Dedicated
Microphone fiend Rakim is back
by Ericka Blount Danois
Michael Wong Photography
In 1985, DJ Marley Marl was working in his studio that doubled as his sister Belle’s second-floor apartment in the Queensbridge Houses—a sprawling ninety-six-building project, a small city of some thirty thousand residents in Long Island City, Queens. The apartment was sparsely decorated with a creaky couch that Eric B. slept on, reel-to-reels against the wall, records from floor to ceiling, and a drum machine that Marley slept with because he didn’t want anyone to touch it.
During the day, Marley worked at the Sergio Valente jeans factory. A barely teenage Roxanne Shante was becoming well known as a rapper and a booster—shoplifting for mothers in her building. Her own mother sold underwear to hookers from a shopping cart by the Dutch Kills ho stroll. A stone’s throw away was Hollywood’s second cousin, the newly minted Silvercup Studios where new movie stars were being bred daily. But inside Queensbridge, there was a different kind of movie rolling without the Klieg lights. Residents were robbing people for their sneakers, walking around with blades to snatch the patches off Lee jeans, and claiming the uninitiated for their sheepskins and leather goose coats. Foreigners to Queensbridge were chased out, and if they went in the wrong direction to get to the train station, “They’d find themselves butt naked by the river,” recalls MC Shan by telephone with a wicked laugh.
Rakim was putting on basketball clinics on the courts in Queensbridge, displaying a mean crossover in pickup games. Some of the hottest rappers in Queens at the time—LL Cool J, Salt-n-Pepa—would come by to hang out at the courts near the black-and-white-checkered card tables. On 12th Street and 40th Avenue, you could sit on the bench all day and hear ciphers from MC Shan, Shante, Jazzy Ra, Infinite, and Prince Wally. In the summer across the street at River Park, the Disco Twins would DJ park jams, boosting electricity from a low-level apartment (because most residents didn’t have to pay for electricity), stretching extension cords across the street. Nobody complained about the noise. The parties lasted all night.
This was the golden era of hip-hop where being a hood star was a reputable ambition, a $17,000 advance for a record deal meant you were rich, and prodigiously gifted MCs never left their own neighborhood.
