Blood at the Root

Again. Damn. These days the whole world looks like a flick I've seen before.

I could speak the oft-repeated and always ignored cliché that "this madness has got to stop." Or, I could be disgusted and stop listening to hip hop (as I did for almost five years after Big and Tupac were murdered, thinking the music was the soundtrack to self-genocide.) Or, I could tell the truth: Jason Mizell was a humble brother from around the way and I'm feeling blood fury at my own community right about now.

In the ultimate equation, geography makes no difference -- a stolen life is an abomination no matter where the theft occurs. Still as a someone who grew up in that neighborhood, it doesn't go down easy that a pioneer of hip hop had his life taken on the very same streets where we honed verbal skills, traded our elementary freestyles and chased reputations for lyrical flow. Hollis Avenue, which runs past the park on 205th street where they used to steal power from the streetlights and throw illegal jams back in 1979; Farmers Boulevard, where cats used to get their rhyme skills (and chins) tested on the Square; Liberty Avenue where some of the illest did their dirt and whose residents always rolled deep to the shows at Club Encore. I don't feel the same sadness as when Biggie and Tupac were killed though because I'm filled with bitter anger. In place of a local legend who blew up and then actually stayed in the community, we have a name added to interminable list of the prematurely dead. Again. We have radio stations nostalgically playing a deceased man's music. Again. We have a frantic search for answers that will not be forthcoming. Again.

I think this is where I came in.

Recognize: before middle-aged academics started charting it's "globalization," before rappers became unpaid boosters for the booze du jour, before ice was anything but frozen water, there was this: two turntables and a microphone. Before hip hop was old enough to see over the dashboard of America, the battles weren't between rappers in different time zones -- it was all about inter-borough strife back then. Them Brooklyn cats had it in for the brothers from uptown; Bronx heads were constantly flexing on Brooklynites and nobody was feeling Queens. I remember when deejays at spots like Union Square and the Latin Quarter would ask if Queens was in the house as a semi-joke. Our Benneton-swathed, bomber-wearing delegations kept our mouths shut fearing larceny from the Bed-Stuy, Harlem, South Bronx axis of evil. To cut to the quick: Queens was known for getting played.

Run & them changed that though:

Jam Master Jay was one third of the trio that put Queens -- a borough that isn't even completely on the New York City subway map -- on the musical one. Never the kind of hyper-kinetic sound architect that could damn near make the tables speak in tongues, JMJ was still the perfect deejay for Joseph Simmons and Daryl McDaniels. Truth told, Run and DMC didn't need the eye-blurring hand speed of a Grand Master Flash or the pyrotechnics of a Jazzy Jeff because they had Jay on the ones and twos -- a deejay who intrinsically knew how to tailor his cuts and scratches to compliment their tightly traded couplets.

He's Jam Master Jay/The big beat blaster/He gets better 'cause/He knows he has-ta
"Jam Master Jay" from the album "Run-DMC"

Having opened the doors for acts like LL Cool J and later MC Shan, Marley Marl and the Juice Crew, they were responsible for transforming Queens status from that of ghetto pariah to hip hop epicenter. For a good block of the music's history, between "Kings of Rock" and KRS-One's loathsome drive-by "The Bridge is Over," Queens was officially running shit. Cats like JMJ helped make it (slightly) safer to be from the city's largest borough and represent at hip hop shows. Run, D and Jay would straight up claim Hollis on wax so we would in turn shout out Hollis (not necessarily "Queens" mind you) at jams.

The irony that Jay's life ended precisely because he remained in the community is enough to make you gag. The number of boulevard stars who go MIA as soon as their bank accounts get into the triple digits is legion. But I remember seeing Jay, still in the neighborhood, still unassuming despite global fame. And thoughts like that are enough to make one angry. I'm thinking now that mourning is played out. Maybe we need more righteous anger because: on some battered corner another graffiti epitaph for a murdered black man is being painted; because the truth this that won't be the last one; because we reproduce hate in ourselves so cavernous as that murder has now become a cliché. And because home has been defiled.

To Jam Master Jay: infinite thanks for those memories, one Queens kid to another; may your soul rest in eternal peace. To his family: you have the sympathy of every one of the millions who have ever heard a Run-DMC record. And to the rest of us: be angry enough to do something; be committed enough to love ourselves better. Maybe then we can stop running this tired reel. Live so that we never have to say "this madness has to stop." Again.