Nanowrimo - Day 22

The next week went fast for Mike. His first challenger was easy prey, couldn't even really hold his weight. Mike won his second competition with a unanimous vote again, and Jasmine was there to see him again, but this time she was closer to the front, just behind the cameras, instead of all the way back in the shadows like before. Things were going so well that Alex said he wanted to meet with Mike back as soon as he came out.

Thinking that Alex may have some news about a contract or a show or something, Mike shortened up his conversation with Jasmine after the taping, promising her they would get together that evening, and eagerly waited for Alex to show up outside of the CBS building on the curb. After just a few minutes, a cab pulled up with Alex in the back, and Mike got in.
"So, do you have news for me?" Mike said, after Alex congratulated him on his second win.

Alex looked confused, "News?"

"A contract? A meeting?" Mike said, "Anything?" Mike opened his phone and started checking his calendar.

Alex leaned back, away from Mike, and raised one eyebrow. "That takes more than a couple of weeks to get going, but I am working on it." He gave the driver directions back to the hotel. "Before we even get to that point, you and I have to do some thinking and planning first, some branding."

Mike twisted his face into a puzzled look, "That sounds kind of like selling out." He closed his phone and returned it to his pocket.

Alex just shrugged off his words. "Call it what you want, but you need to decide now what kind of image you want to have, and by extension, what kind of career."

"Can't I just be myself?"

Alex looked out the window at he traffic passing by, headed the other way. "When I started this company, Mike, this label, I had a very specific dream." He pulled out his wallet and took out a business card. It wasn't the one he had given Mike before, but an older one. It was kind of worn out, less colorful, with just a black and white graffiti watermark on the front with Alex's name and number and the company name.

Mike took it from him, turned it over, and examined it. The watermark covered most of the front of the card and pictured a cityscape with clean, powerful skyscrapers growing out of rubble at the bottom of the card.

"I wanted hip-hop to be the thing that inspires people, like it inspired me as a kid. I remember when rap was fun, and if it wasn't fun, it was uplifting. If it wasn't fun or uplifting, at least it was gritty in a way that made you think about how bad things were and want to change them. And more often than not, it offered a way to change them. It was smart and street at the same time. It was wordplay and world change at the same time, poetry and prophesy and positivity."

Mike gave the card back to Alex, who very carefully slid it back into his wallet, making sure that the edges went in first without bending.

"You don't see that much any more these days. I don't want to sound like some eighty year old grandpa complaining about the dang kids, but it wasn't always like this. Something has gotten into hip-hop, appropriated it, and killed it from the inside out. Turned it into a poison. I don't know if it's the commercialization, the culture clash, or something uglier, more intentional and sinister. Most of the rappers that have real lyrical skill are encouraging our people to destroy themselves, and there aren't enough opposing voices."

Alex nodded toward the window, gesturing for Mike to look outside. When he turned that way, he was looking at Harlem.

"Are we taking the long way back to the hotel?" he said, watching at least fifty or so people walking along the sidewalk as they passed.

As they stopped at a light, Mike saw people walking in and out of a liquor store on the corner, the only business on that entire street in both directions with a sign that lit up properly. He wanted to look away from the store front, from the hopeless faces and the dead eyes just like his father's, but the sheer size of the place mad it almost impossible. One man, dressed in ragged jeans and a thin jacket, despite the coldness of the weather in the middle of November, stood outside begging those who passed by, getting a dollar here and there for his trouble. The light eventually changed, and the car moved on, and Mike looked back through the window, but within another block, there was another liquor store on the corner, with the same ebb and flow of despair through its doors.

"Back in our grandfathers' day, Harlem was the spot. Harlem was the center of the cultural universe up in the northeast, for white folks too." Alex pointed through the window down 54th Street as they passed it. "All of the jazz was here, and the clubs were making money like they had printing presses. And it wasn't just music and clubs, there was poetry and writers, some of the best the country had ever seen, either living here or hanging out. There were artists and dancers." Alex shook his head and slapped Mike's arm with the back of his hand. "Imagine when most of the dancers on this block kept their clothes on. This was Harlem like eighty years ago."

They passed a burned out building, what seemed like it might have been a dry cleaner or tailor's shop, judging by the pictures on the brick front wall, half covered with soot and ash. "And then it was all gone. People used to come here from all over. Now they only come when they want drugs or something."

"Okay," Mike said, "I mean that's really terrible, I guess, but that's what happens. It's just like where I come from."

"Exactly, they always turn this bad." Alex and Mike both looked through the rear window at a corner where an argument was going on between two men, one dressed in jeans and a thick black jacket and the other in khakis and a red sweater with a gold chain laying against it, about six inches below its owner's neck. They were pointing in each other's faces and circling each other, obviously headed for a fight. "Because we don't do anything to stop it. The worst elements have the loudest voices and the most ambition, and most people just follow them like sheep."

"And you want to save the hood, right?" Mike turned back around facing front and settled back into the seat.

"Not the hood, Mike, hip-hop." Alex's eyes were intense, so much so that Mike couldn't bear to look at hem, and turned his face away to the window. "I don't want hip-hop to die like this, like a zombie, just shuffling around and rotting, infecting everybody it comes across. And that's the way it's going. It's almost unrecognizable now." Alex shook his head. "It's not just that there's some destructive stuff out there, it's like it's become, I don't know," he looked through the window at another liquor store, this one next to a strip club, "intentional."

Mike watched Alex's face as they passed that corner. It didn't make much sense; he looked as if he knew somebody in there, like he had relatives on that block. There were strip clubs and liquor stores in Miami, adult book stores and bars that sold more than booze, but it had never bothered Mike. It was just the way thing had always been, and it made a lot of money for some people. For Alex, it was like watching the aftermath of a war.

"So what I'm saying," Alex said slowly, "is you have to decide what you're doing. Think about it now while it's all still hypothetical, because when they're flashing money at you, and I know they will be, because you're that good, when they're talking lots of zeroes, it's really hard o make the right decision. I'll stick with you all the way if I can, but you should know that there's some places I won't go. If you want to be the same old, cookie-cutter thug emcee, playing the music that leads people over the cliff, I can't be there with you. It's a decision I've had to make before. It's the reason I'm still hustling in malls and corners, looking for the next act to take to the top instead of riding the cash tsunami."

"Okay, I get it, you ..." Mike began.

"You mentioned selling out?" Alex interrupted, "I've never once sold out in my life, and don't plan on starting now. You say you just want to be yourself? You and I by know that every man has a lot of sides to him, a lot of selves. So you get to choose which one to be."

Mike looked into Alex's eyes, waiting log enough to make sure he was finished. "I hear you," he said, "and I appreciate everything you've done for me already."

Alex nodded, holding out his fist for a pound until Mike reciprocated. They both sat back in the back seat of the cab, each thinking about the conversation in their own way, the way they each had heard it.

"Wow," Mike said, breaking the silence after the taxi had taken them over the bridge towards their hotel, "Riding the cash tsunami, huh? How come you're not in the competition? Double A Lex, riding the cash tsunami. That's the title of your first solo album."

Alex laughed, and Mike was glad to have some of the seriousness and tension sucked out of the conversation. He thought about some of the uglier things he had done in the pursuit of money, and no matter what, this seemed like a turn for the better. He couldn't see ow anything he could do with a mic could possibly be worse than what he could do with a gun, or what his father had done for that matter. And he didn't really want things to be the way they were, but it didn't seem to be up to him. Some songs just made money, and others didn't. He just wanted to make the songs that made money.