Darth Sidious
New member
In one bit of video playacting, some supposed interlopers attempt to rob the gang, only to discover that they are dealing with more than they can handle. The overall message is not a threat but a warning: If you mess with the Fly Boy Gang, you do so at your own peril.
Were it not for all the real-life murdas, the whole video could have been just theatrics, fantasy stuff like those made by a host of poseur rappers from New York and Los Angeles and elsewhere who sought stardom by pretending to be from the street. That bogus stuff had begun to seem tired. And in seeking something fresh, the recording industry had discovered Chicago “drill music”; to drill in that city’s parlance meaning to shoot.
“A lot of ni**as be rappin’, but we the ones tote guns,” the Fly Boy Gang video says immediately after the reference to K.I. the young killa.
The commercial interest in real street stuff encouraged all the talk of murda and the gun waving, fostering an illusion that the bloodshed was more than senseless, the stuff of stardom. The video thus had another message: Give us a recording contract like you gave Chief Keef
Thanks to his contract with Interscope, Chief Keef had moved to the safety of a suburban McMansion, posting Instagrams of himself posing with guns in a marble bathroom. His debut album, Finally Rich, included the song with the lyrics dissing the murdered Tooka.
In September 2013, a Chief Keef associate named Leonard “L’A Capone” Anderson was shot after emerging from a recording studio. He had survived a shooting a year before, but this time his luck ran out. He had just turned 17, and a chocolate birthday cake his mother had baked sat in the family kitchen.
“I don’t know what to do without my son,” his mother was quoted as saying.
Keef stirred further trouble in November 2013 by tweeting what was apparently a future album lyric containing a reference to the murder of Barnes’s pal Tutu.
“Bitch I’m coolin wit my Youngins. Smokin Tutu wit my Youngins.”
On April 9, Keef’s 30-year-old cousin and sometime music collaborator, Mario “Blood Money” Hess, was shot and killed. Online postings would later name Barnes as the “hitta.” The police did not name her as a suspect in the killing of this father of five. And she herself made no direct online reference to the shooting. She did cite a line from a Biggie Smalls song in a tweet the next day:
“u Nobody until Somebody kill u dats jst real Shyt.”
But that could have been a reference her own losses, the most recent of which had come 12 days before, when police shot and killed 19-year-old Raason “Lil B” Shaw after he allegedly pointed a pistol at them during a foot chase right where the “Murda” video was made. Barnes named her Twitter page “NO SURRENDER LIL B.”
“I Dne seen 2 many of my ni**az n a casket…In da end we DIE,” she tweeted on April 10.
That same day, a rapper named Lil Jay with the Fly Boy Gang taunted Blood Money’s friends by posting a video of himself drinking a red-hued beverage from a Styrofoam cup. Jay had survived being shot 10 times back in June.
“Sippin’ on Blood Money,” he now sang.
The following afternoon, April 11, a hooded gunman approached Barnes on Eberhart Street, just two and a half blocks from where Odee Perry was killed in 2011. She collapsed with multiple bullet wounds at the base of some wooden steps. A neighbor tried in vain to stanch the bleeding with a towel. A ambulance responded, but she was beyond saving when she reached the hospital.
“They killed my little ni**a snoop #restuptyqanaassassin,” a Fly Boy Gang associate tweeted.
In the aftermath, friends posted photos of Barnes brandishing guns. And, as if social media were an alternate reality where she still lived, somebody began tweeting in her name:
“YOUNG NI**AS THEY GONE MURDA... TAUGHT A COUPLE YOUNG NI**AS HOW TO SHOOT SOME OLD GUNS B4 MY TIME WAS UP
“BITCH IMMA STILL TURN UP… IMMA HAVE U NI**AS WIT NIGHTMARES…BOSS KIRAH LIVES TOOKAVILLE.”
Her mother stood before a TV news camera with the graduation photo that to her was the real Gakirah Barnes. The mother told people not to believe what was posted on social media.
“I wanted everyone to know my 17-year-old daughter first off before they start judging,” she later said.
She noted that much of the blustering on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook was just kids trying to impress each other and themselves, making myth out of madness.
“All those kids and rappers talk like Jesse James. Everyone wants to be the biggest and the baddest,” she said. “This is life in Chicago.”
She knows full well that some rappers sit in relative safety while stoking the violence.
“They stir up,” she noted. “But they don’t walk these streets and have to go back and forth to school like these kids.”
The mother said she would be adding Barnes’s obituary to a stack of them her daughter had collected of her friends during her too brief life not two dozen blocks from President Obama’s home in the city some now call Chiraq.
“She seen quite a few friends buried, last few years,” the mother said. “It’s like a war zone.”
The mother insisted that at her core Barnes was a protector. And that made the loss all the more wrenching.
“Because I couldn’t protect her,” the mother said.
She spoke of organizing a Million Mom march for all mothers who have lost a child.
“No matter how they were lost,” she said.
Barnes is buried near her father, who was taken from her on her very first Easter. The two of them now join together to ask if it is ever going to end.
Related from The Daily Beast
Were it not for all the real-life murdas, the whole video could have been just theatrics, fantasy stuff like those made by a host of poseur rappers from New York and Los Angeles and elsewhere who sought stardom by pretending to be from the street. That bogus stuff had begun to seem tired. And in seeking something fresh, the recording industry had discovered Chicago “drill music”; to drill in that city’s parlance meaning to shoot.
“A lot of ni**as be rappin’, but we the ones tote guns,” the Fly Boy Gang video says immediately after the reference to K.I. the young killa.
The commercial interest in real street stuff encouraged all the talk of murda and the gun waving, fostering an illusion that the bloodshed was more than senseless, the stuff of stardom. The video thus had another message: Give us a recording contract like you gave Chief Keef
Thanks to his contract with Interscope, Chief Keef had moved to the safety of a suburban McMansion, posting Instagrams of himself posing with guns in a marble bathroom. His debut album, Finally Rich, included the song with the lyrics dissing the murdered Tooka.
In September 2013, a Chief Keef associate named Leonard “L’A Capone” Anderson was shot after emerging from a recording studio. He had survived a shooting a year before, but this time his luck ran out. He had just turned 17, and a chocolate birthday cake his mother had baked sat in the family kitchen.
“I don’t know what to do without my son,” his mother was quoted as saying.
Keef stirred further trouble in November 2013 by tweeting what was apparently a future album lyric containing a reference to the murder of Barnes’s pal Tutu.
“Bitch I’m coolin wit my Youngins. Smokin Tutu wit my Youngins.”
On April 9, Keef’s 30-year-old cousin and sometime music collaborator, Mario “Blood Money” Hess, was shot and killed. Online postings would later name Barnes as the “hitta.” The police did not name her as a suspect in the killing of this father of five. And she herself made no direct online reference to the shooting. She did cite a line from a Biggie Smalls song in a tweet the next day:
“u Nobody until Somebody kill u dats jst real Shyt.”
But that could have been a reference her own losses, the most recent of which had come 12 days before, when police shot and killed 19-year-old Raason “Lil B” Shaw after he allegedly pointed a pistol at them during a foot chase right where the “Murda” video was made. Barnes named her Twitter page “NO SURRENDER LIL B.”
“I Dne seen 2 many of my ni**az n a casket…In da end we DIE,” she tweeted on April 10.
That same day, a rapper named Lil Jay with the Fly Boy Gang taunted Blood Money’s friends by posting a video of himself drinking a red-hued beverage from a Styrofoam cup. Jay had survived being shot 10 times back in June.
“Sippin’ on Blood Money,” he now sang.
The following afternoon, April 11, a hooded gunman approached Barnes on Eberhart Street, just two and a half blocks from where Odee Perry was killed in 2011. She collapsed with multiple bullet wounds at the base of some wooden steps. A neighbor tried in vain to stanch the bleeding with a towel. A ambulance responded, but she was beyond saving when she reached the hospital.
“They killed my little ni**a snoop #restuptyqanaassassin,” a Fly Boy Gang associate tweeted.
In the aftermath, friends posted photos of Barnes brandishing guns. And, as if social media were an alternate reality where she still lived, somebody began tweeting in her name:
“YOUNG NI**AS THEY GONE MURDA... TAUGHT A COUPLE YOUNG NI**AS HOW TO SHOOT SOME OLD GUNS B4 MY TIME WAS UP
“BITCH IMMA STILL TURN UP… IMMA HAVE U NI**AS WIT NIGHTMARES…BOSS KIRAH LIVES TOOKAVILLE.”
Her mother stood before a TV news camera with the graduation photo that to her was the real Gakirah Barnes. The mother told people not to believe what was posted on social media.
“I wanted everyone to know my 17-year-old daughter first off before they start judging,” she later said.
She noted that much of the blustering on Twitter and Instagram and Facebook was just kids trying to impress each other and themselves, making myth out of madness.
“All those kids and rappers talk like Jesse James. Everyone wants to be the biggest and the baddest,” she said. “This is life in Chicago.”
She knows full well that some rappers sit in relative safety while stoking the violence.
“They stir up,” she noted. “But they don’t walk these streets and have to go back and forth to school like these kids.”
The mother said she would be adding Barnes’s obituary to a stack of them her daughter had collected of her friends during her too brief life not two dozen blocks from President Obama’s home in the city some now call Chiraq.
“She seen quite a few friends buried, last few years,” the mother said. “It’s like a war zone.”
The mother insisted that at her core Barnes was a protector. And that made the loss all the more wrenching.
“Because I couldn’t protect her,” the mother said.
She spoke of organizing a Million Mom march for all mothers who have lost a child.
“No matter how they were lost,” she said.
Barnes is buried near her father, who was taken from her on her very first Easter. The two of them now join together to ask if it is ever going to end.
Related from The Daily Beast
