Can't Stop Won't Stop (33 page)

But the uptown b-boys who had set downtown on fire in the first place found themselves becoming men. They had taken a roller-coaster ride beyond all their wildest dreams, and given the expectation—unreasonable, perhaps—of making a career from their teenage thrills. Just as quickly, it was all gone. Hip-hop had taken over the world, and left them behind. Crazy Legs was angry. “I didn't even want to bother looking at rap videos,” he says. “I felt people had no respect for us. We helped you come up into the rap game.”

After the gigs and the money dried up, FABEL retreated to
El Barrio
. “I was just going with the flow,” he says. “Had I a long term plan it's a possibility that I could have spared myself a lot of pain and misery from hitting rock-bottom.” With his twin brother, he latched onto the hardcore punk scene. “I was into politically conscious stuff, even though I was destroying my body and my mind. It was a strange trade-off. I'd listen to great rhymes about all of the injustices but wait, while I'm doing that let me take five hits of mescaline and down a fifth of Jack Daniels, smoke up an ounce of weed,” he says.

DOZE had graduated from cocaine to freebase. “My check started going there, and then all the money I made from the tours started to going into the habit. My so-called friends who were down with me started turning their back, they're trying to sell me it,” he says. He became homeless.

Many of the hip-hop heads who had come downtown were now nomads cut loose from the clubs and the entertainment industry. Drugs gave them back some structure. They could loop back to the drug spot like it was the only cipher they remembered how to close. Smoke, get money, score some more, smoke. As they fell deeper into the grip of a new kind of rock, drugs also seemed the only viable financial option, a way to chase the status they once had just like they were now chasing the high.

“See, this is what happened. A lot of us didn't want to be drug dealers. A lot
of us did it by necessity,” says DOZE. “But then a lot of them
did
want to be drug dealers. A lot of them said, ‘You know what? Fuck this b-boying shit. We're all bummy and shit.' It went from camaraderie to like, ‘Yo, I gotta get mines.' It just turned. The pulse shifted. I didn't want to fucking destroy anybody's life, if I was gonna destroy anybody's life it would be my own. That was my attitude. So I said, ‘Fuck it, I'm not going to be a drug dealer.' I'm just going to live as a hermit. I'll live as an artist down in the Village. I had big illusions.”

Crazy Legs, FABEL and DOZE survived. Others—Buck 4 and Kuriaki of Rock Steady, Cowboy of the Furious Five and so many others—did not.

Here was the other Planet Rock, born of a much different kind of worldview.

At the beginning of the century, heroin and cocaine were both off-the-shelf pharmaceuticals, manufactured and marketed as cure-alls. Heroin was sold as a cough suppressant and a stronger form of aspirin. Cocaine was available in soft-drinks like Coca Cola. Before long, both were recognized as deadly. In 1913, the
New York Times
reported a rash of heroin addictions in the South Bronx, the neighborhood's first known epidemic.
²⁸
A decade later, both substances had been banned. Production shifted overseas, and distribution moved to the criminal syndicates. During the last half of the twentieth century, an ugly, illicit nexus between war and drugs developed.

When World War II raged, Alfred McCoy recounts in his epic history
The Politics of Heroin
, heroin importation dropped dramatically, the number of smack addicts plunged from 200,000 to 20,000, and the heroin problem was disappearing.
²⁹
But in the all-or-nothing logic of the Cold War that followed, opium and coca products became the perfect commodities to advance coups or counterrevolution. The new Central Intelligence Agency often aligned itself with local movements that supported themselves through drug smuggling syndicates. Such was the case with the French Corsican and Italian Sicilian anticommunist fronts, who, through a combination of strategic CIA neglect and support and the enterprising wiles of American mobland deportees like Salvatore “Lucky Luciano” Luciana, soon reopened heroin trading lanes into the American ghettos.

By 1968, the battle against Communist China and Vietnam had led to the creation of what would become known as “the Golden Triangle”—the lawless
zones of Burma, Thailand and Laos that came to fill a third of the global market for heroin. The yield of this extraordinary boom in heroin production was often pushed through air and sea transports run by the CIA and its foreign assets. Heroin addiction exploded amongst American troops—some reports claimed one in seven GIs were hooked—and in American ghettos.
³⁰
In turn, the profits reverted back to anticommunist military operations in Southeast Asia. Wars halfway around the globe were helping create the world of pushers and junkies that the Bronx gangs walked through, the world against which Bambaataa would imagine his Planet Rock.

A decade later, cocaine was moving through routes that had sometimes been facilitated by U.S. right-wing interests in Latin America. It was a different kind of drug for a different kind of era. Heroin drove you inward and secluded you in the depths of your dreaming. Cocaine strengthened the shakiest of your convictions and made you feel powerful before the world.

Postwar cocaine trafficking began with wealthy Cuban counterrevolutionaries fleeing Castro.
³¹
As they plotted the removal of Castro and financed military attacks on the island with cocaine profits, U.S. intelligence agents looked the other way. By the late sixties, another group of favored anticommunists, the Corsicans, had set up in the southern hemisphere and were working with smugglers in Chile, Paraguay and Colombia to establish French connections north for illegal goods, including coca and marijuana. Entrepreneurs, like the American hippie George Jung and his Colombian partner Carlos Rivas Lehder, plugged in from the other end, marketing coke as a hip, aspirational drug to white American baby boomers.

At the same time, criminal syndicates consolidated coca farming and cocaine production in Latin America, particularly in Colombia, Peru and Bolivia. In the case of Bolivia's “narcocracy,” an anti-leftist government put in place by what would come to be known as “the Cocaine Coup,” syndicates ran the country.
³²
In Colombia, the cartels shifted from working with the military to exterminating leftist guerillas who threatened their trade, or killing crusading government officials.

By 1976, Jamaican DJ Dillinger's song “Cokane In My Brain”—an unlikely smash hit in Kingston, New York and London—announced that the white-line pipelines out of the Andean “snowfields” through the remote Caribbean cays
into the First World's leisure centers were open. In a 1981 cover story featuring a martini glass filled with cocaine,
Time
magazine toasted the “all-American drug,” the powder that made you “alert, witty and with it.”
³³

Best of all, this “emblem of wealth and status” was now available to millions of ordinary middle class Americans. During the early 1970s, rich New Yorkers paid one thousand dollars per ounce for the pleasure.
³⁴
But a decade later, cocaine production and distribution became so efficient that the price of a gram had dropped to as little as one hundred dollars, or roughly three dollars per ounce.
³⁵
The time was right for a chemical innovation to take care of the glut and increase cocaine's demand and profitability again.

For years, Andean farmers had smoked coca paste, which they called
basuco
, or
basé
. The high one got from smoking the paste was much more intense than snorting it. In 1974, a San Francisco Bay Area coke-powder smuggler and his chemist friend tried to replicate the smokable coke. They converted the powder by mixing it with ether and heating it, creating not a paste, but little crystals. When they smoked them, they couldn't believe what they had done. This product got the name “freebase,” because the process that made the rocks had literally, in chemist's terms, “freed” the “base.” Their mistranslation—Spanish “
basé
” to English “base”—had led them to something entirely new.
³⁶

Freebase was marketed as even safer than the powder itself. Journalist Dominic Streatfield writes, “One 1979 manual I found in the Drugscope library in London, called
Attention Coke Lovers! Freebase = the best thing since sex!
. . . [concluded] that freebase is ‘considerably less harmful, physically, than regular cocaine in any quantity.' ”
³⁷
At that point, cocaine's price was still too high for many to experiment with freebase, so for a time, cocaine smokers remained among the most elite of clientele.

But indications that smokable cocaine might not be so benign began to bubble up along the cocaine pipelines. In the early 1970s, doctors began to notice paste-smokers in Peru, Bolivia and Colombia turned to walking ghosts. And when the glut of cocaine hit the Bahamas—the key Caribbean transshipment point—cocaine smoking took off amongst the sufferers. Since the high was also shorter, it was chemically more addicting. Addicts spent all of their time chasing
the next high. All that needed to happen was for the right entrepreneur to figure this all out.

That man, the Kid Charlemagne of cocaine, was Los Angeles legend Ricky “Freeway Rick” Ross, an illiterate ex-tennis champ who got his first fifty-dollar bag of coke for Christmas in 1979, flipped it and never looked back. Freeway Rick came onto the market at the right time. Cocaine production had never been higher and distribution was about to get much easier.

He began by selling powder to wealthy Black clients. As he expanded his market, he got cheaper prices from his suppliers. Then Rick systematically absorbed his competition, making them his own retailers by offering them better prices. Pushers of PCP—known on the streets as “sherm” or “water”—traded in their stuff in to get with him. He even began training Crips to be salesmen.

Freeway Rick's clients knew about freebase. Richard Pryor's 1980 explosive episode with a home-making kit—leaving him with third-degree burns—had been a great advertisement. But they didn't want to risk or bother cooking it up, so Rick learned how to make a simpler version of it by cutting it with baking soda and heating it. He called the result “Ready Rock” and took orders for their weekend parties in powder or rock.

By the end of 1982, as Freeway Rick's prices continued to drop, his clientele shifted down the economic ladder, and Ready Rock had completely replaced powder. Freeway Rick was not mad. Ready Rock was made for the masses. Once he figured out how to standardize production and prices, Ready Rock offered a potentially larger market at double or more the profits of powder.
³⁸
Anyone could afford a deuce or a nickel rock. And who, after hitting it, didn't want more? Now the streets started getting really ugly.

Aqeela Sherrills, then a teenage Grape Street Crip, watched his Watts neighborhood change. “Once an individual got hooked on it that was their only pursuit. They was robbing, stealing, jacking, everything. Then you think about some of the neighborhood killers. When they was strung out on the shit, they was robbing a dice game, getting into it with some cats, shootouts would happen. Cats who was like big-time drug dealers in the neighborhood, all of a sudden they were strung out, with nothing.”

He says, “The whole quality of life in the neighborhood just changed. I mean all of the girls that we were just crazy about when we were kids, that we all
looked up to, became strawberries. The neighborhood was already tough, but people literally lost their families to drugs and the violence that came out of people utilizing drugs and making money off drugs. Folks went to jail for the rest of their life. People got murdered. It just totally devastated the neighborhood.”

In Nicaragua, Reaganite hawks were concerned about the new leftist Sandinista government that had overthrown their dictator-of-choice Anastasio Somoza, the most stunning development since Fidel Castro had taken Cuba. But their zealous military interventions on behalf of the Contra counterrevolutionaries were not popular with the American public. By 1985, Congress voted to cut off funding the Contras. So intelligence and military operatives turned to covert illegal means of supporting their dirty war—selling guns to Iran, and assisting Contra supporters who were trafficking cocaine to fill the exploding demands in the north. At the other end of the pipeline, the illiterate, jobless and hopeless Ricky Ross and many others like him turned into vulture capitalists to feed their ghetto clienteles the illicit spoils of war.

When the
Wild Style
crew had stepped into the Harajuku, Freeway Rick's Ready Rock—this new, less pure, more popular cousin of freebase that the media would name “crack”—was flooding Los Angeles, Miami and New York City. Another Planet Rock was taking shape—a world defined by the constants of destabilization and collapse.

Run DMC had hollowed out the music and killed the old school. Their
Raising Hell
album was bolting to platinum as they headed out of New York City with the Beastie Boys, LL Cool J and Whodini on a sixty-four-date tour. But even as they reigned as kings of the new school, the world was changing.

This new world could be heard one hundred miles from New York City in Philadelphia. Around the time the city's first Black mayor, W. Wilson Goode, authorized police to drop the bomb on the Black radical organization, MOVE, burning down sixty-one homes in a working-class Black neighborhood, a North Philly rapper named Schoolly D used a cheap drum machine, his partner DJ Code Money's scratch and a reverb knob to create menacing tracks like “Gucci Time” and “P.S.K.”—the initials for his crew, the Park Side Killers—songs about beating down style-biters and screwing cheap whores.