Triksta: Life and Death and New Orleans Rap - Hardcover

Nik Cohn is the author of six previous books, as well as two collaborations with the artist Guy Peellaert. He was born in London, raised in Northern Ireland, and now lives on Shelter Island, New York.

On a bright, chill January afternoon in 2000, I was strolling on Rampart Street, thinking of the pizza at Mama Rosa’s, when a black male aged about ten walked up and spat at me, splattering my new Kenneth Cole leather jacket.
I have been obsessed with New Orleans for most of my life; it is the place I’ve loved best on earth. In recent years, however, it has turned violent and distressful, and getting spat on by a child, though mortifying, was hardly headline news. Another time, I’d have muttered a few choice curses and gone on my way. Only, this was not a good moment. I have hepatitis C, a virus that destroys the liver and feels, at least in my case, like permanent jet lag. For the most part, I’ve learned to handle it, but there are days when it handles me. The usual checks and balances cease to function, and I thrash about, untethered, driven by urges I don’t understand and can’t control.

This time I outdid myself. Instead of working out my spleen on some extra pepperoni at Mama Rosa’s, I swung around and walked over to the Iberville project. Not a good idea. I had gone there the first day I ever spent in New Orleans, in 1972, and it had felt welcoming then, but the climate had changed. No outsider, white or black, with a lick of sense would choose to go strolling through the Iberville these days unless they had good reason. In my leather jacket, fat with credit cards, I was asking for trouble. Seeking it out, in fact.

Behind abandoned hulk of Krauss’s department store, I headed into the heart of the project. A few strides brought me to a blind corner. When I turned it, the sunlight was shut out. A few more strides, and a group of youths hemmed me in. None of them spoke or touched me, they simply blocked my path. The brackish smell of bodies was fierce, and I stumbled back against a wall as the youths moved in. Then, just as suddenly as they’d swarmed, they scattered. A city bus had turned the corner and fixed us with its headlamps.

I had never known worse fear. When I regained Basin Street and was safely in a taxi, I was surprised to find I hadn’t pissed or shat myself. That was how it had felt back there—everything running out of me, uncontrollable. And what was most shameful of all, I knew my deepest dread had not been of getting robbed or even shot. I’d been afraid of blackness itself.

Afterward, I tried to blame it on the virus, or the light, or simple aversion to getting mugged. No dice. Over the years, I’d run foul of skinheads in London, neo-Nazis in Brooklyn, sundry policemen around the world. Though never brave, I had managed to keep up some vestige of front. In the Iberville, I was swept by blind animal terror, all pretense at dignity blown.

How could it be? Black music and black culture had been a huge part of my life; so had black friends and lovers. But those, depending on shifting fashion, were negroes or African-Americans. They were nobody’s niggaz.

The same friends and lovers had often told me this: all whites, cut them deep, are racist at core.

I remembered Kerry, a singer I dated some thirty years ago, and how one stoned morning, after we made love, she mocked my record collection, the posters on my walls, all the black artifacts I thought were part of me. Window dressing, she called them, and took my hand and placed it on her breast. This too, she said. She was in my bed, my world; that didn’t mean shit. Drop me off in the ghetto, up against the wall, and see how I felt then. You’d turn cracker in a heartbeat, Kerry said. Of course, I refused to believe her. Other whites, maybe; not me. That poison couldn’t be in me. Yet it was.

My home base is New York, but I visit New Orleans several times a year, often for months at a stretch. Usually, I rent a house, but this was a brief stopover and I was staying in Room 406 at the Villa Convento, a small pension on Ursulines Street, at the back of the French Quarter. My room, strewn with rap CDs that now seemed to mock me, faced onto the street. Deep into the night I lay awake, listening to the tourists trundling past on carriage rides and their guides pointing out the Villa as the site of the House of the Rising Sun, while I went back across my life, sifting through dirt—racial teasing that wasn’t quite teasing, dumb drunken jokes, betrayals big and small. And what I saw in myself, bloated sack of half-truths and jive, was a person I couldn’t live or die with.

I kept replaying those few seconds behind Krauss’s, trying to pin down details. How many youths had there been? Could it be true that none of them spoke? And why in hell was I there, anyway? Who, finally, was I trying to confront? No answers came. All I could conjure up was a rush of amorphous bodies. Seemed like I’d been set upon by people with no faces.

At first light I rose and tried to scour myself in the shower, but the water wouldn’t go past tepid, so I took a walk out of the Quarter through the Faubourg Marigny to the old black neighborhoods of Treme and St. Bernard, once thriving, now impoverished and falling down, heartachingly lovely still.

The streets were almost deserted—just a few homeless men scavenging or pushing shopping carts full of soda cans. At the corner of Pauger and Derbigny, a pickup truck swung by, two laborers on their way to work. A bounce song blasted on their radio; it sounded like Fifth Ward Weebie. I felt the thump of bass in my bones and marrow, and a faint warmth seeped through me. The truck roared off along Pauger, raising yellow dust, and was gone in seconds, but the rumble of bass and Weebie’s rap lingered. I started to walk behind them.

Regular Jugular

Soulja Slim was shot the night before Thanksgiving, 2003.

He was at his mother’s house, the spacious duplex he’d bought her in Gentilly, out toward the lake, in a quiet neighborhood. Slim kept an apartment upstairs, which doubled as his studio.

The day of his death started well. The video for his new single, “Lov Me Lov Me Not,” had arrived from New York. It was his comeback, his big shot at national stardom: “The start of the whole everything,” his mother said later. After he’d got out of jail the last time, Slim had financed an album, Years Later, and put it out on his own label, Cut Throat Committy. It had sold more than thirty thousand copies in New Orleans alone, a phenomenal number for an independent release, and all the more so in this bootleg era, when maybe eighty percent of sales were off the books. Ten thousand was regarded as a hit these days; thirty was ghetto triple-platinum. Now Koch, a major label, had leased the album, added a couple more tracks, renamed it Years Later . . . A Few Months After, and was ready to give it serious promotion. At twenty-six, after thirteen years of rapping and over five years of jail, a heroin addiction and two near-fatal shootings, it looked as if Slim was finally on track.

In the afternoon some of his boyz from Cut Throat came by the house to watch the video. Everyone said it was hot. They planned to go in the studio and cut a new track later on, but first Slim had some errands to run. Around five he took off with his partner Trenity in his Escalade, customized with a flat-screen TV and the razor-slash Cut Throat logo carved into the seats.

By 5:45, when they returned, it was dark. Trenity got out of the passenger seat and went into the house, and Slim followed a few seconds behind. As a rule he stayed armed at all times, but this neighborhood was so peaceable, never a hint of trouble, that he let his guard down. His gun was still in the Escalade as he crossed the lawn and a man stepped to him out of hiding and shot him once in the back, three times in the face. Slim was dead before anyone could reach him.

I heard the news around seven. My phone rang, and a voice I didn’t recognize started talking. Like most Southerners, rappers never bother to identify themselves. “Slim’s gone,” the caller said, then someone started yelling in the background and the line went dead.
A few minutes later, the phone rang again. And it kept ringing all evening. Some of the calls were from people I worked with and knew well, others from virtual strangers. These must have been working through their phone books from A to Z, speed-dialing at random. Though a few seemed surprised to hear a European voice, they plowed on regardless. Slim’s death belonged to everyone.

Nobody seemed shocked. Slim had been running the streets, in harm’s way, from a child, and he was famously confrontational. If anything, the wonder was he’d lasted so long. Even so, there was a sense of awe. A warrior had passed, a great man in his own world. Simply to help spread the news was a form of reflected glory.

It was three years since I had gone walking in the Iberville, two since I started working in rap, and killings had lost their novelty. Normally, when someone got shot, grieving was left to the family. For everyone else, it was more or less business as usual. At Wydell Spotsville’s studio in Pigeon Town, a ravaged area near the Jefferson Parish line, I’d met a kid, fifteen at most. There was an eagerness in his face, a hunger that set him apart. I asked him to rap and he rattled off a verse, freestyling. One rhyme stood out among the standard gangsta posturing: “Need to maximize my worth / ’Fore I leave out this earth.” I asked him to work on that thought and let me hear what came out, but he never showed up again. After a week or so, I asked where he was. “He got popped,” someone said, and Wydell, a godly man, shook his head and sighed. Then he cued another track, and the kid was not mentioned again.

But Slim, that was different. A laundry list of local stars–Pimp Daddy, DJ Irv, Yella Boy, Kilo G, Warren Mays, and many others–had died by violence. Soulja Slim transcended them all. Thou...