The news of Barry Michael Cooper passing away on Wednesday in Baltimore reverberated throughout cultural corners and cut deep for anyone who’d read his writing or watched the classic films borne of his screenplays, like New Jack City or Above the Rim. The gifts of Barry Michael Cooper never “hid in plain sight”—they were quite obvious to anyone touched by his work and his words.
Cooper was a Harlem product, born and raised. He cut his teeth as a music critic and an investigative reporter for New York City alt-weekly The Village Voice for ten years before making his debut in feature at SPIN magazine in 1986. For that feature, he wrote about the coke-ravanged culture of Harlem in the mid-’80s. In the landmark story, Cooper paints a lucid portrait of the momentary exhilaration and despair distilled through a drug that was changing Harlem — and the Black community — forever.
“Crack is the latest drug in New York, and its use is becoming epidemic,” he wrote. “These white pellets of prepackaged freebase (cocaine in its purest form) are extremely frightening. Frequent users – peer-pressured 13-year-olds to 60-plus grandparents – don’t associate its use with the savage addiction of heroin or the hallucinogenic insanity of angel dust, its two predecessors in Harlem’s crippling drug trilogy. But in the last year, crack has become the drug of choice; the exhilarating rush of its 5-to-15-minute high brings a distorted sense of power, a king-of-the-hill nirvana.”
Late SPIN founder Bob Guccione once opined that Cooper’s clear-eyed commentary on the Uptown crack epidemic was “the first major piece ever written about the drug.”
It was his writing for The Village Voice and SPIN that showed just how percipient Cooper was about the world he’d come from and was now expertly documenting. And when a young musical prodigy from Uptown began charting big with Harlem acts like Keith Sweat and Guy, Cooper showed the world the true brilliance of Teddy Riley. He even gave that sound a name, one that would help frame a genre, one of his most iconic films, and contemporary Black culture as the world knew it.
“It was in Bronx River that the young man mixed rap, gospel, jazz, funk, go-go, and gothic-romanticism by way of synthesizers,” Cooper explained. “After worshiping and playing in several churches, playing and learning in several playgrounds and music classes, he found the elements to put together a totally new form of R&B. I call it ‘the New Jack Swing.’’
New jack swing was R&B and hip-hop’s bouncing new baby in the late 80s, and in giving the sound a new name, it announced that the game had changed. This wasn’t your parents’ R&B. It wasn’t even the kinetic electro and freestyle sounds made popular only a few years before. This was the sound of an R&B generation borne of hip-hop—as opposed to R&B attempting to “catch up” to the musical revolution.
And Barry Michael Cooper captured the moment perfectly.
- YouTube www.youtube.com
Later that same year, he wrote “Kids Killing Kids: The New Jack City Eats Its Young.” It was that piece that led to Cooper being tapped by the legendary Quincy Jones to write a screenplay about famed Harlem gangster Nicky Barnes. That script eventually morphed into a fictional drama about a crack kingpin named Nino Brown. New Jack City would become Cooper’s first big screen success. The 1991 film starred Wesley Snipes as Nino, and rapper Ice-T, who played the role of a dogged cop desperate to bring him down. The flick was directed by Mario Van Peebles, and it earned over $47 million at the box office off of an $8 million budget.
New Jack City arrived at the dawn of the 1990s “hood movie” wave that saw stories of urban crises told through the lens of the hip-hop generation. The movie made Snipes a bonafide star and set the stage for Cooper’s famed “Harlem Trilogy” to continue with 1994's Sugar Hill, which also starred Snipes. Set in Harlem’s beloved Sugar Hill district, it again features Snipes as a drug lord—albeit a much more reluctant one than the notorious Nino—who has watched drugs destroy his community and his family. Cooper’s stories weren’t afraid to be grim, but he told them with unflinching grace.
The basketball drama Above The Rim closed out the “Trilogy” with another look at how drugs infected the community—although this was more indirect. As a high school basketball (Duane Martin) star preps to make the leap to a big college after graduation, he’s tempted by the easy money of playing in street ball tournaments for a murderous kingpin (Tupac Shakur.)
Those films helped tell the story of Harlem in the 80s and early 90s and they influenced an entire generation watching hip-hop come of age. Cooper would go on to direct indie releases, produce for television (American Gangster) and collaborate with contemporaries like Spike Lee (She’s Gotta Have It.)
Upon the news of Cooper’s passing, his friend Nelson George reflected on Cooper’s impact on his own career.
“It'll take me a minute to gather all my thoughts,” George wrote. “But just wanted to thank him for recommending [me] to Robert Christgau at the Village Voice when I was trying to write for the Riffs section back in 1981. It was a key moment in my career and life. Barry helped define pop culture in the ‘80s and ‘90s with his early reporting on crack, by naming Teddy Riley’s sound ‘new jack swing,’ and writing star vehicles for Wesley Snipes (New Jack City, Sugar Hill) and Tupac (Above the Rim.) Though he lived much of the last decades of his life in Baltimore, he was Harlem to his core.”
Peers like Nelson George as well as younger writers like Kevin Powell and Cheo Hodari Coker, the late Greg Tate—represent a wave that brought literary nuance to hip-hop culture. Barry Michael Cooper was a new jack writer.
“It rang strong, new jack,” he said. “They were two words that weren’t supposed to go together—but they did. There was a whole thing about the play on words—and the power of words to me.”
source https://www.okayplayer.com/barry-michael-cooper-obituary
Comments
Post a Comment