Imperfectly executed secret history of the hustlers and blood feuds that continue to inform gangster rap.
Bloody chronicle of the ’80s-era cocaine hustlers of southeast Queens and their influence on the rap music industry.
New York magazine music editor Brown recounts the triumphs and travails of Queens, New York, drug hustlers Lorenzo “Fat Cat” Nichols, Kenneth “Supreme” McGriff and Thomas “Tony Montana” Mickens, among others, and the appropriation of their mystique and violent approach to doing business by the hip-hop artists who came of age in their shadow. Brown does a thorough job delineating the savage milieu of the crack-devastated communities and their code of pitiless, often pointless violence, drawing on copious wiretaps and courtroom transcripts, search-warrant affidavits and interviews with those involved to shed new light on the murders of Tupac Shakur and RUN-DMC’s Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell, as well as the shooting of superstar rapper 50 Cent, who emerges from the narrative as a singularly effective maneuverer and survivor. From the numbing iterations of brutal murders and assaults (southeast Queens would send Sam Peckinpah running to his mommy) arise a few compelling voices: Entrepreneur Russell Simmons speaks eloquently on the insanity and tragic waste of the lifestyle, while embattled Murder Inc. record exec Irving “Irv Gotti” Lorenzo’s self-serving monologues have the piquant volubility of a Tarantino monologue. The book may have benefited from a larger historical perspective—there is no mention of the mafia’s analogous involvement in the music industry of the ’50s and ’60s, which seems an odd omission—and the endless intramural beefs and reprisals, recounted in Brown’s dry, journalistic style, become a bit claustrophobic.
Imperfectly executed secret history of the hustlers and blood feuds that continue to inform gangster rap.Pub Date: Dec. 6, 2005
ISBN: 1-4000-9523-9
Page Count: 288
Publisher: Anchor
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Nov. 1, 2005
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.
The legendary booze-addled metal rocker turned reality-TV star comes clean in his tell-all autobiography.
Although brought up in the bleak British factory town of Aston, John “Ozzy” Osbourne’s tragicomic rags-to-riches tale is somehow quintessentially American. It’s an epic dream/nightmare that takes him from Winson Green prison in 1966 to a presidential dinner with George W. Bush in 2004. Tracing his adult life from petty thief and slaughterhouse worker to rock star, Osbourne’s first-person slang-and-expletive-driven style comes off like he’s casually relating his story while knocking back pints at the pub. “What you read here,” he writes, “is what dribbled out of the jelly I call my brain when I asked it for my life story.” During the late 1960s his transformation from inept shoplifter to notorious Black Sabbath frontman was unlikely enough. In fact, the band got its first paying gigs by waiting outside concert venues hoping the regularly scheduled act wouldn’t show. After a few years, Osbourne and his bandmates were touring America and becoming millionaires from their riff-heavy doom music. As expected, with success came personal excess and inevitable alienation from the other members of the group. But as a solo performer, Osbourne’s predilection for guns, drink, drugs, near-death experiences, cruelty to animals and relieving himself in public soon became the stuff of legend. His most infamous exploits—biting the head off a bat and accidentally urinating on the Alamo—are addressed, but they seem tame compared to other dark moments of his checkered past: nearly killing his wife Sharon during an alcohol-induced blackout, waking up after a bender in the middle of a busy highway, burning down his backyard, etc. Osbourne is confessional to a fault, jeopardizing his demonic-rocker reputation with glib remarks about his love for Paul McCartney and Robin Williams. The most distinguishing feature of the book is the staggering chapter-by-chapter accumulation of drunken mishaps, bodily dysfunctions and drug-induced mayhem over a 40-plus-year career—a résumé of anti-social atrocities comparable to any of rock ’n’ roll’s most reckless outlaws.
An autobiography as toxic and addictive as any drug its author has ever ingested.Pub Date: Jan. 25, 2010
ISBN: 978-0-446-56989-7
Page Count: 320
Publisher: Grand Central Publishing
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Dec. 1, 2009
IN THE NEWS
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis...
Privately published by Strunk of Cornell in 1918 and revised by his student E. B. White in 1959, that "little book" is back again with more White updatings.
Stricter than, say, Bergen Evans or W3 ("disinterested" means impartial — period), Strunk is in the last analysis (whoops — "A bankrupt expression") a unique guide (which means "without like or equal").Pub Date: May 15, 1972
ISBN: 0205632645
Page Count: 105
Publisher: Macmillan
Review Posted Online: Oct. 28, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: May 1, 1972
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