"I’m thinking, There is no real reason this kid should know this much about gang presence on the South Side, because he’s from another side of town. It wasn’t just territory they had down cold. They were up on the latest of basically every gang war in the city.
I asked these kids how the hell they knew all this. They looked at me like I was an idiot. “Music,” they said...
It’s surprising how much strategy goes into the making and posting of these videos on YouTube and SoundCloud. CBE members are constantly considering how to get the most views. (At least one of their videos has exceeded five million.) The thinking is that if a video pulls enough, record labels will start calling. Sometimes the guys will record a video but wait to release it until a rival gang member—preferably one they’ve called out—is shot, so that it seems like CBE is taking credit. It’s all about convincing viewers that CBE really does the violent stuff that they rap about—and often they do...
I once asked him why he projects such a violent persona in the videos. He flipped the question back on me: “If I wasn’t doing this, would you even be down here in the low incomes? Would you even care that I exist?”
He was right. As one of the other CBE rappers would always say, “You know, white people, Mexicans, bitches, those people don’t live the life, but they love hearing about it. People want the Chiraq stuff. They want a superthug ghetto man, and I’m giving that to them. I’m just playing my role.”...
The more clout you have, the more cloutheads—easily exploitable groupies—you have. A.J. has a lot of cloutheads. And he won’t just ask them to take off their clothes; he’ll ask them for money, meals, new iPhones—almost always in exchange for the promise of sex. Since most of the guys in CBE are really bad at dealing drugs—they usually smoke up their own supply—the gang relies on the rappers to bring in cash this way. The whole exchange between rappers and cloutheads is a bizarre modern twist on sex work."
I wanted to pull every part of this. It's voyeuristic, for sure, but it's also *revelatory, a peek in, an opening into... can't think of words*
This is what it can actually look like to try to get out of poverty under conditions of systematic oppression.
I mean, look at the number of detective dramas on TV; true crime podcasts; our society is obsessed with stories about murder, might as well commercialize it
FB: "For the gang—and other gangs like it—the rappers are designated as the ticket out of poverty. It becomes the responsibility of the rest of the members to support and protect them. Each rapper has one or two “shooters.” These are the members who make good on the threats the rappers dish out in their lyrics and on social media. And, yes, that means shooting—and sometimes killing—people. CBE has about a dozen shooters. A.J. may be the one holding an automatic weapon in his Instagram photos, but he has never shot at the opps.
The rest of CBE—there are about 30 members total—are known as “the guys.” Some are just loosely affiliated with the gang, but others play more active roles, acting as producers or cameramen. Geo and Marcus, for example, basically serve as the tech department. They do stuff like steal the local school’s Wi-Fi password."
or
"I remember a moment when A.J. started to feel her drift away because he had refused her demand that their relationship become monogamous. So he played his trump card. It was clear she had long had a slumming, voyeuristic desire to come down to the Lincoln Homes, so he invited her to visit during a repass—a celebratory wake—for a resident who had been shot. It was a total bash, everybody outside wearing T-shirts with “CBE” silk-screened across the front. A.J. gave her a tour, walking her around and pointing out things like “Here’s my niggas playing dice” and “You know, the opps might ride through here anytime and shoot up the block.”"
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