Why Did Rapper KXNG Crooked Make an Entire Album About Killing Cops?

His provocative concept record is designed to spark activism, not violence

After digesting his new album Good Vs. Evil for about a week or two, I soon found myself sitting at a dilapidated wooden table across from rapper KXNG Crooked. Like two businessmen that only deal in cash, we agreed to meet at the remote location of Calico Ghost Town, CA; a halfway point between his home of Long Beach, CA and my city of Las Vegas.

Good vs. Evil was released this month; a concept album in which the Shady Records / Slaughterhouse MC weaves a revenge tale not unlike Marvel’s Old Man Logan or Sylvester Stallone’s Rambo: First Blood. But despite his story taking place in a fictional “alternate reality” called Planet X, the record is an answer to the recent wave of very real police murders that have made headlines after being caught on video. The album’s setting is essentially the black planet that Chuck D told you to fear in 1989.

Not since Ice-T’s “Cop Killer” have we heard such an inflammatory record, which boasts song titles like “Shoot Back” and “Robocop Went Pop.” The latter fantasizes about invading a police precinct with guns blazing, like some wild Grand Theft Auto mission, and that’s just scratching the surface. Yet Crooked is adamant that this is a story of fiction, not reality.

“When I started the album, it was a concept album. I wanted to take all of my anger and emotions and try to turn it into art. Within this world, I’m able to get as violent as I want to to paint the picture,” Crooked explains. “I’m really a character on the project. The character is really speaking from his perspective. His perspective is ‘Let’s gather the poor people — black, white, Mexican, Asian, don’t matter what — the lower class citizens and [together] let’s overthrow what the hell is going on in this corrupt system.’”

The character Crooked plays on Good vs. Evil is a manifestation of the shock, anger, and outrage that many people have felt after witnessing the viral videos of murders of black men like Philando Castile, Eric Garner, and Terence Crutcher, arguably none of whom deserved the penalty of death by the hands of police. This list continues to grow seemingly each time we turn on the news — or rather, browse our social media feeds — but in the words of author Ta-Nehisi Coates, “the violence is not new, it’s the cameras that are new.”

“I was getting pulled over one day and I just started recording on my phone. This is where we are now. I can’t trust a police officer to give me a speeding ticket without worrying about a violent encounter,” Crooked says, stiffening up, employing a hint of vigilance in his body language. “Sometimes you gotta shock people to wake them up… A lot of people need to know that these types of thoughts exist in reality. Some people are like, ‘Yo, if they pull me over, I’m shooting them.’ That’s a crazy thing, but that’s where are.”

After years of enduring racial profiling, police brutality and this most recent wave of shocking viral videos, it is not surprising to see strong reactions, whether that takes the form of peaceful protests, crazed snipers, or violent rap lyrics like those found on Good vs. Evil. This school of thought is explained eloquently by Crooked’s former Death Row labelmate 2Pac, whose sampled voice opens the album with a fitting metaphor. “Everyday, I’m standing outside, trying to sing my way in. ‘We’re hungry, please let us in.’ …After a year, I’m picking the lock, coming through blasting,” says Shakur from beyond the grave.

After a bad deal formed in 1995 with the now defunct Noo Trybe Records (a subsidiary of Virgin), KXNG (then known as Crooked I) joined Death Row Records in 1999, three years after 2Pac’s death.

“[Suge Knight] was in jail when I first signed. I went to the penitentiary with Michel’le and me and him negotiated terms of the contract on a visit. From that point on, I’d go see him once or twice a month,” Crooked reveals, taking a pull from his cigar, in a manner almost similar to Suge.

Despite conversations with Dr. Dre about signing to his Aftermath imprint, which at the time had several projects in the queue ahead of him, he went with Death Row. His future with Dre and company would take shape much later down the line.

“After that meeting with Dre, I went up to the pen in Sacramento and saw Suge, and he was like ‘Look man, I’m going to give you this much money.’ And I was like, ‘I got a family, I gotta help moms out,” so I took the deal,” he reveals.

Crooked would produce almost every song on Eddie Griffin’s Dysfunktional Family soundtrack on Death Row in 2003, but he never saw his own album released. The scene he describes at the Death Row office was bizarre, which included “crazy paintings of Biggie in bad positions and shit,” curated by Suge.

“It’s funny looking back because there was so much other real shit that was going on with Death Row. Street shit. Murderous street shit. I didn’t really see all of the things that somebody just visiting would see. I was connected into just surviving this shit and just putting out music,” says Crooked. “[Suge] had a big ass parrot that would gang bang on people when they came into the office. If you wore blue, he would cuss you out. If you had any kind of clothes that made you look like a crip, the bird would curse you out. He was trained to curse people out that wore that color. Shit like that was just hilarious.”

Despite the label’s reputation for bad behavior, Crooked remembers the time fondly. “One thing I must say though, [Suge] allowed me to sit in certain meetings and got my knowledge of the music industry up. Like ‘Crook, this is Lyor Cohen, this is Russell Simmons…’ I would just sit like a fly on the wall and [they would] talk about the business. That was very valuable,” Crooked admits. “Other than that, the shit was crazy. People getting fucked up, shootouts, task force raids in the office. Somebody that you became friends with at all of the studio sessions, popping up dead the next day. It was really crazy.”

After leaving Death Row in 2004, Crooked’s future would again find him in the shadow of Dr. Dre. In 2008, he joined with a crew of like-minded super MC’s—Royce 5’9, Joe Budden and Joell Ortiz—to form Slaughterhouse, signing to Eminem’s Shady Records imprint. Eight years later, Eminem helps out on Good vs. Evil’s opening song, “Planet X.” No stranger to controversy himself, Em’s endorsement of the project is bound to draw attention, thanks to its provocative message.

“It’s crazy to have Eminem do commentary on the intro, as big of an artist as he is. This is what the corporations don’t want. They do not want Eminem, RZA, and Xzibit attached to a project that could cause this kind of controversy. But this is what’s needed,” says Crooked of the album’s guests.

With two decades in the rap game, Crooked may be “old” by industry standards, but with age comes something that the young and flashy might not have: wisdom. Coming from the school of N.W.A and Public Enemy, Crooked is a student of an era in which rappers were not afraid to use their craft as a platform to address social or political issues.

“When we were coming up, it was normal that if the government or the police or anybody was on some bullshit with the people, the rappers spoke about it. Point blank,” Crooked says with a bit of annoyance. “Now, the corporations are in control, and they are controlling the messaging. Once you let the corporate side of music control the message, shit gets watered down. Things become false and fake and plastic and you lose the artform, you lose the realness.”

With definite skin in the game, Crooked possesses the benefit of hindsight, which has been the secret to his longevity in the industry. He elicits frustration with the current crop of what he refers to as “mumble rappers,” that don’t know or care about who or what came before them.

“If you don’t study your craft and do your history and try to take hip-hop to another level, what happens when that hot song is done? You’re out. And those people that patted your back at that big website, they’re not going to run another story on you until you’re dead. And that’s the only time you are going to pop back up on that blog,” Crooked says of disposable, one-hit wonders. “You talk about ‘It’s all about money,’ well, longevity equals the most money. If it’s all about money, would you rather get money for two years or twenty? That wave that they are on, that ‘Fuck everybody’ wave, that ‘Fuck the older generation?’ They are closing their eyes to what people have to say.”

As he continues his rant, the decibels increase, preaching with fire and brimstone, almost echoing in the congregation of the small town.

“I’ve seen this movie. I’ve had a front row seat to this movie for twenty years. I’ve seen dudes come in, get hot, go platinum, and then guess what? Now they’re serving me popcorn at the movies. And they had three platinum plaques on the wall and had to pawn them. I’ve seen them go from the Benzs, like ‘Hey, what’s up Crook,’ to ‘Aw man, I’m not doing so well, you think I could borrow twenty dollars?’”

Crooked’s impassioned words fly off his tongue, as if he were pointed towards a microphone in the vocal booth.

“I represent hip-hop to the fullest. I’m an MC. I know people that are scared of that term. Like, ‘I am not calling myself that because it makes me dated as an artist.’ I don’t run from it, I run to it,” he declares proudly.

Crooked’s unfiltered, real talk mirrors that of what is found on Good vs. Evil. His down-to-earth, IRL persona is not as unhinged as the album’s character, and he makes it clear that he does not endorse cop killing. He is merely painting a picture of how bad things could be if things don’t change.

“I’m in the streets. I hear what people are talking about. They are talking about gunning them down, man. They want to live. They’re like ‘I’ll gun them down and then go to Mexico. I’m out of the country.’ People want to live and I don’t think the cops see it as that serious,” he says grimly. “I think that nervousness needs to be on both sides. But if somebody does do that [kill an officer], I would never [endorse] that. Once you do that, you are throwing more lives away than just yours and a police officer. There are families involved; the whole community.”

Naturally, this begs the question: what if someone kills a cop and says “KXNG Crooked made me do it?”

“I think the current situation made them do it, not me. Music is powerful, I don’t deny that. I think there’s a scapegoat that some rappers use ‘Hey man, it’s just music… If you didn’t raise your kids, it’s not my job to raise your kids right,’ he says. “But you have to think, what makes a guy like [Dallas cop killer] Micah Xavier Johnson snap like that?”

Incidentally, the same day we sat down for this interview, headlines broke that two Iowa police officers, Des Moines Sgt. Anthony Beminio and Urbandale officer Justin Martin, were shot and killed. The suspect Scott Green, a 46-year-old white male, had been ordered by the court to move out of his mother’s home after he was charged with physically abusing her.

So if Good vs. Evil is just a daydream and retaliatory violence is not the answer, then what is?

“The whole shit needs to be remixed (laughs). You might be a racist cop, you might be a bullied cop that’s got some issues from childhood, you might just be a jackass, or you might be a guy that just wants to serve and protect. But if the system allows you to get away with murdering people, then we need to change the system,” he concludes. “Some people say we need more training or interaction with the community, but my whole thing is, if you became a cop because you want to do these type of things, there is no amount of training that can stop that. We gotta really figure out how to vet these cops better and make sure we are putting the right people in there, because we need police. We are not going to police ourselves.”

After speaking with KXNG Crooked for an hour, his position on these and many other issues becomes crystal clear. The mission statement of Good vs. Evil is not to inspire real world retaliation, but instead to draw attention to the issue, inspire activism and spark some much needed conversation.

“If they listen to the album and the only thing they get out of it is that I said I would kill a cop, then they missed the point… Enough is enough.”