Barry Michael Cooper Captured The Zeitgeist – The Best And The Worst
Barry Michael Cooper Captured The Zeitgeist – The Best And The Worst
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“Sometimes it’s good to pay attention to movies because you get what’s really happening,” Larry Davis — the crack-dealer-cum-folk-hero who survived a shoot-out with dozens of NYPD officers in 1986 — told writer Barry Michael Cooper in 1988.
The quote came from a 1988 jailhouse interview Cooper did with Davis for a Voice feature covering the trial that was dividing the city: Had Davis been set up by corrupt cops who’d been financing his drug dealing, or was he simply a prevaricating killer? Cooper, who passed away last week at age 66, did an impressive job of knitting together many strands of a life story right out of a Hollywood crime thriller, including Davis’s strong musical talent, his troubled youth, his claims about rogue cops, and his daring escape from the police raid after a shootout that left six officers wounded. In a memorable paragraph, Cooper described talking to the accused murderer of rival drug dealers: “To say Larry Davis is intense is an understatement. The day I interviewed him in the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the guy not only stared me down, he appeared to look right through me, and then discard my bodily contents. It reminded me of somebody chewing all the sugar out of a stick of Juicy Fruit and throwing it in the garbage. Davis gave the impression he regards reporters as nothing more than inquisitive ectoplasm that collect and distribute information.”
But Cooper did much more than simply collect and distribute info. In 2007, he told interviewer Michael A. Gonzales:
I gotta give my first girlfriend props. Her name was Cynthia Coleman. I was frustrated because I was sending my stuff to magazines, and then I started working at the post office around 1979. She said, “Why don’t you try to write for a newspaper, send something to the Amsterdam News.” I said, “I ain’t no reporter.” She said, “Don’t you know Richard Wright and Hemingway started off as reporters? They were reporters.”
Sure enough, she was on point. From then, I started reading the Voice. I wasn’t crazy about the Village Voice, but I liked that they were able to freely express themselves as writers.
Cooper took Coleman’s advice and contacted the Voice’s music editor, Robert Christgau, who gave him the go-ahead to write something on Parliment-Funkadelic’s album, Gloryhallastoopid. Christgau told Cooper the piece needed work, “but you got a voice.” Indeed, even early on Cooper displayed a beyond-broad knowledge of the music of that fervent epoch: “Peep it out; this album will be an architectonic musical blueprint for the current new wave/power pop crew, the phade-out disco crew, the progressive funk/r&b crew, and the rock/country crew. If you don’t think so, check out the variations on the One beat with lan Dury’s ‘Reasons To Be Cheerful —Part 3,’ Chic’s ‘Good Times,’ Rufus’s ‘Do You Love What You Feel?’ and Ronnie Milsap’s ‘Get It Up.’ ” That was in January 1980. A year later, Cooper used his eloquent, streetwise voice to report on the burgeoning rap movement, writing about the music’s roots in the lively “toasting” records of the West Indies, and of its social similarities to punk in England and reggae in the Caribbean: “These transcontinental urban griots echo the despair, pain, and anger of the South Bronx and Harlem (the world’s two major rap centers), which a lot of the cool-jerk white liberals and b.S. Black bourgeoisie don’t want to hear. Rapping reminds them that everything is not cool and correct on the home front….”
And few writers had a more gut-level understanding of problems on the home front than Cooper, whose story about “Kids Killing Kids” in Detroit appeared on the cover of the December 1, 1987, issue of the Voice, with the subhead “New Jack City Eats Its Young.” Cooper’s 7,000-plus-word feature covered the history of Detroit’s Black working- and middle-class neighborhoods and the devastating effects the 1967 riot in the city had, quoting a professor of criminology at Michigan State University that life in Detroit before the riot “was an absolute paradise.” Cooper’s keen ear not only for the sonics of music but also for its social impact comes across when he writes, “Berry Gordy’s Motown was the bullhorn for this new black age, and its ‘Sound of Young America’ was heard around the world. Motown was the example of how far my people had come, and how far we could go with hard work, three-part harmony, silk and sequins, and tricky terpsichore. Motown went to the heights because white America loves black people who know their place after assimilation. From 1960 to ’67, it seemed that Detroit was living the best of times.”
Cooper then fast forwards to the way that too many families and neighborhoods were steadily hollowed out by the onslaughts of heroin, and later, crack: “New Jack City for the economically deprived is a crystalline legacy formed by the cooked-down anarchy of their parents in the 1967 riot. Because of the seared riot consciousness, because of heroin’s flip-flop — killer and money-maker — and crack’s entrepreneurial spirit, outlaw is the law.”
Cooper certainly understood the outlaw allure; in 1991 he co-wrote the Mario Van Peebles-directed hit film New Jack City, based partly on his Voice feature.
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