Suck It Up and Survive," which was also a hit for the Pointer Sisters. "The Way We Were" made him a megastar and his first R&B number-one single, selling eight million copies in a few weeks. "I had a lot of success as a result," he says, "but at that time there was a lot of pressure on me to put on a big show." The tour was a huge success, as was the album. It received rave reviews from the mainstream press. "I had to keep up with the Joneses," he says. The Rolling Stones were big early supporters, especially Mick Jagger, who said _Black Caesar_ was "easily [the] finest album since the Stones' _Sticky Fingers_ , the _Blueprint_ of soul music."
While Jones was touring, he was also writing a new music and lyrics for a musical. " _Black Caesar_ was a very visual story and it was very exciting," he says. "I'd been to so many shows and loved all the theatrics and all the lights and costumes and so forth and I really wanted to put a show together myself. I knew it was going to be a huge success and, therefore, I had to be careful because I was working with a major drug company at the time." He decided to work in animation, which was a new form of story telling and his first foray into technology. "We had to create characters that we could not only express ourselves through, but that the audience could understand, but in a larger sense, what was going on and how the characters were reacting and responding."
When he came home from the tour, he started composing a musical with a New York friend, who was familiar with the street sounds and music from a group called the Native Tongues.
"He's like one of those jazz guys who like to say, 'My roots are deep in hip-hop,' " he says. "I didn't say it for that reason—I didn't say it in a boastful sense—but to make sure he could understand what I was doing. He liked what I did, so we wrote a script. He read a lot of books and a lot of material from different cultures—a lot of street stuff, a lot of jazz, and I brought him the real drug music I was listening to." That was how _Stir It Up_ came to be. "I would go to my high school's [Fordham] gymnasium, where I'd walk out onto the field and shoot myself with my .45 and shoot myself and walk back in and pull my guts out and sing about the people in the neighborhood and the kids in the school."
But there was still the matter of drugs. "In the real world and in the media, to have been involved in the gangster lifestyle of drugs and street stuff," he says, "to make a musical about that, would have been seen as a very weak attempt at redemption." So he used music instead. "I have to use the media that the bad people put out," he says. "I can't choose the media I'm gonna use and I have to make the most of the shit they put out to make me appear evil and bad." He says there were two reasons for writing the story that he did. "The whole time I was involved in the hip-hop culture, it didn't include women. I have strong women characters in the musical. I want to show that I'm in favor of women who use their voice and their bodies to challenge male oppression."
So what does it take to do a musical about the neighborhood? "It takes a whole lot of music and a whole lot of ideas, but what's amazing about hip-hop music is you can write a song about it."
What would he say to kids who are having trouble dealing with their environment, their friends, and their surroundings? "You gotta use your music to help people," he says. "Kids can get through anything if they help each other. You know what you need to do. Think of your heroes, who are the heroes in your neighborhood. Look at what they do, what they're into, how they react to things. You don't have to take that path, but you have to act like you want to take that path. There are things you can do to overcome your neighborhood and your environment."
When asked what he thinks is the worst side of the hip-hop scene, he says, "You shouldn't be afraid to look at yourself and be who you are, whether you're black, white, or what color. If you're good at something, you should let the world know that. I'll never change. I'm in a perfect place right now." But what about rappers who get on the mic and go off on other people? "At a certain point it stops being music," he says, "it becomes an ego trip. It's all about them and what they can make themselves look like and talk about. That's why I made my music. That's why I'm doing my things."
## "I DID MY TIME ON THE WARPATH OF DRUG DEALING"
##
## NICKEY BEAZIE
Nickey Beazie (born Raymond Hill in the South Bronx on February 8, 1949) is a musician best known for his work with rap duo Cold Crush Brothers. The Cold Crush Brothers, with Beazie on lead vocals and guitar, and producer Teddy Riley as his rhythm section, had six R&B hits between 1987 and 1993. Beazie also worked with Riley on two of the producer's bestselling hip-hop tracks: "Victory," which reached No. 1 in 1988 and featured C.L. Smooth, who was later joined by Public Enemy's Chuck D for an update in 2002; and "Jack the Ripper," which reached No. 2 in 1989, with the rap trio Black Sheep. Beazie also wrote "Love's Gonna Get You" for the Gap Band.
Beazie was the youngest of ten children and was born into an impoverished family in the South Bronx. When he was thirteen, his mother brought home a guitar for his eleventh birthday. "After that," he says, "she saw that I could put the instrument to good use. She saw that I could put it in front of an audience, perform and then she would have one less child to raise."
He never finished high school, and his mother died when he was nineteen. He then became involved in a drug-trafficking operation, dealing with the police, and was involved in armed robbery, but eventually turned his life around and began playing in clubs and became involved in poetry and rap. "I went from being the youngest kid in my family to being the oldest," he says. "I'm at that age where you can't take the stuff no more, and you start reevaluating your life. At that time, I started working on myself."
By the time Beazie arrived in New York City, he was involved in the drug-trafficking business, dealing with heroin, and getting arrested on and off for possession. "I did my time on the warpath of drug dealing," he says. He then turned himself around by getting arrested again and sentenced to do time in Rikers Island, a New York City jail, where he performed in concerts for the inmates. "It was a positive change," he says, "because I can't do that no more. I got old now, I'm married, I have kids, I have four kids and one on the way."
Beazie then turned to gangbanging when he arrived in Florida. "My man was out there doing the same thing I was doing," he says. "You know how you get on the corner and all the niggas be talking about stuff, and you start throwing stones at that nigger up on the corner for your girl? And you go to this nigger over here who you haven't seen in a while and all of a sudden he's wearing chains, but he's still your friend. He still has your back. You start throwing them rocks again, you get on the next corner. If you're in that lifestyle, you will have people from both sides of your gang who will kill you. You can't be out in the streets. You need a home and you need people who have money."
But he was arrested again in 1981 and was sentenced to seven years in prison. When he got out, he decided to make a change. "I did the hip-hop circuit and was singing hip-hop," he says. "I went on the road and became a celebrity and got tired of that lifestyle. Hip-hop is a lifestyle, but it ain't for everybody. It is entertainment for the young. When you go on the street and get your ass kicked by a gang, it ain't entertaining, so I took a break from all of that. When I saw what my life was becoming, I got into music more and decided to do something with it. I started getting in with some of these people who I looked up to, not just musically but life-wise and what's going on around us. My music has a message, which is why I feel some artists aren't getting the message of what I say."
Beazie says that his music is real and that it comes from his experiences in his life. "I put the world into my music, because the street is everywhere," he says. "It's what I
