Gulraj Gill

1993.01.18-2015.06.20

Photo Collection 1, 2

Video Compilation


In the Summer of 1997, Everyone Took To The Streets In Shiny Suits

THIS IS THE ONE WHERE THE MOTHER DIES. I feel drawn to apology, though I imagine you must have known it was coming. Here, perhaps I should tell you that she died in summer. If I say that I was at least outside rather than cocooned by cold, pressing my grief-slick face to a window, perhaps the image is more bearable. The thing about dying unexpectedly is that it certainly saves you the heartbreak of watching your loved ones fuss over you. I kissed my mother on a June night in 1997, and when I woke up, she was gone. That was it. I think sometimes it was better that way, to have our last moment be a routine farewell. Her throat simply closed in the middle of the night, a reaction to medication she was taking to fight against her bipolar disorder. Sometimes it isn’t what we’re battling that takes us but simply the battle itself. Days before she died, she got to watch my brother, her oldest son, graduate from college. It seemed fitting, to go out on the heels of a celebration. 

A few months before we buried my mother, a casket was carried through Brooklyn, the Notorious B.l.G.’s body inside, and here is a myth I like to imagine about that day: a line of rappers watching his funeral with their hands out, trading in their street-honed rhymes and still- cocked guns for a shiny jumpsuit, perhaps a pile of chains. A stack of money with the promise of more to come. And no rapper was ever killed again, and every hood danced in the streets for two whole decades, every song dipped in a sweet sample that our mothers learned from their mothers. It’s a lie, of course. But 1997 was, for me, a year of far-off myths that I wanted to come to life. I dreamed myself into

an emotional survival that I wasn’t afforded the opportunity to live in my waking hours.

To have lost a beloved rapper first was a sad but gentle bless-ing. I was 13 years old and familiar enough with death to have felt its impact, but the loss of Biggie felt different, even more than the loss of Tupac just a few months earlier. If you happened to be alive in the Midwest in the mid-’90s, equidistant from each coast, you got to enjoy mainstream rap at its sharpest and most complete rise, without the biases that engulfed the coasts at the time. After the Notorious B.I.G. was murdered in March of 1997, it felt like the ride was over. It briefly felt like perhaps the peak had been reached, and then came the blood and the funerals, and now the whole genre was on timeout, tearing itself apart at the seams. I remember a brief moment where my brothers and I had to become secretive about our rap intake,

our parents growing concerned about the violence of it all. It felt a little heavier to rap along to songs about guns and death. My mother began to eavesdrop on the music I was taking in, cutting eyes at anything with a black-and-white striped “PARENTAL ADVISORY” sticker on it. I was her youngest child and it was sill the spring. She did not yet know that she would be gone.

“Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems,” the Diana Ross-sampled hit from the Notorious B.I.G’s posthumous album Life After Death, was released as a single two days after my mother’s funeral. It was my first time hearing it on the radio. Not just a single radio, but every radio. It spilled out of cars, onto basketball courts, people danced to it in parking lots after the sun set. The song sampled “I’m Coming Out,” an anthemic 1980s disco-soul hit that arrived before I was born but existed in familiar homes in the years after, playing in the hood, or at the cookout, or anywhere you could find space for Black people to dance. “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems” was the first time I considered the true work of the sample: to call us all back to something familiar, in hopes that we might ignore all that is falling apart outside. The music video for the song came out shortly after the single. I watched it premiere on BET one day on a break from summer revelry. The visuals are a celebration. Ma$e and Puff Daddy dancing, cloaked in shiny suits, and even with the ghost of Biggie hovering thick over the song, they laughed, swayed arm in arm, levitated underneath the face of their dead friend.

With that, a new gate opened. The so-called “shiny suit era.” The commercialization of hip-hop, taken to an extreme. The party that never stopped. Puff Daddy on every single, blinding jewelry in every video, songs drowning and shameless soul and pop samples covering the top of the charts, gold albums for any MC who stepped in the booth. It began with Puff Daddy and Bad Boy Records, of course, but like all successful trends, it spread. It would be a lie to say that all of the music that was produced during this period was good. The results weren’t always ideal: MCs like Mic Geronimo and Nas, who weren’t organically in the shiny suit lane, attempted to venture in and found

themselves clumsy and out of place. Still, rap was at its most commercially accessible after a brief and dark holding period and I remember being thankful. Drinking in every bit of excess from a small TV screen in Ohio, feeling like both rap and my life hadn’t managed to change much at all, despite the hole left in the gene, despite the hole left in my childhood home.

At its inception, what made punk rock great in the face of incredible odds was the general idea that anyone could do it. It wasn’t about making great music, it was about getting free. This isn’t just something that Puff Daddy understood. Big Pun understood it while dancing in the “Still Not A Player” video. Missy Elliott understood it while spending the late ’90s giving us new ways to see, hear, and feel. Big Tymers understood it when they realized that they had no business rapping, but did it anyway. Nelly understood it while becoming a Midwest success story, an MC who still sounds exactly like where he’s from and doesn’t apologize for it. Cam’ron understood it in 2003 while freestyling on Rap City, counting hundreds of dollars.

This, too, is a response to grief. Covering yourself in the spoils of your survival and making music that sent people dancing in the streets again. What I took away from 1997 wasn’t how much I’d lost, though that burden was mighty. I remembered the songs my mother loved once, repurposed for my own pleasures, and this made it feel like she had never left. The shiny suit era, for all of its detractors, was a gift in that summer and beyond. A small light out of the loneliness that had found its way to me.

In New Orleans, the people dance on caskets. They cut the body loose while the funeral rolls slow down a street. Onlookers join in and celebrate the life of the deceased, whether they know them or not. The band plays loud and long into the hot night, and the line of dancing people grows and grows. I watched this once when I was young, in 2002, a few years after my mother’s passing, when I’d learned to move on. People, covered in sweat, both crying and yelling out in joy. Strangers hugging each other, and singing along to whatever tune the band saw fit to carry us home with. It made me reconsider the true purpose of a funeral. To see it, instead, as something that makes death memorable for those still living, something less fearful to sit in. A way to show the dead that we’ll be all right, that we can go on without them just fine.

After Katrina, when I came back to the city for the first time in a couple of years, there were bodies floating on the water. People were searching for their loved ones. After a couple more days, caskets, unearthed by the flood’s ferocity, began floating through the streets. It was haunting, the unburied floating next to the once-buried, both home and far from home, all at once. On my last day there, a man on some higher ground took out his horn and began to play while a few caskets, some turned side-ways and empty, floated below us. A few people, weary and sad, started to clap slowly along, on beat. We make our own music to celebrate our dead where we must.

I’m saying that I wish I knew what joys could be unlocked by tragedy before my mother died, but I’m thankful to have learned it shortly after she was gone. No brass band played for her as she was taken into the cemetery, no dance spilled out in her name. But in the summer of 1997, I learned what it is to feel someone everywhere. On the radio, every time I heard “Mo’ Money, Mo’ Problems,” I would think of how it might just have been the one rap song that my mother would have given allowance to. How she might have smiled and swayed at the familiarity of Diana Ross for long enough to ignore the lyrics. The gloss and shine of the era wasn’t just for the suits and the sound. It was all a distraction. A small and delightful manipulation. The only way that rap could have survived after being declared dead under a hail of bullets. It was all a trick to pull our eyes away, and it did, for me. And, look, I am not saying that the mass commercialization of rap music saved the genre or saved lives. It had vast drawbacks, some of them still being felt today. Shifts in production and marketing that started to water down the genre then haven’t really stopped, leading to a current-day market where there are, quite literally, too many rappers. But I wouldn’t take it back. It was what I needed in the moment, and still what I need now. The thing about grief is that it never truly leaves. From the moment it enters you, it becomes something you are always getting over. I will take healing in whatever form I can, and I heard my mother’s voice singing underneath that music. I heard her slowly making her way back home.

The thing that I can’t promise is that heaven exists. I like to hope that it does, despite growing less and less connected to an idea of a higher power with each year. My mother died without knowing that death was coming for her, and I like to imagine her somewhere comfortable, a place where she can make peace with that. Selfishly, and more than anything else, I’d like to see her again, whatever seeing in the afterlife might look like. I’d love to sit across from her and hear her laugh at something, anything. Id like to tell her about the summer of 1997 while someone sits behind us and plays a horn, slow and beautiful. I’d like to tell her about how I went outside for the first time two days after we covered her casket in dirt and heard the notes to a song she could sing along to. I’d like to tell her that I played basketball late into the night that summer, with the words to that song fresh on my tongue. That the radio played rap again, even in the suburbs that I hated. I’d like to tell her that I did not cry at the funeral, but I didn’t dance either. Not until weeks later, when I finally let go and flailed my limbs to the radio behind a closed bedroom door, crying and singing, feeling myself get closer and closer to freedom with every unhinged movement. You should’ve seen me, I’d tell her in our new and clean heaven. You should’ve seen me.

I did, she’d say. I always did.”

(from They Can’t Kill Us Until They Kill Us by Hanif Abdurraqib)