Issue #19.51 :: 12/18/2007 - 12/24/2007
C'ville hip-hop R.I.P.?
How gunplay shut down the local scene...again
BY BRENDAN FITZGERALD
The flow: Stack Boys Entertainment
Twenty-one-year-old Milton Taylor, Jr., known among his hip-hop crew as "DJ Millz" or "Mil Mil," was born and raised in Charlottesville, and started making music at the age of 13. He attended Charlottesville High School, during which time he says he met most of the performers that comprise Stack Boys Entertainment, currently numbering seven (including himself): H.B., Gangsta Gill, Bandana Money, Domino/Dino (Dennis Jones, 19), Giovanni (Cedric Jones, 18), and Nix (Kyle Jackson, 19).
DJ Millz, members of local hip-hop crew Stack Boys Entertainment, show off the Virginia hip-hop look and sound (see sidebar for more on Stack Boys music). A few members of Stack Boys performed at Outback Lodge on November 7, one week before a Louisa County resident was shot and the performance series was cancelled.
When they began rapping, Domino, Giovanni and Nix were members of a hip-hop crew named Gotta Shot, a music collective presided over by Louis Antonio "B-Stacks" Bryant, the gun-toting drug dealer sentenced to life in prison for his leadership role in "Project Crud" and the "Westside Crew," names given to Bryant's gang of crack dealers. When B-Stacks was arrested, Taylor took the initiative to contact the three rappers and keep them working together.
"He made noise in the street for us doing our music, you know what I'm saying?" says Taylor of Bryant. "He made the pathway. He started something and now we're just trying to finish it."
The rest of Stack Boys came together through personal connections to other local rappers. Giovanni knew Gill and Bandana Money from Jackson-Via Elementary School and met Nix in seventh grade. Nix introduced Giovanni, who also performs under the name "P.G.," to the recording facilities at the Music Resource Center the same year. "We started going there around age 13, and did that for a few years," says Giovanni. "Me and Bandana Money's brother was good friends through elementary school; he introduced me to Money, and we all sat down and listened to him."
"I'd never really rapped with them before," says Money, the youngest member of Stack Boys and currently a senior at Charlottesville High School. "I did this track with some other guys that ended up being on the radio, 91.9FM, and one of the members of the group called me—they were putting together a group called the 'VA Dream Team.'"
The VA Dream Team started recording in 2005 and released a few mixtapes before changing their name to "Straight Paper Entertainment," a name that lasted until a few months ago when the seven musicians caught wind of another group using the same name.
"We had a conflict, [so] in recognition of B-Stacks, we called ourselves Stack Boys," says Giovanni. [For more on Stack Boys Entertainment, click here.]
The majority of the Stack Boys are currently unemployed; all name music as their primary focus. However, Taylor cuts hair at Cavalier Barbershop, where he also sells copies of his mixtapes (more accurately, mixed CDs filled with reimagined riffs from other songs and rhymed lyrics from members of Stack Boys). At a request, he can produce a selection of nearly 10 CDs, boasting titles such as DJ Millz: Southern Takeover Volume Three and VA's Finest: Hate It or Love It, Volume One. The CDs come in slim cases with shabby cover art; the latter shows a picture of Taylor in a t-shirt that reads "Mil Mil," near the words "Prince of the Ville." All of the CDs have been produced during the last two years or so, and are sold in stores such as Charlottesville Players in the Fashion Square Mall as well as barbershops that serve mostly African-American customers.
In addition to printing and selling mixtapes, each member of Stack Boys operates a webpage on MySpace, an Internet site used for social networking. Each page carries a few songs by each performer, with built-in music players on each website tracking how many times each song has been played. The number of listens among the Stack Boys varies from a few hundred listens to more than 30,000 for the song "900 Block" by Bandana Money and Gangsta Gill, a reference to the block of First Street where they grew up and, coincidentally, the block number of Preston Avenue where the Outback Lodge sits (Chorus: "900 block, I'm screaming, yo./ 'V' to the sky, 'A' to the floor.")
Taylor refers to the Stack Boys' show at Outback Lodge as their first proper gig. "We don't really have venues that we could rent, so the Outback was really trying to help us out," says Taylor in an interview the day before the shooting occurred.
None of the Stack Boys seem fazed by the fight that broke out at the conclusion of their show, nor do they seem surprised that a gun made an appearance in the Outback Lodge's parking lot following the November 14 concert. In an interview with Eric and Haans Slaughter following the shooting, in fact, Haans wasn't aware that the shooting had taken place. "People don't know how to act sometimes," says Haans. "Nothing that happened [at our shows] ever had anything to with the show or the artists themselves."
In the song entitled "Soldier" posted on Taylor's MySpace page, Giovanni raps over a melody of chimes and snare drum beats. He opens the track by boasting in a sandpaper snarl, "Let's get this shit clear./ I'm the shit, yeah." A moment later, DJ Millz's beats and Giovanni's rhymes are suddenly interrupted by the ratatat of machine guns and, at one point, the rhythmless, careless blast of a shotgun.
The effect is eerie, as if the shooting at Outback had played out on tape. Random shootings at hip-hop shows may not have anything to do with the Stack Boys, but violence seems to be in their periphery, following them and other would-be rappers like some timeless apparition that cradles a handgun the same way they hold microphones.
Walker is 22 years old, a graduate of Charlottesville High School, where he met several of the members of Stack Boys including Milton Taylor, whom he calls "Mil Mil." Walker wears thick, long dreadlocks to his shoulders, a baggy gray sweatshirt and colorful Nike sneakers; he doesn't balance an overwhelming stage presence with shyness like some local rappers, nor does he drown his friends in self-hype. Rather, he is soft-spoken and laughs easily, a confident man.
Walker's hip-hop story reads like divine selection, the passing of a gold-plated microphone to the young man's hands from some immortal emcee. Walker first rapped for a crowd during a performance by hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean (a member of '90s act The Fugees) at the University of Virginia in 2000. Fifteen years old, he was pulled onto a stage by a bouncer and urged to perform by the platinum-selling artist rather than banned from a club. He opened for underground rap icon Kool Keith at the Satellite Ballroom in 2006; for Afroman, a rapper whose sole hit was titled "Because I Got High," at a UVA fraternity house; and as the headliner at a word-of-mouth concert in September at an undisclosed location. Any time that he has performed, Walker says that crowds have been fun. "It's not, 'I hope such and such is there so I can fuck him up,'" Walker says between bites of his salad.
Walker is currently working on a record in the VA Recording Arts Studio on Meade Avenue rather than going the homemade, do-it-yourself-with-a-laptop approach of Stack Boys. "There are other studios that have more high-caliber equipment, but this is my first time to go into a studio with guys who not only use their equipment to improve my sound but show me how the stuff works," he says.
Walker was born in Charlottesville, but moved to Fluvanna with his family when he was young. In 1995, he moved back to town. When asked about dealing with violence in the hip-hop scene, he mentions being jumped by seven guys outside of the roller-skating rink that once occupied the Jefferson School building. "Those same people are dead now. Out of those seven, four are locked up. They don't ever change. They don't 'recycle' every seven years. It's the same shit."
On the Outback Lodge shootings, Walker just sighs. "The reasons for these actions have been exhausted." He mentions historically all-black performance venues like the Apollo and tries to articulate how, when an African-American performs for an all-black audience, the crowd can react in a harsh manner. Walker mentions his excitement over his Outback Lodge show for these reasons.
"I was expecting it to be a predominately black crowd. And a lot of people I left off in high school I haven't seen since 2003," says Walker. "I was getting prepared to go. Even though it was a small venue, it was a big thing, to see how people dug what I was saying."
"As an artist, you want to go to different places. Like, 'Everybody digs me in Charlottesville, but what are these people in Kansas like? What do these people in Illinois like?' [Performing] starts that, and that show would've started it for me. But now it ain't here, so I've gotta do something else."
Stack Boys released the latest in their line of records on Wednesday, December 5, a double-CD album from Domino titled Money or Murder. One week before the record's planned release, Taylor maintained that the release would be celebrated during a party in the basement of the Outback Lodge, something like Martin's hip-hop nights or the parties he and the Stack Boys threw in high school. However, Taylor called a few days later to say that the party had been cancelled along with the hip-hop shows. The record will be released as planned, and Mills says that Stack Boys plan to release video footage from their November 7 performance at Outback Lodge in a compilation called Hood Hype Volume One. The act feels oddly like a memorial offering for the local rap group.
Millz has also put the finishing touches on Southern Takeover Volume Nine, his latest mixtape, a title that now seems almost ironic. Every record or DVD that Stack Boys release is labeled as part of a volume, suggesting a drive for success or, in the least, continuity. And, while the Stack Boys never experienced a wealth of local performance opportunities, the offer of a concert was one they jumped at—a turn of fortunes that brought a crowd that desired hip-hop to a group of performers that desired a crowd. For a short breath of time, the Southern Takeover seemed imminent. Now it will have to wait.
