Close to the Edge (12 page)

The university expended much energy on controlling who entered the area. Public transportation out of Hyde Park was possible in the evenings, but bus services into the area stopped around 8 o'clock. The university didn't want any undesirables coming in on the Jeffrey 6 bus. Our email accounts were bombarded by frequent crime watch and safety warnings. We were cautioned not to be out alone past 9 p.m.

Student organizations on campus encountered resistance from the university's administration when they wanted to bring in rap bands touring on the college circuits. When the administration finally relented and allowed the iconoclastic rap act Black Eyed Peas to do a show on the lawns adjacent to the dining commons, there was a strict system of security set up to keep out any local residents. Students had to show their ID to enter. As a somewhat bored will.i.am entered the stage before a lackluster crowd of college kids, a line of armed security was suddenly visible on the nearby roofs and perimeters of the event. Were they worried the show might awaken the unbridled passions of an engineering student? Or, God forbid, that it might attract actual black people?

Knowing my frustrations with Hyde Park, my friend Anurima Bhargava introduced me to her former classmate and local rapper Mike Treese. One day we stopped by Café Florian, a Hyde Park bar and restaurant where Treese worked night shifts as a delivery person. Treese was a shy white guy who wore a baseball cap pulled down low. With a black rapper, Gee Field, Treese formed a rap duo known as Mass Hysteria. Anurima and Treese had both gone to Kenwood High in Hyde Park, which had produced the rapper Da Brat and the R&B singer R. Kelly. When Treese gave me a ride to Anurima's New Year's Eve party later that week, we revealed our initial suspicions about the other. “When I first saw you, I was, like, what would she know about hip hop?” he admitted to me. “Well, when I saw you,” I replied, “I was thinking, how can this white boy make it as a rapper?”

Treese told me about his life growing up in Hyde Park and going to a mostly black public school. It seemed that a by-product of the university's gentrification efforts was the creation of some new integrated spaces in a highly segregated city, as Treese experienced growing up. And these integrated spaces— much like Mike Walsh had described in the case of his South Side community—did provide some opportunity for blacks and whites to come together through hip hop culture. It struck me how the whites who participated in hip hop culture generally invoked their atypical life experiences—they were born in a black area or grew up in the projects or went to a black school. It was their pain, their poverty, or their truncated life options that made them identify with hip hop. And as S. Craig Watkins has said, white poverty in America has largely been invisible, as it violates dominant notions about race and class.
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White rappers like Treese weaved these details into their narratives, as if being white meant you had more to prove.

“My life—to use a Jay-Z line—was both a ‘gift and a curse.' In fact, I thought of that line before him,” Treese said. Some of Treese's family members suffered drug and alcohol addictions, and he himself struggled with depression. Only, his escape was music rather than alcohol or drugs. “The best thing my parents ever did for me was put me in public schools in Hyde Park, because they didn't have enough money to send me to private school. For Chicago to be the most segregated city in the country, I grew up in the most integrated community, which was Hyde Park. That's where I was introduced to hip hop.”

As one of the few white kids in his school, Treese grew up feeling like he was in the wrong place at the wrong time. “As a white kid going to a black school, you're really just tryin' to fit in,” he recalled. “I was a shy, skinny-ass kid. Not just being a white kid among all black people but a really little kid who was a late bloomer with everything. So you felt like you had to play catch-up and compete even harder 'cause you were little. That defined my life. I had a fear of being left out. Nobody wants to be the last kid picked on the team. Nobody wants to get their ass whipped. And for a little kid, nobody ever fucked with me.”

But it was by being on the South Side that he was introduced to hip hop. “The fact is that I heard ‘Jam on It' when that came out,” recalled Treese, “and I was break-dancing to it. I remember this one kid, Donald, would have a boom box, and he would tape shit off the radio, and we would practice to that. And I heard Run-DMC's first rap songs. I heard ‘Roxanne Roxanne' and ‘Rappin' Duke.' I remember buying
Raising Hell
on my own, I remember buying
License to Ill
on my own. My older brother had friends, and they would have boom boxes and play ‘Din Da Da' and ‘Planet Rock.' We didn't know where this shit came from. I remember even in eighty-seven when
Paid in Full
came out, we was looking at the tape, like, which one do you think is Eric B and which one do you think is Rakim? We didn't know—nobody had cable and videos. You saw that later on. We didn't experience it like New York kids. I didn't really see people rapping till high school. But in grammar school there were definitely people break-dancing on cardboard, and graffiti was prevalent.”

Mike Treese of Mass Hysteria

Gee Field of Mass Hysteria

In Treese's senior year of high school, rap culture was at its peak. “I used to write rhymes here and there but not seriously till my senior year in high school,” Treese recalled. “Everything in my high school and in Chicago in ninety-two was hip hop. There was still other shit that existed. There was still gangster culture, and House culture, but hip hop exploded in that year. It's never exploded like that since then or before then. That's when I met the people that I got down with, like Gee Field. They realized that they were serious about it too, so we could do something together.”

Gee Field was a classmate of Treese's, hailing from a rough South Shore neighborhood known as Terror Town. Gee was born at Seventy-sixth and Walcott on the Southwest Side and moved to South Shore with his mother and siblings after she separated from his father—the well-known old-school R&B singer Garland Green. During his father's studio sessions in their basement, Gee had met Michael Jackson and other celebrities. Gee's mom would play old-school hip hop like Sugar Hill Gang on the radio in the car.

In the mid-1980s, when he was in grade school, Gee had a classmate who introduced him to the rap show on the University of Chicago radio station WHPK. “It didn't come on until 12 o'clock midnight,” Gee related. “Sure 'nuff, I stayed up and I listened to the show and it just opened up a whole new world for me. There was this DJ named JP Chill who played mostly New York hip hop, it was really bubblin' at the time. He'd play uncensored versions, curse words. I had these tapes called Tone-Master tapes. I would pop one in my cassette deck, ‘cause I could probably only stay up for the first hour of the three-hour show. After about twelve-thirty or one, my mom would peek in and see me messing around. She'd say, ‘Boy, get yourself to bed,' and hit me upside the head. I would sneak the tape in before I went to bed.”

Mike Treese and Gee were participants in the citywide hip hop meetings in the early 1990s. “We used to throw hip hop meetings,” Treese explained, “and you could only come to the meeting if you did one of the four elements. You couldn't just come if you were a fan, 'cause we had been fans our whole life. Now it's, like, we're eighteen—now we gotta do something serious. So are you a b-boy? You a graffiti writer? You a rapper? You a DJ? You a producer? So you had to do something. There'd be like a hundred of us. We used to meet up on the train tracks, and we called it the ‘heat box' on the Metra tracks. It was, like, a glass-enclosed place where you wait for the train. We'd just meet up there, and some of us rapping, kids doing graffiti, then people start breakin'. So that was ninety-two, that was our
Beat Street.
But it didn't last, 'cause that's the time you have to make grownup decisions. Most graffiti writers don't make any money. Most b-boys don't make any money. If you're lucky as a DJ or a rapper, you might make money here or there. Ninety-two was the year Common came out. Twista came out. A lot of people's careers got started back then, including me. Back then you could look at it, like, well, OK, Common and Twista got deals, so maybe we can, too. But the shit didn't work like that.”

The underground independent route began to develop in Chicago around the midnineties as an alternative to the major labels that came to dominate the music industry. One event that gave impetus to Chicago's underground was the buyout of the twenty-four-hour hip hop radio station WJPC 950 AM in the summer of 1994. It became 106 Jamz and switched to the generic formula of New York's Hot 97.
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The monopoly of the media giant Clear Channel Communications over a large majority of radio stations—following the loosening of restrictions on media ownership in the Telecommunications Act of 1996—meant that radio playlists became much more formulaic in general. Airtime became a commodity for sale, and independent artists who couldn't afford to pay for it had no chance of having their songs on the air.

Live Nation—a spin-off of Clear Channel Communications—owned SFX Entertainment, which managed a large number of the country's entertainment venues. Corporate monopoly over entertainment venues contributed to the exclusion of independent artists. The Chicago House of Blues—acquired by Live Nation in 2006—was unwilling to showcase local rap artists, even as opening acts for the national rap acts regularly touring Chicago. Even before the takeover by Live Nation, the venue was accused of being exclusionary. In April 2000 the hip hop community organized a large demonstration outside the House of Blues. According to the protesters, the House of Blues marketed itself as a historic venue for preserving black and Latino culture. They alleged that the venue prevented urban youth from getting their events in, and quoted local artists exorbitant prices for nonprime slots. The House of Blues regularly booked national rap acts like 50 Cent or Nelly with restrictively high prices for the tickets. Some local artists invoked the situation of jazz in the 1920s, when clubs booked black acts while excluding black audiences.

The major labels were signing artists with club appeal, danceable music, and the standard formula of bragging about women, cars, and money. It may have been possible to get a hit song on the radio without being signed to a major label, but this meant buying beats from producers who consistently had hit songs, which meant shelling out close to $200,000 for a beat. Or it just meant getting lucky and being a one-hit wonder. Neither route was sufficient to sustain a career and an artist for the long term. Even making it gold or platinum on a label once didn't guarantee a sustainable income if the artist couldn't continue to produce a sound that sold commercially.

Since commercial radio was out of the question, the main resources for independent hip hop artists were college radio stations, as well as small local venues and retail. This combination was enough to sustain the careers of underground artists in, for example, the San Francisco Bay Area. The retail support of small record stores along Telegraph Avenue in Berkeley, mini-chain stores such as Rasputin, and college and community radio stations could allow independent artists in the Bay Area to sell up to fifteen thousand CDs locally.

But in Chicago many of the mom-and-pop stores were bought out by national chains such as Best Buy. College radio stations such as WHPK had three hip hop shows a week, but the audiences were so small that they couldn't really be used by artists to promote their sales. Despite this, there still existed a large enough community of people in Chicago who didn't want to listen to the major radio formula and who supported independent hip hop. Here in Chicago, it seemed I had stumbled upon a real, authentic underground that wasn't looking for handouts from the government or kudos from the market to make its music.

T
here was a long line outside Double Door for the Monday hip hop night, but the bouncer waved us straight in, no cover charge. I was with my girls. Nicole was a Trinidadian American from Brooklyn who was a fellow grad student. Anurima was a desi who had grown up on the South Side close to Hyde Park. Hip hop night tended to be mainly guys, and in an attempt to attract more females the organizers had the ten-dollar cover charge waived for those of our gender.