Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler
by Ethan Brown
Anchor Books
239 pages

The further hip hop travels from its origins -- from a Bronx-born invention to a global artform, an underground youth movement to a multi-billion dollar industry, a culture of political resistance to one that has learned to expertly reproduce sites of oppression -- the less hip hoppers can take for granted, from each other or the world.

Once upon a time, when there was less history to be learned and less music to be digested, members of the Hip Hop Nation (as it was then called) were expected to know certain things: the names and accomplishments of hip hop’s founding fathers (Kool Herc, Afrika Bambaataa and Grandmaster Flash comprise the holy trinity, though there are many more), the so-called ‘four elements,’ or artistic vectors (rapping, deejaying, breakdancing and graffiti, although the proper names of at least three of those activities are under debate), the canon of classic recordings.

But hip hop generations are not like normal generations; a new one is born every six years, thanks to a frenetic media determined to turn younger and younger people into super-consumers and incredibly skilled at eclipsing the past with the present. (If you’d like an illustration, find a thirteen-year-old and ask her is she remembers what her favorite song was last year.) And so hip hop history takes on a sheen of romance; complex events are shaved down into truisms, and each new generation bathes in a more-diluted pool of cultural knowledge than the last. What is celebrated, and what sells, ends up defining a culture infinitely more complex than 50 Cent’s latest thug-glamour rant.

New York Magazine music editor Ethan Brown’s Queens Reigns Supreme: Fat Cat, 50 Cent, and the Rise of the Hip Hop Hustler is a fascinating look at the way one generation’s reality becomes the next’s mythology, and how living up to it can turn reality upside down. Here, diligently researched and trenchantly observed, is a treatise on the much-discussed but often misunderstood interplay between hip hop and gangsterism, street credibility and industry legitimacy, ancient neighborhood beef and contemporary rap-feud intrigue. Or to put it another way, how drug dealers from an outer-borough New York neighborhood altered the course of hip hop history -- and helped create an environment in which 50 Cent can reign supreme.

The neighborhood in question is Southeast Queens, where local drug hustlers rose to infamy and wealth in the bloody crack wars of the eighties. Brown traces the rise of three organizations, profiling their differing modus operandis and their iconic leaders: the calculating, visionary Supreme and his cold-blooded nephew Prince, the magnanimous Fat Cat and his ruthless lieutenant Pappy Mason, and the flamboyant, yacht-buying Tony Montana.

These men, running million-dollar drug rings and living lavish lifestyles, were the neighborhood’s celebrities. They were scrutinized by countless admirers, including the aspiring rappers of Queens -- whose industry, at the time, was dismissed as financially unrewarding by the hustlers.

But soon the tide would turn; by the late eighties, hip hop would become a legitimate source of wealth, due largely to the success of Hollis, Queens’ supergroup Run-DMC and mogul Russell Simmons, older brother of group member Joseph ‘Run’ Simmons. Meanwhile, law enforcement was decimating the drug rings and putting their leaders behind bars. The 1988 murder of New York City police officer Edward Byrne by members of Fat Cat’s organization was one turning point; the assassination galvanized national outrage, and George Bush even campaigned for president with Byrne’s badge in his pocket.

As the rappers who had grown up idolizing these jailed gangsters came to prominence, the industry learned to share their fascination; soon, the same rappers who’d begun name-checking Fat Cat and Supreme in their songs realized they needed street credibility in order to succeed. The men who could best supply it, meanwhile, needed entree into a new moneymaking hustle, and that hustle became hip hop. As drug dealers were released from prison, they began finding their way into the rap game that had lionized them.

When real gangsters crossed paths with the rappers who emulated them, the results were explosive. Among the incidents Brown chronicles are the myth-making, nonfatal shootings of Tupac Shakur and 50 Cent, both of which he traces to varying shades of beef with Queens gangsters. Brown also spends considerable time analyzing the unsolved 1999 murder of Run-DMC DJ Jam Master Jay. It is here that the inescapability of Southeast Queens is most poignant. Jay was a world-famous figure and a neighborhood hero, but he never left Hollis, and eventually the violence he’d always navigated around found him; his death, too, is situated in relation to a web of long-simmering feuds between gangsters, played out by their rapper proxies.

The news story that gives Queens Reigns Supreme its currency is a result of another partnership of mutual convenience: the federal indictment of hip hop mogul Irv Gotti on charges of laundering millions of drug dollars for Supreme. The story of their relationship is indicative of just how seductive street credibility can be: Gotti was already a successful rap producer when he met Supreme at a video shoot in Southeast Queens in 1995. Born in middle-class Hollis, Gotti had grown up in awe of street players from the rougher Jamaica section, and soon after he and Supreme met, the two became partners in film and music ventures, and allegedly much more.

Perhaps the book’s most revealing moment comes when Gotti, in an exclusive interview, rhapsodizes over Supreme’s power in the eighties, when his Supreme Team was running the drug trade. Gotti recalls that although Supreme was omnipotent, he was totally unseen. When informed that Supreme was unseen because he spent most of the Supreme Team’s reign in prison, Gotti seems nonplussed; nothing, not even the facts, can sway his idolization of the man who may soon bring about his downfall.

Adam Mansbach is the author of the novel Angry Black White Boy, or The Miscegenation of Macon Detornay.