As Ertegun had long taught, understanding the popular sound meant understanding African-American culture. Jazz, blues, soul, R&B, rock, funk, disco, techno, house, electro, and rap—all had their roots in the black American slum. Lately, conditions in those urban ghettos had reached an astonishing level of decay. The crack cocaine trade had triggered an epidemic in crime, peaking in the early ’90s in an uncontained frenzy of gang violence and homicide. Heavy-handed police crackdowns followed, culminating with the 1992 Los Angeles riots, a catastrophic outbreak of low-grade urban warfare in which more than fifty people were killed and more than a thousand buildings torched to the ground.
Iovine and Morris were certain that therein lay the future sound of pop. In 1992, they had heard an advance copy of Dr. Dre’s The Chronic. The album was confrontational, catchy, packed full of hits and sonically brilliant, but so explicit that the corporate majors wouldn’t touch it. Sensing an opportunity, the two had arranged for a meeting with Suge Knight, the CEO of Death Row Records, the label behind the release. Scheduled just a few weeks after the riots, the meeting took place in Los Angeles at the Ivy, a restaurant better known for the celebrity of its patrons than the quality of its food. Suge wore an oversized white T-shirt and a blood red baseball cap, tilted to the side, and his massive bulk barely fit into his chair. Across from him sat Morris and Iovine, impressed, excited, and maybe even a little afraid. Earlier in the day, Iovine had worked out a plan to win Knight’s confidence: at a certain point in the meal, Iovine would excuse himself to the bathroom. Then Morris would tell Knight that Iovine was a genius.
Halfway through, the plan was executed. “Suge, listen,” said Morris, indicating the vacant chair that Jimmy had left. “That guy is an authentic genius.”
Morris wasn’t above a little razzle-dazzle at a sales pitch, but in this case he meant what he said. Anyone could get lucky and produce a hit record, or maybe even two, but Iovine had released dozens. Talent like Iovine’s was exceptionally rare, and when you met someone who had it, you grabbed on to the back of his shirt collar and held on until he ran out of ideas or croaked. If Morris had a secret—he denied having one, of course, but if he did—it was whatever combination of personal qualities that allowed him to keep artists and executives locked in his personal orbit for years, sometimes decades.
Morris had spent years building this reputation. He was well aware that, in the public imagination, executives of his station were regarded as smooth-talking swindlers. He had certainly known many who had bolstered this stereotype, but he had also noticed that, over the long run, the swindlers ended up marginalized and forgotten. Burning an unsophisticated artist on a record deal might net you some short-term riches, but word soon got around, and then your phone calls weren’t returned. Musicians gossiped. In fact, they bitched incessantly. They complained about even the most generous contracts, and often aired these grievances in extremely public fashion. Cultivating a reputation for probity was the only way to stay in the game. It was an eternal truth of show business: “The secret of life is honesty and fair dealing. If you can fake that, you’ve got it made.”
Suge Knight was convinced. He was authentic, too. Shortly after the meeting, Death Row signed with Interscope, with Time Warner acting as its distributor. The deal was like a half share in the future: Snoop Dogg, Dr. Dre, and Tupac were poised to dominate the radio waves for years to come, and albums like The Chronic and Doggystyle were destined to become back-catalog bestsellers.
And that was where the real money was. An entire generation was upgrading its vinyl collection to compact discs, and anytime some kid in Wisconsin bought a digitally remastered copy of Physical Graffiti, Morris got paid. As his fortune grew, though, Morris kept a low profile. Unlike Ertegun—who chased after starlets and partied with Mick Jagger—and unlike Iovine—a fast-talking Brooklyn sharpie who made sure others were aware of the presence of genius—Morris shunned publicity. He was famous in the music business, but not well known to the world at large, and his relationship with the press was icy. He rarely gave interviews and encouraged his subordinate executives to do likewise. No one had ever accused him of shyness, of course. He simply knew his business, and that meant putting the artists first. Iovine, Suge, and others could make the headlines. Morris signed the checks.
But the Death Row deal made publicity inevitable. The label was incendiary, and sales of The Chronic went on to surpass even Morris’ best expectations, establishing both Dr. Dre and Snoop Dogg as bankable long-term stars. Snoop’s menacing persona was just the gloss for a brilliant comic sensibility and a talent for singsong hooks. Dr. Dre was the Phil Spector of his era, whose musical skills and work ethic augured a pop music dynasty that might well last for decades.
And then there was Tupac. Under the beneficent guidance of Suge, the onetime drama student had emerged from the politically conscious underground and struck a posture of uncompromising fuck-the-world menace. Even on Death Row’s roster he stood out. Snoop looked like a greyhound, and Dre looked like Mr. Toad, but Tupac was beautiful. His hooks were immortal. His voicing and cadence were sublime. His lyrical content was earnest, sometimes almost embarrassing, but he made it impossible to look away. And his fans were legion.
Talent came at a price. By 1995, a significant portion of Time Warner’s shareholder dividends—paid out to jowly GOP aristocrats in expensive three-piece suits—were being funded by a mobbed-up posse of black hoodlums who rapped about murdering hookers and selling crack cocaine. The malfeasance went beyond lyrics: Suge was on probation for assault; Snoop Dogg was facing a murder rap; Tupac had been sent to prison for sexually abusing a groupie. This uncomfortable intersection of corporate sobriety and glorified crime narrative had drawn attention from the self-appointed guardians of the family, who worried about the corrosive nature of the recorded material on the nation’s morals. Bravely leading this self-described “moral crusade” was Bill Bennett, Ronald Reagan’s former secretary of education.
Bennett was a bloated neoconservative, a blithering culture warrior, and a major-league asshole. Under George H. W. Bush, he had served as the nation’s drug czar, overseeing federal antidrug policies that had targeted the same environments from which the gangster rappers now came. He had teamed up with C. Delores Tucker, a black civil rights crusader who had, decades earlier, marched arm in arm with Martin Luther King. Together, the two were calling for Time Warner to divest its share in Interscope and abandon the genre entirely. Bennett took to the airwaves and the cable channels, and wrote scathing editorials in major newspapers. Tucker purchased twenty shares of Time Warner stock, then showed up at the company’s shareholder meeting, and, in an excruciatingly uncomfortable moment, requested that the executives there read the most explicit lyrics from Death Row releases aloud to their shareholders. (They declined.) After Tucker’s performance, Henry Luce III, the heir to the Time magazine fortune and a director of the company’s board, was seen applauding.
Bennett and Tucker had criticized the artists, the label, the overall corporate parent, and the executives. They had even succeeded in making rap lyrics a campaign issue, with Bob Dole, the heir presumptive to the Republican nomination, piling on. Two weeks before Morris’ scheduled meeting with Fuchs, Bob Dole had called Morris out personally, in front of a crowd of Republican donors.