I Wonder If C-Murder Wanted Me Dead? (HHDX article)

[Elano]

HHDX article

I just went in the archives (i.e. a Kroger grocery bag littered with a bunch of junk) and dug out the tape. I’m surprised I still have this dusty old micro cassette lying around considering it’s damn-near eight-years-old now…but I’m glad I kept it. I had a feeling when my brother and I conducted this interview (for our one-issue-and-out Cincinnati-based Rap mag The Elements) way back on November 8, 2001 that Master P’s words at the time, unlike many of his instantly forgettable rhymes, were truly worth taking note of, especially when my younger brother asked him about the very serious attempted murder charges Percy Miller’s younger brother Corey “C-Murder” Miller [click to read] was facing at the time for an August 2001 shooting inside of Club Raggs in Baton Rouge, Louisiana:

“Well,” P began solemnly, “my thing is right now, you know in every family – I think you gotta look at it in every family – there’s always somebody that go up the wrong…grow up and just…I definitely appreciate society for judging us as our own individual. I mean, I won [the] Image of the Year Award with The Source this year. Silkk [The Shocker]  been doing an incredible job, staying out of trouble. Romeo, me…so you know, you always have one person – We just praying for C, hope that this be a learning lesson for him. But, you know, just like you say, this is a very serious case that… This something he have to go through... He put himself in this predicament. So he definitely have to face those consequences. I think this is definitely growing him as a person. Let him know you know what, once you make it out the ghetto, it’s alright to change your life, change your environment. You never forget where you came from, but you gotta keep moving forward, and you definitely gotta keep your game face on and be on top of your game. So it’s definitely a learning experience for him, and we definitely praying for him, and we hope that he come out the best of this.”

“He put himself in this predicament.” I always found it interesting that Master P knew all along what the rest of us wouldn’t learn was true until eight years later - that C-Murder, in a combined act of cowardice and ignorance did this:
<a href="http://www.youtube.com/v/cr7JwEOJuoQ" target="_blank" class="new_win">http://www.youtube.com/v/cr7JwEOJuoQ</a>
Once the case was finally, after years of legal maneuvering, about to make it to trial in May of this year, and the surveillance footage from the club seen above was on the verge of being shown in open court for the first time, C-Murder, on the second day of jury selection, decided to accept a prosecution-offered plea deal and plead no contest (which is essentially the same as pleading guilty without being forced to actually admit guilt) to two counts of attempted second-degree murder.

Prosecutors alleged that C-Murder was attempting to gun down the owner of Club Raggs, Norman Sparrow, along with club bouncer Ronnie Williams, for the apparently death-worthy act of denying C entry into the club once the rapper refused to be searched - if they would have frisked him they would have discovered the semi-automatic pistol C had resting in his waistband. Fortunately the pistol C produced and attempted to fire twice into the club’s entryway jammed and no one was shot. Unfortunately, (or fortunately, however you choose to look at it), C-Murder was sentenced this past Tuesday (August 25th) to his agreed-upon plea bargain of 10 years in prison.

That sentence will run consecutively – separate – from the life sentence C was handed almost three weeks ago, on August 11th, for the shooting of 16-year-old Steve Thomas on January 12, 2002 inside of the Platinum Club in Harvey, Louisiana as Thomas laid on the floor of the club while being beaten by C’s associates. It has just been reported that C-Murder will be appealing his conviction to the Louisiana Supreme Court following an admission by one of the jurors seated for the case that she was pressured by fellow jurors to find C guilty of second-degree murder. 

I wonder what Master P is thinking right about now? I reached out to him last week for an interview, but his one-time publicist didn’t respond to the request. She hasn’t responded to any of my requests to speak with any of her clients in the years since I ran my Master P cover story back in ‘01 while also including in the same issue a scornful review of P’s God-awful Game Face album. So I guess with not being able to ask P in ’09 if his words from ’01 regarding his little brother are still his thoughts today, I have to take his eight-year-old quote as all the insight I’ll personally be able to obtain from him on the subject of C-Murder.

“I definitely appreciate society for judging us as our own individual.”Being the eldest of three brothers myself, it was easy to feel real empathy for P when he said that. Here he was, having done a 180 with his life and left the illegal street life behind for the legal money in the music biz, only to have his knucklehead middle brother squandering his own opportunity at a better life with his seemingly stubborn refusal to stop doing dumb shit.

I can relate.

I’m probably the only music journalist whose freelance writing career began only because the Feds came beating down their door. My short time as a self-published scribe came to an abrupt end after the FBI came to my door in Clifton (near the University of Cincinnati campus) in early 2002 to tell me my middle brother, the brother I had published my magazine with and who had gotten to realize one of his dreams as a die-hard No Limit Records fan by interviewing Master P a couple months prior, had robbed a bank in northern Kentucky. Not being a native Kentuckian, and since he had driven across one of the bridges that stretch across the Ohio River linking Cincinnati with the Bluegrass State, his state crime automatically became a federal crime.

I didn’t even know he had driven across that bridge and robbed that bank until the Feds came-a-knockin’. Like most of his criminal career, I was on one track (away from the criminal aspirations more and more of my peers from our native neighborhood of Seven Hills had begun reaching towards) and my brother was on another track (the one that led him to eventually serve four years in a federal penitentiary, in which time he missed the birth of his daughter as well as the funeral for the older kid from our neighborhood that guided him in the early days of his criminal career). What slight brushes with the law I had as a young-and-dumb teenager I had long moved past, but my middle brother wouldn’t, or just couldn’t, do the same - sorta like Master P and his middle brother.

Flash forward a little over five years later, to my review in XXL magazine of the ‘07 original version of C-Murder’s Screamin’ 4 Vengeance . I only wrote a little under half of the review that was printed (my then-editor wrote most of it), but I did pen the lines,“On the droopy lead single, ‘Posted on Tha Block,’ C nonsensically spits, ‘Yeah, I’m fresh out, but I’m out fresh ’cause life’s a test,’ before proclaiming, ‘The state railroad ya boy, ’cause I’ma violent man,’ completely unaware of the ign’ant irony. Equally misguided is C’s first-person narrative of a fatal club fight, ‘Murda Man Dance,’ which eerily parallels the very crime he’s accused of.” I had no idea that write would eventually lead to C-Murder possibly wishing me dead.

A few months after that review was published, I requested an interview with C for another outlet. I reached out to C’s then publicist on July 16, 2007 with my request, to which she replied, “For which mag and nothing about his case.” I then informed her it wouldn’t be for one of my then print outlets, but for my new writing home online, HipHopDX. She agreed to coordinate the telephone interview with C for me for that Thursday, July 19th, but only on the condition that I also secure coverage for one of her other clients at the time, Grandaddy Souf. It’s unfortunately routine practice in this shady music biz that to get an interview with one of a publicist’s more known clients you also have to first appease that publicist by obtaining coverage for one or more of their other lesser-known clients. “I have to do a piece on Grandaddy Souf to get to speak to C?,” I subsequently asked. To which she responded, “Lololol…well I would appreciate you taking care of them both…most media outlets accommodate.”

I decided to stand my ground a little bit and not reply to that polite-but-pushy (the trademark of any good publicist’s communications) demand, and on that Thursday received an email from her stating, “Today is Thursday babe. No interview?” To which I responded, “Not if it’s mandated that I interview Grandaddy Souf just to be able to speak to C.” I then proceeded to explain that I had already done a pre-release profile on Souf for Down magazine and that doing another piece now after the release of Souf’s album, which hadn’t even charted, would just be saddling DX with a feature of no benefit. But that we still could, and I would very much still like to speak with C.

Unfortunately (as I would soon discover), in the course of that email I happened to make reference to the XXL review I had done for C-Murder’s album. The reply I then received from the publicist is when things took a turn for the worse: “I just read that XXL piece…He may not want to interview with you…wow Paul you killed him.”

After explaining that I expressed my true feelings on C’s album with that review and that was fine by me if he now didn’t wanna talk to me because I told the truth to the consumer, I basically committed the ultimate no-no in this business and told a publicist off: “First you try to strong-arm me into getting more pub for Souf, and now I gotta what, apologize to C to be granted the privilege of talking to him? Fuckouttahere. Lose my email.”

She responded back in kind with a long barrage of shots and threats: “First of all respect! That’s the first thing you need to learn and quick boy!,” “You get the fuck out here!,” “Don’t let your mouth write a check that your ass cant cash,” “…a dumb review written probably by a white northern journalist who has joined the world of Hip Hop to critique a culture that is not his own. Case in point with you and oh so many others,” etc.

She then proceeded to explain to me that she had read my review with C-Murder’s management the night before and that, “We all laughed especially at the comment by the young man that said C was going to kill you. And for the record…you ain’t worth C’s time of day boy so don’t go getting excited… You see Corey is a man who doesn’t let the odds beat him… Do you see all that he has achieved and conquered in his life? …He wrote a book, recorded two albums and a slew of music videos at a time and in a place where folk like you thought was the end for him.”

She additionally explained what the end result of a conversation between myself and C would have been: “It would have been funny to hear you crawfish when confronted by C on the phone… Would you like to say some of that to him live in person? …You couldn’t stand next to him under the same circumstances? Definitely not…you’d be somewhere crying in the corner getting your ass taken from you. Corey is innocent! And if you hadn’t noticed…he is dam [sic] near free!”

I’ll never know for sure whether or not C was with his management when my review was read aloud, and if he really felt the same as his publicist - if he ever chuckled at the thought of some deranged C-Murder stan coming to the ‘Nati to kill me for what I wrote about C’s album in XXL.   

This piece you’re currently reading wasn’t supposed to be me sharing with the world a phone conversation with Master P from eight years ago and some email exchanges with C-Murder’s publicist back in ’07. I know my editor - one of the few equally humble and hardworking members of the Hip Hop media game, Jake Paine - wanted me to utilize this feature editorial to construct a retrospective of C-Murder’s career. I tried to find the highlights in C-Murder’s 17-year career, I really did. I went back and listened again to a lot of C’s old songs, some of which I hadn’t heard in more than a decade, and I just couldn’t find enough audible proof in C’s rarely-quotable rhymes to document his true worthiness to the Rap game, to prove that C-Murder was his own unique artist and not anything more than Master P’s lucky little brother. Aside from the occasional highlights like one of the best reinterpretations of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five’s classic “The Message” I’ve ever heard, “Like A Jungle” , C-Murder’s Rap career wasn’t much to write about.

C-Murder was basically a contrived Tupac Shakur knockoff, complete with tattoos, bandana and smoky-voiced thug persona, but without anywhere near the unbridled passion and ghostly flow (that C clumsily tried to emulate) ‘Pac seemed to possess naturally.

Add to that the fact that C wasn’t even a star on his own label. Any fan of No Limit during their mid-to-late ‘90s hey-day can tell you Mystikal, Fiend [click to read], Mac, Soulja Slim and Mia X were the true talents – the starting five if you will. At best C-Murder was the sixth man on the NL team. C’s often off-beat delivery did best the atrociously disjointed flow of his younger brother Silkk The Shocker [It should be noted that I sent a request for an interview to the email contact listed on Silkk’s MySpace page, and received the following reply back from a representative: “We are currently not doing any phone interviews… Could you please submit your questions is writing.” I decided against doing the written interview because I know from past experience that written interviews are usually just artists attempts to not to speak in the same more open, and more lengthy manner they would in a telephone interview]. But against even the arguably limited talent on No Limit, C-Murder failed to stand out.

And for the record, I’m far from a No Limit hater. I bump TRU’s “Hard N’s” like the shit came out yesterday, and not 10 years ago this summer. Shit, Fiend’s “Talk It How I Bring It” (hell that whole Street Life album), Mr. Serv-On’s “I Hate The Way I Live,” and plenty of other ’99 No Limit tracks stay on my playlist a decade later. And I don’t think, I know Beats By The Pound were one of the most under appreciated production teams in the history of Hip Hop. No Limit Records was a worthy musical dynasty in their time whether or not the entirety of the Hip Hop community can bring themselves to admit that fact. 

And also for the record, I may have a certain amount of disdain for the artist known as C-Murder, but I don’t hate Corey Miller. Even though I don’t know if he laughed at the thought of my demise, I still don’t know the man to have any opinion of him as a person. But I wanted to share these comments in regards to that man from his brother and publicist to maybe help shed a little light on what people closer to him than I had to say about C.

I stopped speaking to my brother not long after he committed that robbery and got locked up. I was fed up after having endured over a decade of police-at-my-door scenarios, as well as having lost what proved to be my only shot at publishing my own writings. I don’t know if Master P has done the same with C-Murder, if he’s gotten to that breaking point and separated himself from his brother. I hope he hasn’t. I made a serious mistake in letting frustration trump family, and am paying for that mistake to this day. Hopefully P will hold C down as best he can while he does his time. I don’t wish prison on anyone, even C-Murder.

Godspeed to Corey Miller. And rest in peace to Steve Thomas.