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Gold Records on the Streets
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Madeleine Bair
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May, 23 2007
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In a city that’s best known to the outside world for high crime and hip-hop, it should be no surprise that Oakland's top-selling album is a chilling epic of murder, fear, and the need to strengthen the community, woven over the electronic fingerprint of the hyphy movement.
And no, I'm not talking about Da Baydestrian, the latest album to drop by hyphy hero Mistah F.A.B. Sales of that pale in comparison to the success of Turf Unity, a less-polished but more ambitious undertaking. |
Cov Records' artists selling on the streets
In a city that’s best known to the outside world for high crime and hip-hop, it should be no surprise that Oakland's top-selling album is a chilling epic of murder, fear, and the need to strengthen the community, woven over the electronic fingerprint of the hyphy movement.
And no, I'm not talking about Da Baydestrian, the latest album to drop by hyphy hero Mistah F.A.B. Sales of that pale in comparison to the success of Turf Unity, a less-polished but more ambitious undertaking. Mistah F.A.B. inspires dancers to “go dumb” and get their “thizz” on. That’s all very well. But Turf Unity aims a few steps higher: to bring a stop to violence on the streets of Oakland.
If you've never heard of it, you haven't been in downtown Oakland lately. That's because Turf Unity is being sold the old fashioned way – on the sidewalk with a backpack full of CDs and a quick sales pitch to passers-by. Multiply that by the thirty-so young artists featured on the album and you've got a street team that can spread through downtown like they’re playing Nellie Ball with hip hop albums, a sales attack that’s hard to ignore in the high-rise alleys between Broadway and the lake. Since the album dropped at the beginning of May, more than 800 units have sold on these sidewalks.
19-year old D'Angelo Lemmons, a rapper and producer credited on half of Turf Unity's twelve tracks, is a longtime member of the team. Like most of his teenage comrades, D'Angelo makes his sales pitch with a smile, and takes rejection or apathy with disarming politeness. "Help silence the violence," he says, day after day, at his post on 20th and Webster, a busy hub of business-suited foot traffic on any weekday afternoon. Each pitch comes with the wave of a CD that has D'Angelo's smiling face gracing the cover, along with pictures of the twenty-plus other local artists featured on the album below its name, Turf Unity.
D'Angelo, also known as D.Nok
While the high-rise alleys of downtown are not quite the epicenter of Oakland's hip hop scene, D'Angelo, a West Oakland native, says he chose this spot, one block away from the Kaiser Center, carefully. "There is a lot of currency that comes down here, and there are a lot of people who work here but don't know nothing about the community," he says, while friends and label mates Chaos and Lil-O peddle CDs to an endless stream of lunching workers.
D'Angelo, who performs as D.Nok, says his raps are inspired by what he sees every day. "If I see a beautiful flower blooming," he says, his eyes widening with the pretty thought, "I write about a flower.”
It’s not flowers, though, that D’Angelo and others see in the communities they rap about on Turf Unity. D’Angelo’s first verse on the album ends with this grim reflection: Lack of respect/senseless acts/ has the young at a point to attack and explode.
The omission of flowers notwithstanding, the album, both in its content and production process, is about creating unity and positive change for Oakland. After the dramatic spike in Oakland homicides last year, particularly among those 24 years old and under, three local youth organizations – Silence the Violence, Covenant House, and Art in Action – got together to do something about it.
Last year’s increased murder rate in Oakland and other cities may have confounded policy makers and the police. Galen Peterson, a local youth worker and one of the leaders behind the Turf Unity project, believes music is an answer. “Music and rhythm,” he says, “remind people of commonality.”
Galen, the founding director of Cov Records, the studio and music mentorship program of Oakland’s Covenant House, first recognized the transformational potential of hip-hop music when he was working at a community center in a Seattle housing project. There, in a freestyle cipher, in which rappers gather in a huddle to improvise raps in succession, he saw rival gang members dialogue for the first time. “A cipher is a place where everyone can be heard and seen equally, and we can see each other as one organism. Whatever needs to happen, be it anger, explanation, grievance, can happen.”
At Cov Records, Galen has been bringing together youth from all neighborhoods in Oakland to make music for the past five years. Taking advantage of the free studio space and production experience the program offers, many students find themselves sharing a studio -- or maybe even a song -- with others from rivaling turfs. For Galen, the collaborative process of music-making and entrepreneurship is the key to breaking down the barriers created by gang rivalries and turf wars. “A kid will think, ‘in order to make music, I need this guy’s beats, and this guy needs that rapper.’ Or, ‘if we get together to sell the CD, we can make more money.’ They see a need to continue working together to make music,” he says.
Earlier this year, fifty-so Cov Records artists from all over Oakland gathered in the studio over the course of a weekend. The goal was to work together to create a positive expression of Oakland’s youth. According to Galen, many Cov Records artists have been shot, not just last year but throughout the program’s history. After a particularly bloody period in the East Bay, the concept of Turf Unity was, he says, “Let’s turn this negative experience into something positive.” The lyrics did not have to be positive or preachy, just honest. Galen told the rappers, “Don’t rap about killing someone if you don’t want to be a killer.”
A DIFFERENT APPROACH
The album created that weekend is a brooding, often dark, but in the end, a hopeful collection of work. While the credits of some songs run into the double digits, verses themselves are at times deeply personal, as in the case of an elegy for a murdered cousin, not yet seven years old, in Lost Ones.
On Different Approach, a danceable joint propelled by a minimalist handclap and the ominous rhythm of synthesized strings, gruffly delivered lyrics depict the ills and temptations of the ghetto, before breaking down and rejecting the motivation of gangsters and the mentality that renders a thug lifestyle legit. A grim chorus repeated throughout the song sums up the message in two brutally clear lines:
Guns, dope, bullets, tombstones; dust to dust, cause young cats hold chrome.
Blocks rocks pimps, hos; we need a different approach, so we can make it home.
Like most songs on Turf Unity, the lyrics of Different Approach paint a violent picture of life in Oakland, but the message is the need for a change, the need for a community-wide transformation.
SILENCE THE VIOLENCE
57% is just a number, one that has probably sold newspapers and that has made local authorities and policy makers scratch their heads since its rampant appearance at the beginning of this year. But the amount of lost lives it represents – the increase of Oakland homicides in 2006 over the previous year – is palpable at the Turf Unity CD release party held earlier this month at 2232 MLK.
To get the crowd warmed up, an emcee shouts an unconventional provocation to the floor of Oakland high schoolers and older teens: “Everybody that lost somebody in here, scream as loud as you can,” he says. After a wave of male and female voices responds loudly from the audience, the emcee leads a unified chant of “Silence the violence,” before the next hyphy act takes the stage.
Ask any of the performers or spectators at this event who they have lost to violence and the answer comes in list form: “Uncle Chris, Uncle Virge. I lost hecka uncles,” says Sharmaine Bell, a 19-year old singer and poet whose warm voice provides hooks for the girl-power Women’s Movement track on Turf Unity. “I do this for my uncles. I do this for my dad. I do this for the people that’s out there,” she says, “to let them know we hear them.”
Sharmaine Bell
D’Angelo, who is also at the West Oakland club to perform, says he’s lost too many companions to count. The latest victim was his friend Stevie Bailey, a 23-year old athlete fatally shot just two months ago. “I’ve been here for a short period of time, and I’ve already lost a lot of folks that were close to my heart,” D’Angelo says.
The growing movement to reverse the trend of violence on Oakland’s streets is already bearing fruit. If the decline in murders this year compared to last isn’t a sure sign, Cov Record artists Sharmaine Bell and D’Angelo Lemmons don’t need to look far for stories of personal transformation. Sharmaine says she used to be “one of those kids selling dope,” but she’s turned her life around. D’Angelo, for his part, does not hesitate to conjecture where he might be if a nice lady in juvenile hall hadn’t steered him to the Covenant House 6 years ago. “Dead. Dead or on the street corner killing somebody.” Now D’Angelo is a community leader, someone, his mentor Galen Peterson says, “I look up to.”
Want to support Covenant House? Then you might want to attend the Covenant with Youth Gala Thursday evening in Oakland.
What: The Bay Area Leadership Council presents Community Hero Awards to:
Congresswoman Barbara Lee and Michael Ghielmetti
MTV's Sway will be in the house
Invited Guest: Keyshia Cole
Where: The Oakland Rotunda
When: May 24, 5:30 pm to 8:30 pm
5:30 pm Cocktail reception and silent auction
6:30 pm Dinner, awards, live auction, and entertainment
For more information, go to
covdove.org
To sponsor or buy tickets, go to https://secure.ga1.org/05/community_heroes |
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