The Raid That Changed Rap

Rodney Carmichael and Sidney Madden are the hosts of Louder Than A Riot, a new podcast from NPR Music that investigates the interconnected rise of hip-hop and mass incarceration in America.

The foundations of hip-hop are rooted in making something outta nothing — just like the culture's ancestors turning "old food into soul food," as Jay-Z puts it.

If you're living in the Bronx in the 1970s and music education is being cut from city schools, you make instruments out of two turntables and your parents' record collection. If you don't have access to the museums, you turn subway trains into rolling art galleries. And if the disc jockeys refuse to play rap on the radio, you throw it on a cassette tape for underground distribution.

The 1983 film Style Wars gives a succinct explanation of the criminalization of these early pillars of hip-hop. In it, NYPD detective Bernie Jacobs stands in front of a graffiti-covered subway train and asks:

"Is that an art form? I don't know. I'm not an art critic. I can sure as hell tell you that that's a crime."

But the difference between art and crime depends on who you ask. And just as hip-hop was on the brink of becoming the most-consumed genre in the country, if not the world, mixtapes — a product essential to hip-hop's survival — became a scapegoat for the music industry's collapse. The players who turned this underground currency into legit capital became criminals in the eyes of the law.

For a good stretch in the early 2000s, DJ Drama had one of the most important voices in hip-hop, with mixtapes that launched the careers of artists like T.I. and Jeezy and put an entirely new sound on the map. Inside his Means St. Studio in Atlanta today, his wall of fame contains snapshots of artists who have passed through: Snoop Dogg, Cardi B, 2 Chainz, Megan Thee Stallion, Pharrell, Ice Cube, Big Boi, Nipsey Hussle — and that ain't even the half. Everybody who's anybody has been to Means Street.

But Drama's on his second life now. Thirteen years ago, at the height of his fame as a mixtape king, he had everything taken away. After a raid by federal agents on his studio, Drama wound up targeted, arrested and jailed – a martyr for mixtape culture.

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In 1992, Drama was still just Tyree Simmons, a high school freshman in his hometown of Philadelphia. He remembers seeing a subplot of the movie Juice, about a character trying to make it as a DJ. "I just never forget looking on the screen and being like, 'Man, that's what