Lap of Honour: an Appreciation of Nipsey Hussle
‘Not today’. Waking up to the news that Nipsey Hussle had been murdered elicited this reaction from me. My first emotional response was anger. Not because Nipsey had one of the best projects released last year and was taken before he became more than the underground legend he already was. And not because his partner and children have been left bereaved.
No, I was angry because I knew that whilst his fans and the community would hold him up as an activist, entrepreneur and rapper, the mainstream media wouldn’t get much past a rapper from Crenshaw with ties to a gang, a rapper covered in tattoos and imply that he was a thug and somehow complicit in his own death.
Not today.
My friend Nate first introduced me to Nipsey. We were curating songs for our end of year playlist and the first track he mentioned was ‘Double Up’. I have the privilege of putting the playlists together and one of the things I spend way too much time thinking about is the order the songs should go in (editor’s note — the shuffle button is the enemy of the curator). ‘Double Up’ is almost directly in the middle. It was deliberate. When I first heard it, it grabbed my attention and held it captive for the entire song. It is a wonderfully balanced song — a perfect mix of vocal dexterity, production and melody — and Nipsey’s verse is a statement of intent:
My new shit sound like it’s ‘Soul Train’
Tookie Williams over Coltrane
Hearing that, I knew, I absolutely knew that he was going to be an international superstar. In one couplet he reached into the past and recognised the dichotomy of beauty in the world he knew. He mentions ‘Soul Train’, one of the first shows that featured majority black audiences and performers, John Coltrane, another artist that died too young but whose music transcended his lifetime and Tookie Williams. It is the reference to Williams that stands out to me today. He was one of the founders of the Crips movement in Los Angeles. Lest we forget, and with the power of the internet, we don’t have to, ‘Williams himself has stated that he founded the Crips not with the intention of eliminating other gangs, but to create a force powerful enough to protect local black people from racism, corruption and brutality at the hands of the police’. Williams was executed in 2005 for the murder of four people in 1979, one of the last people to be executed in California. Hussle was from the same place, a place with indiscriminate police violence and poor life chances if you’re black.
I focus on Williams because the media will focus on Hussle’s gang connections with absolutely no analysis of the utility of those same gangs. If we take Williams at his word, then gangs are there for the safety of their members against threats. Ta-Nehisi Coates recently wrote:
…the police are not the true agents of the violence. We are.
We are the ones who designed the criminogenic ghettos. We are the ones who barred black people from leaving those ghettos. We are the ones who treat black men without criminal records as though they are white men with criminal records. We are the ones who send black girls to juvenile detention homes for fighting in school. We are the masters of the American gulag, a penal system “so vast,” writes sociologist Bruce Western, “as to draw entire demographic groups into the web.” And we are the ones who send in police to make sure it all goes according to plan.
There’s a famous scene in ‘The Wire’ where a character says, ‘the game is rigged. But you cannot lose if you do not play.’ Bullshit. In a 2010 interview with Complex, Hussle had this to say about artists that were repping gangs:
If you 35, 28, or 30 years old, and you decide you’re gonna pick up a rag and start bangin’, and you can look yourself in the mirror and you still feel like you’re a man? That’s cool, do your thing. My concern is the niggas that are really in the shit. I’m more focused on giving solutions and inspiration more than anything.
Hussle didn’t try to deny his past. In the same interview he said ‘We were just out here with the shit for real. That was our day-to-day.’ When the background to your life growing up is violence, be it police, gang or systemic, a gang becomes a necessity which can be the difference between life and death. He didn’t deny it, but he used his success to provide others in his community options that are denied to so many, opening a STEM centre, with beautiful reasoning,
“In our culture, there’s a narrative that says, ‘Follow the athletes, follow the entertainers,’” he said. “And that’s cool but there should be something that says, ‘Follow Elon Musk, follow [Mark] Zuckerberg.’ I think that with me being influential as an artist and young and coming from the inner city, it makes sense for me to be one of the people that’s waving that flag.”
I’m writing this because narrative matters. The world lost a talented musician. Crenshaw lost an entrepreneur, someone willing to put his money where it mattered. And children lost their father. That is the narrative that matters. RIP Nipsey.
