![]() Almost always, a first interaction with him was negative. Many of his closest friends had once been enemies many of his enemies were once his closest friends. “His mom’s house . . . that was, like, him, his mom, his brother girlfriend, his girlfriend and his kid,” says Andrew, who visited him often.ĭanny liked to needle people endlessly. He was Danny Hernandez, from Locust Avenue, in Bushwick, who worked the counter at the Stay Fresh Grill and Deli, who picked fights on Instagram, and who lived in a crowded two-bedroom apartment in a derelict tenement. To them, he wasn’t Tekashi or 6ix9ine, even after he put 14 songs on the Billboard chart and started hanging out with Kanye West. ![]() Photo credit: Jefferson Siegel/The New York Times/Redux Jefferson Siegel/The New York Times/Redux And within a month, Teakashi would find himself in a much bigger trouble. Tekashi would avoid incarceration, but that evening, at a dinner celebrating the judge’s decision, a gun battle would break out between Shotti’s crew and his label CEO Elliot Grainge’s security team. But just more than 12 months after that video shoot in Brooklyn, Hernandez would be in a jail cell facing 32 years to life on charges that included armed robbery and attempted murder.Ħ9 Problems: In a Manhattan courtroom on October 26th, 2018, for a plea violation. People who knew Hernandez well agree that, before he met Shotti, he hadn’t been involved in gang life at all. Later, authorities allege, he would threaten Tekashi’s life. He produced the crowd of menacing young men in the video, and in time would become Tekashi’s unofficial manager. Shotti was allegedly a member of the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods, a subset of the violent prison gang founded at New York’s Rikers Island jail in 1993. “Shotti,” that would be the most consequential part of that summer day in Brooklyn. But it was his introduction to Kifano Jordan, a.k.a. That surge in popularity would lead to the uncovering of Hernandez’s pre-fame life, including a guilty plea for child-sex charges, a case that would define Hernandez in the public eye. “Gummo,” powered by the bizarre, unforgettable 6ix9ine image, was a viral sensation that went platinum in just a few months. The “Gummo” video launched Hernandez on three parallel trajectories - one that made him famous one that made him notorious and one that may end his career. But if we showed you the analytics on who writes the hate comments, they’re the ones who go to the shows and buy the T-shirts!” “We look at the data - 80 percent of the comments are hate. “He is the Donald Trump of the music industry,” Elliot Grainge, the CEO of Tekashi’s label, 10K Projects, told me last summer. You didn’t have to like him you just had to have an opinion. It’s a playbook that’s been used before - 50 Cent, for example, dissed his way to rap’s throne in the early 2000s - but the speed at which 6ix9ine found himself with an audience of millions could only have happened in the smartphone era. He became hip-hop’s troll prince, a master at sparking outrage and bottling it into a feverish popularity. ![]() In his brief career, Tekashi 6ix9ine captured America’s attention with an escalating series of provocations and controversies. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |