The Plot Against Hip Hop Read Online Free Page A

thick black hair, a little round in the waist, but still easy on the eyes, came over to D. “Mr. Hunter, Mr. Gibbs wonders if you had a moment.”
    In contrast to the bright, sleek, modernist design of the rest of the office, Gibbs’s space was dimly lit and a little smoky. The ashtray on his desk held two dead cigars with one still smoldering. Sharing the desk with the tray were stacks of reports full of multicolored graphs and bullet points. Next to them was a D.M.C. doll, one of a Japanese line of collectibles built around famous hip hop figures. The rest of the desk was covered in various devices—BlackBerry, Sony Playstation, iPod, and a futuristic thing D couldn’t place.
    He had a couple minutes to contemplate Gibbs’s desk since the mogul wasn’t actually there yet. Well, D thought, I did make it into the dude’s office. At least I did that. To kill time between sips of the Evian that the Latina had generously handed him, D practiced a trick Dwayne had told him about back in the day. D began trying to read Gibbs’s files upside down. You couldn’t get the small print but a log line or caption here or there could yield a nugget of useful info.
    From what D could see, most of the reports were marketing surveys of “urban buying habits” tied to “embedded brand desire.” It was the gobbledygook of psychological selling, something D had often encountered in meetings with people trying to move sneakers, video games, and liquor. D didn’t understand much about it, though he knew that anyone who talked that talk could squeeze a living out of corporations from here to hell and back. Gibbs had gone from selling records out of the backs of cars to selling digital dreams to lifestyle companies and the big Walmart brand.
    D was gazing at an upside-down graph of red, blue, and green lines when Gibbs walked in wearing a white shirt, jeans, and a diamond in each earlobe. “Sorry about the wait, D,” he began after a handshake and a polite hug. “I had to change for a meeting I have in fifteen minutes. But I wanted to make sure I spoke to you before I left.” In that one bit of dialogue Gibbs had put a time limit on their conversation, while also acknowledging the need to speak. D dove right in.
    “As you probably know, I was the last person Dwayne Robinson spoke to before he died.”
    “Yeah, I read that.”
    “The police have no leads and are treating this as a Bloods initiation. Simple as that.”
    “But you think his last words mean something. A clue to who did it.”
    “Maybe more like why it happened. At least I hope they do.”
    “I’ve thought a lot about it since I read that stuff in the papers. It’s funny cause I never thought Dwayne was a huge Biggie fan, so for him to reference the dude at that moment, it had to be about more than a record.”
    “What’s your guess?”
    “I hate to say this, but I don’t know that I have a guess. To be honest, these last few years Dwayne and I haven’t been close. I mean, if I ran into him it was all love on my part. But we had some major differences over the direction of my life.”
    “I don’t wanna get all up in your business, but were the differences things that, you know, reflected his state of mind?”
    “Well, he was one of the few people I knew from back in the day who didn’t think I’d sold out. No. He thought we’d been sold out.”
    “ We’d? ”
    “Yeah, like everyone who was in the hip hop game had been talked out of being rebels and just handed the culture over to corporate America for chump change.”
    “You know he was writing a book titled The Plot Against Hip Hop .”
    “That’s strange to me.” Gibbs paused now, his face revealing both anger and amusement. “How a man who’d seen how we’d all pushed and shoved this street culture into an industry could think that one force or person could control its direction—well, that idea just tripped me out. These niggas are so hard-headed you can barely get two MCs to do a tour