Radical (5 page)

CHAPTER THREE

The Doctor Who Said “Fuck tha Police”

It was my Uncle Nasir, Abi's brother, of all people, who got me into hip-hop. By the early 1990s he was a doctor in Newcastle. Nasir had ended up marrying my cousin from my dad's side, Farrah, the daughter of
Tai Ammi,
who told the fascinating bedtime stories. Nasir was my favorite uncle, a soft-spoken, deeply intelligent, and insightful man. His marriage to Farrah, someone I consider a sister, made this family my special relatives to visit, and their kids Raheem, Alia, and Habiba became my closest cousins.

In his mannerisms, dress, career, and proper English, Nasir is the opposite of the street culture I eventually embraced. But what was so impressive about him is that he had empathy for those who were less fortunate. I remember how he would always go out and talk to the roughest neighborhood kids, who were otherwise stealing cars and picking fights. I asked him once why he did this, and he replied: “My surgery's located here; the majority of my patients are from this estate. If I don't speak to them, who will?” I loved him even more for that, and so did these dangerous youths. His car never got stolen, and I learned a valuable lesson.

In the summer of 1989 we went up to Newcastle to visit, and Nasir decided that he would play Osman and me a type of music that we had never heard before. With a glint of mischief in his eyes, he put on a track called “Fuck tha Police” by N.W.A (Niggaz With Attitude), and pumped up the volume. A year earlier N.W.A had released
Straight Outta Compton
, their debut album, on which Ice Cube, Dr. Dre, Eazy-E, DJ Yella, and MC Ren had laid the foundations for what would later become known as “gangsta rap.” By introducing this one rap track to us, and without realizing what he had just unleashed, Dr. Nasir helped his two young nephews find their voice.

“Fuck tha Police” is a statement as much as it is a record. It gives it to the police for treating black communities like dirt, targeting them and lazily assuming that anyone with a car or a bit of money must be a drug dealer. It slams them for their prejudice and for their violence, and N.W.A promises to mete out its revenge, fantasizing about “takin' out a cop or two.” All of this is delivered by the various MCs with an aggression, a passion that grabs hold of the listener, a raw, seething anger coming from one of LA's roughest ghettos, Compton. It's a history lesson with a booming drum track and packed into five minutes.

I was never the same again. The track quite simply blew me away. It was the attitude and confidence that I took to immediately. This was definitely
not
the sound of someone turning the other cheek: this was the sound of a community finding its voice, and using it to say that they weren't simply going to lie down and take it. They were saying
you treat us like that, and we're going to take the fight straight back to you.

My uncle was of the same generation as my mother, who'd grown up by giving way and stepping back when confrontation arose. This doctor's love for N.W.A and the fact that he was sharing it with me spoke volumes; it must have given vent to all his frustrations growing up. He could turn up “Fuck tha Police” and even now as a respected doctor, he could find strength in their stand. For me, the N.W.A attitude had more practical connotations: unlike my uncle, whose job had taken him away from having to face such situations, I had my teenage years ahead of me. The experiences of racism at primary school had scarred me, and the thought of having to accept more years of the same was a frightening one. Listening to N.W.A, I realized that I didn't have to. Others were fighting back, and so could I.

The fact that rap lyrics rubbed everyone the wrong way made me love such groups all the more. People's offense at the expletives helped make the band feel cool. I remember listening to “Fuck tha Police” in the car, on a cassette player, and my parents being completely shocked. “What the hell is this?” my dad asked, as Eazy-E rapped about his “bitches” providing him with sexual favors, while Dad tried to concentrate on the road. New music is often popular for the very fact that earlier generations find it shocking: this was “our” music, misunderstood by others.

What most people heard was just a load of shouting and swearing; they thought the music appealed because of its shock value. They couldn't have been more wrong. These rappers were bright, street smart, and articulate. Their rhymes encapsulated the experience of being young, male, and black in a way that simply didn't exist elsewhere in the media. This was a time when banana skins were still being thrown at black players at football matches, when Nelson Mandela was still in prison, and when the beating of Rodney King by LAPD officers was about to send shockwaves around the world. The sense of disenfranchisement, that you couldn't rely on the state for help, was very real.

The odd thing is that up until that summer, Osman and I would bicker like most young siblings over almost anything. There was only a year and a half between us, and where he was undoubtedly the bigger one, I liked to think I was the sharper one. I would try to use my wit against his power, which led to many clashes and parental intervention. But when Nasir got us both into rap, we found a common cause, a common purpose. It was like we were suddenly on the same side against the rest. Our bickering stopped and we began sharing music, going out to the same parties, and sharing friends. We began to feel like a team with a cause. Our cause was rebellion against the status quo.

If it was my uncle who introduced me to N.W.A, it was Osman who first got me into Public Enemy. “Rebel Without a Pause” was the first single of theirs that I heard, and it still sticks with me now. Here was a group who didn't just have the attitude, but the
political insight
to go with it. There was always a thought-out philosophy to Chuck D and Professor Griff's rhymes—this was a band sampling Malcolm X and bringing the Black Nationalist message into teenagers' living rooms. Professor Griff had his security team, the S1Ws—the Security of the First World—and an interest in the Nation of Islam. They were fearless. The more I listened to the records, the more the lyrics and influences began to seep into me. I had never really heard of people like Malcolm X before. Now I had a real thirst to find out all about him.

The fact that Professor Griff was an advocate for Islam made an impression, too. Considering myself an agnostic, I had never been a religious person: it hadn't been a big issue growing up. The few times I'd been to the mosque it had been a disaster. The imam didn't speak any English and got his message across with the use of a stick. I told my parents I wasn't going back because he used to hit children and that was it; they didn't make me go again.

Professor Griff made something I had considered old-fashioned feel vibrant and interesting. He wasn't the only one: in 1993 Brand Nubian used the Muslim call to prayer “Allahu akbar” as a sample for one of their songs in their second album,
In God We Trust.
I absolutely loved it. I had little understanding at the time that most of these Black Nationalist rappers belonged to racist sects of Islam such as Farrakhan's Nation of Islam and the Five Percenters. What mattered was that these sorts of endorsements from young, streetwise rappers made me rethink my identity. The faith I had inherited was no longer some backward village religion to be ashamed of or apologetic about. It had been re-branded as a form of
resistance
, as a self-affirming
defiant
identity. On the back of such groups, the black conversion rate to Islam was going through the roof. Even members of the nascent British hip-hop band Cash Crew ended up converting. All of a sudden, it was cool to be a Muslim.

That September, in 1989, I enrolled at Cecil Jones High School, at precisely the time that hip-hop was starting to really kick off. If rap was the form, hip-hop was the culture. Dr. Nasir's little “Fuck tha Police” intervention couldn't have been better timed. I had left primary school intent on never letting anyone pick on me again. At Cecil Jones I changed my dress style, wearing a baggy uniform with my sweater tied round my waist. I also changed my hair, closely clipping it to a “grade one” on the sides while leaving it long on top, and I got my ear pierced.

On my first day at school, age eleven, I remember consciously talking myself up to people as someone you didn't want to mess with. In fact, I got so carried away that someone even tried to call my bluff and I nearly got hit again. A very crude ranking system operates in school playgrounds, the “hardest” kids are known, and a pecking order is quickly but firmly established as kids jockey for position in the first few weeks of the term. I soon realized that merely talking myself up would not be sufficient. I needed the right friends, the right “crew,” and I ruthlessly began to seek them out.

The fact that I was one of the first kids from my year to get into hip-hop made my task of building a crew easier than expected. White kids were lining up to talk to me, not just about rap music but the whole hip-hop scene. Hip-hop was something that could more than compensate for my absence from football games. My skin color was suddenly something that kids
wanted
to be associated with. Very quickly, Aron and Martyn, respectively the first and second toughest kids in our school year, had become my closest friends. I was to be their very own trendsetter, teaching them the ways of the B-boy, or someone living a hip-hop lifestyle.

It instantly bonded me with all the popular kids in the older classes, too. In my school year there were no black kids, and only two other Pakistanis, one being my cousin Faisal. But in the year above was a boy called Michael, whom we all called Moe. He was Kenyan British and had a group of friends in his year, including Faisal's older brother Yasser. There was a kid called Mark, who was West Indian and equally respected, and friends with Osman. In those early days, we were a small community and hip-hop was our way of life. We had a certain style of dress, spoke in a specific slang, and we clipped our hair very short on the sides, sometimes carving patterns into it, and then left it standing long on top. We believed that we had discovered “cool” where all others had failed, and we quickly bonded with each other over the music.

I've never been one to do things by halves, and once I got into hip-hop, I bought into the scene big time: not just the music but also the look, the clothes, everything. I'd wear what we called “Click” or “Extreme” suits, named after the brands. These were a pair of matching jackets and trousers, the trousers being as baggy as you can imagine—almost Aladdin genie-type—and we would fold them in at the bottom with what we called “pin-tucks.” The top would be baggy too and come complete with a hood. The trainers would be Adidas, big and fat to match. Wearing the right labels was everything, and we'd travel up to London to buy the gear.

Word went around that we were connected with the scene in London. If you messed with us, we could make a few calls and bring down heavy B-boys from the big city. We saw the benefits of this sort of hype, but back then it was all about survival. These London connections, knowing the hard knocks two school years above me, and having my own crew meant that in Cecil Jones no one dared mess with me again. Gone forever was the boy who cried alone in a school playground because he wasn't allowed to play football.

It was almost like having bodyguards. Aron and Martyn looked up to me for my knowledge of hip-hop dress, style, and sounds. They developed a loyalty to me, especially the bigger of them, Martyn, whom we called Sav. If anyone said so much as a rude word to me, Sav would stand ready to defend me. But I never forgot what it was like to be victimized, which pushed me sometimes to stop my best friends from getting too rough with other kids. Though other times, in my twelve-year-old mind, I felt that kids “deserved” it, like if they had said something racist. In such circumstances I would not intervene, believing in a playground sense of justice.

At primary school, I'd won prizes for my artwork. Now I used my talents to write graffiti. I chose “Slamer” as my tag. With my friends I would go round “tagging,” writing my name and “bombing,” plastering a wall with tags. I'd use Polka Pens, which were these big, fat permanent markers with nubs as thick as your thumb. You would have to give the marker a shake to keep the ink fresh, and whenever we got the chance, we'd tag up any wall with them. Alongside my tag, I'd write different words and captions—“fight the power,” things like that. I'd draw bode, too: these were little characters, strange-looking duck figures that'd stand by the side of your work. I'd also sketch “pieces,” which were basically pencil sketches of graffiti on pieces of paper, which you'd then use as a stencil for a larger, sprayed picture.

There was an area in Southend that the police left specifically for graffiti called The Yard. It was a derelict area left alone in the hope that by letting us tag there, we wouldn't graffiti elsewhere. A lot of kids hung about there taking drugs, and that's where I started. Pretty soon I graduated to the streets, because that was where you'd get your work seen. I'd always have my pen with me, and if I saw a wall I liked, and the coast was clear, I would tag it. When we went bombing, it was a bit more planned: a group of us would target somewhere and blast the whole area in a specific raid. The whole cat and mouse thing with the police just added to the buzz I got from doing it. I was chased a number of times by the police, but always gave them the slip. I was smart enough to never get caught, and smart enough not to get into the spray-painting side of things. That was a far bigger process: to spray-paint a high street wall involved covering an area five times the size; to do that, and do it properly, you could be sitting there for an hour or so. The chances of getting caught were that much higher, and if they did catch you, they'd really throw the book at you.

Graffiti is a culture where if you're shit, everyone is quick to tell you. The mark of respect for a graffiti artist is how long your “piece” and tag stay up on a wall. Out of raw respect, other artists will not paint over something they think is good, and anyone who does paint over it better be prepared for a beat-down. However, if your stuff is no good, or if you are seen as an amateur, you'll quickly find the word “lame” written over your work. The offending person would then leave their own tag at the side as a direct challenge. The only way to get even was to be good.