Lloyd Banks article in new XXL

[Jome]

http://www.xxlmag.com/Features/0504.lloydbanks/index.html






Lloyd Banks: You know his name,  but do you really know who G-Unit’s most lyrical MC is? What real-life stories make up a young rapper’s rhymes? Sometimes you just gotta read between the lines.

Lloyd Banks [1] steps onto the front porch of the house where he was raised in South Jamaica, Queens [2]. Dressed in black from head to toe [3], he tentatively looks in three directions [4]. To his right, he can see the home of his childhood friend Marvin Bernard a half block away. When he was growing up, he would look for Marvin from his porch. But he hasn’t seen Marvin from that porch in over a year. It’ll be a while before he sees Marvin again [5]. From this vantage point, Banks can see pretty much the entire area where his name was known before he professionally aligned himself with Marvin and a third friend, Curtis Jackson [6]. It’s unusually quiet in this neighborhood of eroding lower-middle-class homes. Almost as quiet as the first time he heard himself on the radio [7]. He walks over to a waiting armored Mercedes-Benz. He has places to go [8].

1: “My name Banks/But my uncle ain’t Phil. . .”

Lloyd Banks was born Christopher Lloyd some 22 years ago. As a child, he was nicknamed Lazy because, well, he was lazy. When he started rhyming on local mixtapes, one of his uncles—one of the many drunken uncles from his father’s side of the family that he affectionately refers to as “career fuck-ups”—would say that every time Lazy rhymed it was “money in the bank.”

There was one uncle—his father’s uncle, to be exact—who wasn’t quite a fuck-up, though. He was rich. “He got a big-ass mansion and everything,” says Banks. But his uncle treated the house like a museum—you couldn’t walk on the carpet, you couldn’t touch a thing. He wasn’t particularly fond of this uncle, but he did appreciate his home. “At a young age, I was like, ‘Man, I gotta live like this.’”

2: “I went through mama bitchin’, in and out the kitchen/
With probable cause, ’cause pop was in and out the prison. . .”

His parents (Mom, Puerto Rican; Dad, Black) were thrown into the roles in their mid-teens. They were never a true couple, so Lazy spent some of his time traveling with his father, who was as good at dodging the long arm of the law as he was at getting yoked up by it. “He was in and out [of jail] for three years, six years, doing bids,” Banks recalls of his father. “I seen him as a baby. After that, seen him again when I was six years old. And then off and on.” When he was around, Banks’ dad would give him up to $50 a day as allowance. “No wonder I had so many cavities,” he says. “You giving $50 to a 10-year-old, per day. All you do is run to the store and eat whatever.”

But it wasn’t all so sweet. There was the time his father bought Banks his favorite sneakers, a pair of all-black Reebok classics. “I wake up in the morning to put them on to go to school, and they was gone.” Banks searched all over the house for the sneakers, even places where he knew they wouldn’t be, like under the sink. “Later that night my mother told me: ‘Your father took the sneakers back. He really couldn’t afford them. He just wanted to see you happy.’ I couldn’t understand it at that point. I was like, ‘What the hell? He better not call, he better not do nothing.’ I had a grudge over a pair of sneakers for a long time.”

Then there was the time he saw his first murder. Banks was always at the screen door, paying attention to shit in the street that wasn’t his business. His father’s best friend got into an argument with someone. “When you’re young, you don’t really understand what’s going on,” he says. “All you remember is tension and arguing.” Shots went off. “He got hit about two or three times in the head. That was just like, Oh shit. I know I wasn’t supposed to see that.”

3: “I done lost my bigger nigga and I didn’t cry. . .”

“2003 wasn’t really a good year as far as death is concerned,” says Banks. “It was almost like every time I was coming home, I was going to a funeral. I actually spent more money on funerals than I did on myself, ’cause in total it was four. My grandfather, my uncle passed—he had a stroke—and one of my homies got killed down the block from here. He got shot up. That was the story they was talking about on [New York’s Hot 97’s] Street Soldiers. And then my best friend. My best friend got killed in Manhattan. He got stabbed in the neck.” Banks was in London when he got the news, over the phone from his mother.

“I said, ‘What news?’ I thought she was talking about the MTV things, ’cause we was on MTV, it was a half-hour special. She was like, ‘Nah, not that.’ She was like, ‘Guy... Guy got killed.’ I dropped the phone. I never knew how to show my emotions, but I guess she knew what happened when I dropped the phone, cut the phone off or whatever. It was kinda selfish [of me] in a way, ’cause she couldn’t call me back. So she don’t know what the hell I was doing. I ended up calling her back in a half hour, she told me everything that happened. That’s the hard part, ’cause I ain’t never lost no one that close to me.”

4: “Bring your buddy when it’s time to roam/
’Cause I got hit the last time I left mine at home. . .”

This corner, within spitting distance of the North Conduit, is where Banks always thought he would be shot. The on-ramp for the expressway would serve as a prime exit for a getaway driver. He always knew he would be shot one day, he says. Hell, he prayed for it: “Before I went to sleep, I used to always pray for what didn’t happen to me yet to happen, as far as negativity. I’d rather get all the negative out of the way, first. So if I get past the negatives, then that’s [when I can become] what God wanted me to be. Then ain’t nothing but success gonna happen. Right before I got shot, I prayed to get shot. I hoped that it happened, just so I would never have to face the fear of it happening. And you know how they say you get what you ask for?”

But it didn’t happen on that corner. It happened on Jamaica Avenue, outside of a club. It was September 10, 2001—the day before the Towers dropped. The night’s festivities were over and groups of teens crowded the corners. “After the club is over and you still outside, you only waiting to get shot, you’re waiting to shoot somebody or you’re waiting to get locked up... What the hell you outside of the club for after it’s over? You supposed to know better.”

And you’re supposed to know to run when there’s gunfire. But when you’re in an area where gunshots are a common occurance, running kinda gets played after a while. So when an estimated 10 firearms began blasting, five people were hit. Banks was one of them.

With a bullet hole in his liver, Lazy lived up to his childhood name and began to walk to the hospital. “I started off walking,” he says, “’cause I ain’t know how serious it was. It wasn’t really like bleeding out crazy, it was internal bleeding. I wasn’t really sweating it. I’m like, I’m aight.” After a block, though, he began to get dizzy. “I was like, Hey... that’s not a good sign.” When he walked into the path of a passing car at the corner, he realized: “I ain’t that cool. Fuck that. I don’t wanna die cool. I don’t wanna die, period.” He ran the 10 blocks to the nearest trauma center.

To Read The Rest Of This Story, Get This Issue At Your Local Newsstand Now! To Receive a Full Year of XXL for $12, Click Here!

[CRAFTY]

Nice article...Thanks (they didn't have the new XXL mag yet here in Belgium)