Music Industry Rappers
“The schools in a portion of Boston stretching from just south of South Boston through Roxbury and into Dorchester are districted with a similar effect: the predominantly black areas are cut away from the predominantly white areas.”
Morgan v. Hennigan, U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, 1974 THE SEEK BUTTON on the Ford’s radio is working. The downtown recedes. Miles of neighborhoods fill the windshield. The SEEK function locks on someplace in stereo, college FM probably. “Yeah,” a new friend says, “Whas up. Whas goin on.” The radio has another button, VOL, which gets jacked repeatedly while the Ford hurtles, happily, to the source of the noise. Not to the station’s broadcast booth on a campus across the river, nor to its transmission towers in the suburbs, but rather to RJam Productions in North Dorchester, where black kids from Boston’s now-integrated high schools-Latin, Madison Park, Jeremiah Burke, Mattapan-cut demos and dream of being bigger than even the radio’s new friend, a young man named Schoolly D who right now, at speaker-damaging volume, sounds darn big. “Before we start this next record…,” Schooly’s saying. The record in question is called “Signifying Rapper,” a brief, bloody tale of ghetto retribution from Side 2 of Schoolly’s Smoke Some Kill.
The black areas are cut away from the white areas a federal judge ruled in ’74, and evidence is everywhere that nothing’s changed since then. On the southbound left of the Fitzgerald Expressway pass 20 blocks of grim Irish-Catholic housing projects, the western border of Belfast, complete with Sinn Fein graffiti and murals depicting a glorious United Ireland, a neighborhood where the gadfly will get his fibula busted for praising the ’74 court order that bused “Them” from wherever it is “They” live-the Third World fer crissakes–into 97-percent-white South Boston. On the Expressway’s right is the place the fibula-busters are talking about: the simultaneous northern border of Haiti, Jamaica and
Morgan v. Hennigan, U.S. District Court for Massachusetts, 1974 THE SEEK BUTTON on the Ford’s radio is working. The downtown recedes. Miles of neighborhoods fill the windshield. The SEEK function locks on someplace in stereo, college FM probably. “Yeah,” a new friend says, “Whas up. Whas goin on.” The radio has another button, VOL, which gets jacked repeatedly while the Ford hurtles, happily, to the source of the noise. Not to the station’s broadcast booth on a campus across the river, nor to its transmission towers in the suburbs, but rather to RJam Productions in North Dorchester, where black kids from Boston’s now-integrated high schools-Latin, Madison Park, Jeremiah Burke, Mattapan-cut demos and dream of being bigger than even the radio’s new friend, a young man named Schoolly D who right now, at speaker-damaging volume, sounds darn big. “Before we start this next record…,” Schooly’s saying. The record in question is called “Signifying Rapper,” a brief, bloody tale of ghetto retribution from Side 2 of Schoolly’s Smoke Some Kill.
The black areas are cut away from the white areas a federal judge ruled in ’74, and evidence is everywhere that nothing’s changed since then. On the southbound left of the Fitzgerald Expressway pass 20 blocks of grim Irish-Catholic housing projects, the western border of Belfast, complete with Sinn Fein graffiti and murals depicting a glorious United Ireland, a neighborhood where the gadfly will get his fibula busted for praising the ’74 court order that bused “Them” from wherever it is “They” live-the Third World fer crissakes–into 97-percent-white South Boston. On the Expressway’s right is the place the fibula-busters are talking about: the simultaneous northern border of Haiti, Jamaica and