star in the world. When we met at the studio, I reached over to give him a pound, and when we bumped, I could feel that he had on a bulletproof vest. Here was Eminem, someone who was doing the thing he loved and succeeding at it probably beyond his wildest dreams, and he had to wear a bulletproof vest.
To the studio.
He should’ve been on a boat somewhere enjoying himself without a care in the world, not worrying about getting shot up on his way to work.

It’s easy to take shots at performers when they seem to self-destruct. But there’s another way to look at it. When you reach that top level, there’s suddenly so much to deal with on all fronts—you have old friends and distant family who are suddenly close, people who feel like they should be getting rich from your success. You have a target on your back from other people—rappers, hustlers, angry cops—who feel like your success should be theirs. You have to deal with lawyers and accountants, and you have to be able to trust these people you’re just meeting with everything you have. There’s just more of everything. Women, money, “friends,” piles of whatever your vice is. There’s enough of whatever you love to kill you. That kind of sudden change can destabilize even the most grounded personality. And that’s when you lose yourself—like the Eminem song says,
superstardom’s close to a post-mortem.

IT’S STRONGER THAN HEROIN

I was lucky in a lot of ways to have a body of life experiences already under my belt before I had to deal with a serious level of success. I’d made friends and lost them, made money and lost it and made it back. I’d watched people blow up in both games—music and hustling—and then watched them fuck it up and fall back to earth, hard. I was prepared. All that happened to me in music over the first years of my career mirrored a lot of what I’d seen before, just on a larger scale. Eventually the scale got so large that the comparisons stopped making sense or being as useful, but I’m lucky to have a lot of the same friends and family with me that I had when I was recording my first album, people who keep me grounded. I’m also lucky never to have needed the approval of the gatekeepers in the industry because from the start we came into the game as entrepreneurs. That gave me the freedom to just be myself, which is the secret to any long-term success, but that’s hard to see when you’re young and desperate just to get put on.

When Basquiat painted
Charles the First
he was only twenty-two. People always wanted to stick Basquiat in some camp or another, to paste on some label that would be stable and make it easy to treat him like a commodity. But he was elusive. His eye was always on a bigger picture, not whatever corner people tried to frame him in. But mostly his eye was probably on himself, on using his art to get what he wanted, to say what he wanted, to communicate his truth. Basquiat shook any easy definition. He wasn’t afraid of wanting to succeed, to get rich, to be famous. But just because you want the shit doesn’t mean you can handle it.

One critic said about Basquiat that the boys in his paintings didn’t grow up to be men, they grew up to be corpses, skeletons, and ghosts. Maybe that’s the curse of being young, black, and gifted in America—and if you add sudden success to that, it only makes it more likely that you’ll succumb, like Basquiat did in a loft not far from the one I live in now, a loft filled with his art. But I don’t think so. I don’t accept that falling is inevitable— I think there’s a way to avoid it, a way to win, to get success and its spoils, and get away with it without losing your soul or your life or both. I’m trying to rewrite the old script, but Basquiat’s painting sits on my wall like a warning.

You Still Have that Stigma on You. (2:58)

Inspired by Basquiat, my chariots of fire / Everybody took shots hit my body up I’m tired / Build me up, break me down, to build me up again / They like Hov we need you back so we can kill your ass again / Hov got flow though he’s no Big and Pac but he’s close /
How I’m supposed to win they got me fighting ghosts …
¹
 /
Same sword they knight you they gonna good night you with
²
 / shit that’s only half if they like you / That ain’t he even the half what they might do /
Don’t believe me ask Michael
³
 / See Martin, see Malcolm / You see Biggie, see Pac, see success and its outcome / See Jesus, see Judas /
See Caesar, see Brutus
⁴
 / See success is like suicide /
Suicide, it’s a suicide
⁵
 / If you succeed prepare to be crucified / Hmm, media meddles, niggas sue you, you settle / Every step you take they remind you, you ghetto / So it’s tough being Bobby Brown /
To be Bobby then, you gotta be Bobby now
⁶
 /
Now the question is, is to have had and lost 
/
Better than not having at all
⁷
 /
Everybody want to be the king till shots ring
⁸
 / You laying on the balcony with holes in your dream / Or you Malcolm Xed out getting distracted by screams /
Everybody get your hands off my jeans
⁹
 / Everybody look at you strange, say you changed / Uh, like you work that hard to stay the same / Uh, game stayed the same, the name changed / So it’s best for those to not overdose on being famous / Most kings get driven so insane /
That they try to hit the same vein that Kurt Cobain did
¹⁰
 / So dangerous, so no strangers invited to the inner sanctum of your chambers /
Load chambers, the enemy’s approaching so raise 
/
your drawbridge
¹¹
and drown him in the moat / The spirit I’m evoking is of those who’ve been awoken / By shots from those who was most close to them / They won’t stop till you a ghost to em / But real kings don’t die, they become martyrs, let’s toast to em / King Arthur put a robe to em like James Brown / Know the show ain’t over till Rome’s ruined / Till the republic is overthrowed, till my loyal subjects is over Hov / Long live the king. Know the reign won’t stop