The first time I saw a white woman on Crenshaw Boulevard was on an August morning in 2017. She jogged nonchalantly down the sidewalk, passing by a parking sign that read “NO CRUISING” with a picture of a Cadillac crossed out in red underneath. Two blocks away sat the famous Vision Theater in Leimert Park. A caravan of homeless men that lived on the traffic circle mosied out of their tents to start the day. That was when it hit me that Los Angeles was changing.
Now it’s nothing to drive through Inglewood and see two young white men holding hands and sipping boba tea. To some, the changes in South Central are a sign of progress. But the issue with gentrification is that it doesn’t solve poverty, it just pushes it out of view. And when push came to shove for Nipsey Hussle, he decided to fight. He bought back his block one store at a time, showing black and brown people the key to keeping our city in our hands. It started with The Marathon Store, but it was so much more than that. When I saw the video of the 33-year-old artist, community activist, father, and mogul lying bloodied and dying in front of his own place of business, I felt a part of our city dying along with it.
After he was killed, I expected to cringe at the social media comments facetiously asking, “Who?” But I didn’t, because I didn’t care. In my selfishness and my rage, I didn’t need anyone else to know Nipsey, because his music, his entrepreneurship, his west coast swagger, and most importantly his love, belonged to us. He belonged to an L.A. that we knew, an L.A. he tried to save.
The first time I heard Nipsey Hussle was back when I used to stare at the radio in anticipation of new music. Dialed into Power 106, a Snoop Dogg-like voice cried, “I’m comin’ straight off of Slauson, a crazy motherfucker named Nipsey! I’m turned up ‘cause I grew up in the ‘60s!” I turned it down ever so slightly and turned up my TV playing Madden; the radio was censored, but I didn’t want my mom finding out I listened to anything so harsh. But I was hooked. Everything, from the reference to “Straight Outta Compton”, to the iconic sample of “The Funky Worm” wiggling through the instrumental, Nipsey represented the West Coast from day one.
I used to laugh at this kid at my high school that screamed “NEIGHBORHOOD!” in the hallways, referencing the Rollin’ 60s Neighborhood Crips, of which Nipsey was a member. Even jokingly, the snarling “r” in “neighbor” and the concussive “oo’s” in “hood” swung violently off his tongue into a sound only an L.A. nigga can make. With a sly play on words carving “Hustle” out of black comedian Nipsey Russell, Nip’s persona mirrored that playful but intimidating spirit of a city where palm trees and bullets share the same sunny sky.
The grittier side of Los Angeles is what often soothed my ears as a teenager. It was hard not to press play every time a gang came out with a new dance like the Rollin’, or released their own remix to Hard in the Paint . The more grassroots and lofi, the better. But gangs aren’t meant to be celebrated; they were the source of my primal fears. Driving down the wrong street, walking past the wrong dude, wearing the wrong colors, graffiti paint stained on every concrete wall. Black boys gunned down before they could become men. L.A. gang culture represented all of that. Colors run down family trees like bloody maple syrup. I used to be so naive, saying, “Oh my Grandpa’s from Compton too!” to a complete stranger. I could feel his demeanor change, from a happy-go-lucky dude I met at the gas station, to a street veteran sizing up a potential threat.
“Where in Compton he from?”
“Oh I don’t know…” I’d say sheepishly, even though I knew his address down to the block.
I thought I’d never see the day someone from that life could be honored on ESPN and grace the cover of The L.A. Times. The numbers and letters repping gang signs, from X’s to Z’s, and every “B” that replaced a “C”, and every “C” that replaced a “K”, made up a complex equation that solved nothing and ended in death. Nipsey was always different though. He repped his ‘hood, but he was above the colors and the letters and the petty reasons men in this city lose their lives. He was a Crip who regularly made songs with Bloods, and had a greater vision for his city beyond the violence.
L.A. danced between a few musical spaces when Nipsey first got big. On one side you had the jerkin’ scene. The tinny, trebled sound of you ain’t gon’ tie me down echoed through old iPod speakers around L.A cafeterias. Every high school had that one kid that could hit the “Reject” or the “Spongebob” better than anybody else. This was back when only L.A. kids knew the pulsing hey, hey, hey, of a DJ Mustard beat. Some people really hear “BITCH YOU BROKE!” and don’t automatically sprint to the dance floor; I can’t relate.
On the other hand, you had collectives like Top Dawg and Odd Future conquering the underground and hipster blogs before blowing up in popular culture. But guys like Nipsey were in their own lane, too street for the mainstream, but never the type to chase a trend.
Nipsey shared that lane with the likes of Dom Kennedy, Casey Veggies, and YG back when he was just the “Toot it and Boot it” dude. That era of L.A. rap felt like a group of friends hanging out after school, sharing Takis at the bus stop in front of the Arco. Dom was the cool one, always laid back on AIM messaging girls. Casey the fashionable one, always trying out the most colorful combinations. YG the “brazy” one, as if he watched Menace II Society one too many times and wanted to be just like O-Dog.
But from that group, Nipsey was the one that made you think “that guy’s gonna make it out”. He was one of the cool kids, but sat at the back of the class and quietly got A’s on all his tests. One look at Nipsey Hussle and you could see a mind that was always working, someone who could see past the shoes tied to the telephone wire, the birds and smog in the air, straight through to the stars.
He landed in the national spotlight most often not for his music, but for the power moves he made. I remembered folks laughing when Hussle sold his 2013 mixtape Crenshaw for $100. But their tune changed when Jay-Z bought 100 copies for $10,000. Behind the clickbait headlines, that $100 mixtape came with a ticket to a Nipsey Hussle show and other incentives. I only saw him live once, at the “BET Experience” in 2014 at the Los Angeles Convention Center. His skinny frame belied a monstrous presence when the speakers blasted the infectiously spacey “Checc Me Out”. In a call-and-response pattern reminiscent of his Eritrean roots, Nip cried out, and the crowd responded.
“New Nipsey Hussle!”
“Check me out!”
“You in trouble!”
“Check me out!”
“Pay us now!”
“Check me out!”
“Or pay me double!”
“Check me out…”
Five years passed between Crenshaw and Hussle’s Grammy-nominated album Victory Lap. In that time, he built. He launched The Marathon Clothing Store with his brother Samiel, became an ambassador for Puma, launched Vector 90 (a STEM center in South Central), and invested in enterprises ranging from cryptocurrency to real estate. During that time, the city built too.
The Fox Hills Mall isn’t the Fox Hills Mall anymore, it’s the “Westfield”. There are Metro trains running along the 10. What used to be Hollywood Park Racetrack is now a multi-billion dollar NFL stadium for a city that used to have no pro football teams at all. Even the white woman jogging down Crenshaw has been replaced, by the white women riding Bird scooters down Crenshaw, bumping over cracks in the road that used to be chalk outlines. Of all the things I remember about the Los Angeles I grew up in, one thing I didn’t expect to become just a memory was a man like Nipsey Hussle.
Dedication, hard work, plus patience,
the sum of all my sacrifice I’m done waiting…
Nipsey’s music was the soundtrack to a young man sitting on a bus bench, tapping his cleats on the concrete waiting for the bus to head to training camp and his last chance at a college scholarship. It was the kid in 7th grade who made his own bags of thick, gooey Kool-Aid with gummy worms and sold them out of his backpack every morning for a dollar. It was the soundtrack to the Muslims in bowties selling bean-pies on a Sunday afternoon, the chef behind the counter slaving over a hot stove at the fish fry and swatting away June-bugs, the vendors selling paraguas whenever it even slightly drizzled, and the men in the ice cream trucks whose strawberry shortcake always tasted better than the kind you got at the supermarket even though you knew it was the same.
Despite Victory Lap’s accolades and universal acclaim, it didn’t feel like a crowning achievement; It felt like just the beginning. It took Jay-Z and Diddy decades in the game to get to the heights they are now, and it felt like Neighborhood Nip was right behind them, grinding just as hard in half the time. His last single, Racks in the Middle, dropped only a month before he passed, and the video featured his grandmother sitting on a jet drinking champagne. That’s the pinnacle of prosperity to most, but it was just the beginning for a young man from Crenshaw and Slauson. And that’s what made his success our success, because no matter how hard outsiders tried to change L.A., no one could ever take the spotlight away from him. No one could ever stop him from representing us.
Tupac of my generation… red rose in the gray pavement,
young black nigga trapped and he can’t change it,
know he a genius, he just can’t claim it,
’cause they left him no platforms to explain it…
Tupac famously described himself as a rose that grew from concrete. Nipsey was the first rose to make that concrete bloom. And as long as his spirit flows through our veins, we know no one can ever repave our city.