Choe’s personal practice is fitting of how Sound of Scissors runs its business. It isn’t at the top of Google search results for “hair salons in Koreatown.” It doesn’t run promoted ads in social feeds, nor does it place listings in local papers. In fact, it hasn’t run advertisements online or on air for several years.

“We don’t really need to right now,” says Choe. She would know what is right for the business, which has been at its corner under its current name on Wilshire Boulevard and St. Andrews Place for over two decades. Having been at its current location for this long, the salon finds relevance because of its history in the community.

Prior to operating as Sound of Scissors, the salon was known as the Ivy. The name changed when its former owner passed the business on to Sara Kim, who had been renting her workstation at the time. Today, Kim runs Sound of Scissors in partnership with Choe and Anne Ko, both of whom joined Kim in Koreatown after working at several other hair salons outside of the neighborhood. They wanted to deliver on the promise of service to a community that made them comfortable about their cultural backgrounds. Since 1993, it’s been just the three of them who run the chairs. Or rather, it had been the trio in their rhythm for so long that none of them are exactly sure that 1993 is when they began. “But definitely at least 25 years,” says Choe.

Nowadays, a lot of Sound of Scissors’ new clients come from people who find them simply by walking down the block. It’s hard to miss. Its green and black signage wraps around a white building on Wilshire and St. Andrews Place, yet easily overlooked by somebody who is brand new to Koreatown.

In Koreatown’s current iteration, new residents are on foot exploring their parameters and anchoring themselves to their essentials. Here they mingle with families of Asian descent who moved here to immerse themselves in something familiar. Local merchants are steadily accommodating transplants who find comfort in recognizable brands. It’s evident in the Romanization of Asian business names and English translations to their offerings on menus and displays. The brute side-effect to Los Angeles’ growing pains: a culturally rich neighborhood is being stripped of its color.

Korean Angelenos rally through word of mouth. Grapevines are thick like rope in these communities. In coffee shops and markets, families and friends check in on one another. Secrets of the neighborhood are exchanged. I wouldn’t have found myself at Sound of Scissors if it weren’t for my mother, who started going under the tightly-sealed recommendation of a Sunday service friend. Then my mother started to take my aunt with her, and soon my aunt’s husband and neighbor followed.

“We do well because of families and family friends. Women bring in their husbands and children, or they bring their friends from work or church,” explains Choe.

A typical Korean hair appointment starts with a thorough hair rinse underneath a shampoo hose that has just one mode of pressure; it’s not the real deal if water isn’t splashing your neck and shoulders as you recline in the chair. Your hair then gets wrapped in a towel blanched from bleach.

Meanwhile, your head tingles from the minty leave-in conditioner that was furiously lathered into the scalp with latex gloves, speckled with dye. If you’re coloring your hair in a Korean salon, you’re sitting at the work station with a thick, slick coating of vaseline lining the frame of your face. Meanwhile, your stylist is furiously mixing dyes at her station in front of you. The pungent ammonia permeates and reminds that this is no time and space for smoke and mirrors. Haircare in a Korean salon is process-driven.

Choe takes pride in her “gisul.” The word translates to “skills” and according to her, “It’s what people come to Korean salons for.” Skills are developed with respect to people’s hustle outside of their appointments; surviving in this metropolis means there is constant money to secure and mouths to feed.

Clients have rearranged their day to squeeze in appointments. The Korean salon thus belongs in a city, and the Korean stylist thrives where their customers appreciate sensibility. Gisul means getting shit done.

Entering Sound of Scissors is like putting on noise-cancelling headphones. It’s occasionally punctuated by the hums of hair dryers or the faint fuzz of an adult contemporary radio station cutting in and out from a dated portable system. The only other sounds that steadily cut through the air are the surgical snips of sharp edges through wet hair; Sound of Scissors is an apt name. For Korean communities, these salons are trusted harbors for respectful merchant-client arrangements: for your time and money, you get somebody’s practical expertise.

“How is your aunt?” Choe asks me at the start of my recent visit. “She came for a trim the other day.” Formalities melted years ago; it’s not uncommon to find Korean families confiding in their stylists. Choe is a part of my own family’s lore.

My usual cut is a thinned layered look, which a Caucasian hair salon once told me is difficult because it is not “in style.” I’d tried other places in hopes of having easier conversations about my hair (I’m not fluent in Korean), but it felt as if the arrangements were mismanaged. I hadn’t asked for my hair to be treated with style; I asked for layers because my thick, coarse hair would hang heavy on my head otherwise.

If there is anything additive to the service you get from a Koreatown salon, it’s the comfort of not adapting to outsiders’ recommendations. The reliable presence of these older fixtures have made us feel better in spite of changes. On the same side of Sound of Scissors lie a massage therapist, a bank and a restaurant that specializes in ox bone soup (seolleongtang); my earliest memories are all attached to their service to my family.

I worry about foot traffic at the Wilshire and Western intersection. Google returns about 20 search results for new hair salons up and down these blocks. Being offline right now feels counterintuitive for the sake of business, but Choe trusts the process.

“We’ve been able to change with the changes,” she says. “It’s similar to how we didn’t have iPhones, but now we all have iPhones. We will adapt.”

The post Clipping Culture appeared first on theLAnd.

For a distinctly reverent gathering, there’s a lot of vomiting. I can’t see the person gagging on the other side of the candlelit room, but I hear them churning up something from deep inside themselves, and whatever that is is hitting the bottom of a plastic bucket with a hard splash. To my left, a middle-aged woman sobs into her hands, while a white-haired old man on my right laughs hysterically. “I get it!” he yells into the rafters of the cavernous space. “I see it all so clearly now!”

I look up to the ceiling and see nothing, but that doesn’t mean there isn’t anything there. In the middle of this room on the semi-rural outskirts of Los Angeles County, a trio of musicians dressed entirely in white perform a ballad with acoustic guitar, hand drums and lyrics about the glory of the wind.

As the song crescendos, a thin woman stands and spins, her hands raised over her head and her skirt floating into a kaleidoscopic whirl. When the song is over, no one claps. There are rules here, and not clapping is one of them. Anyone who’s sat in an ayahuasca ceremony will affirm that the music really does move you to tears, to laughter, to understanding, to catharsis. Thus comes Birds in Paradise, the debut album from Los Angeles collective Bird Tribe, a sprawling group of musicians and artists who have for years served as the house band for L.A.’s progressive spiritual scene. They’ve played tea ceremonies, cacao ceremonies and art galleries in Venice.

You’ll catch them at sustainability talks out in Topanga, hosting a discussion by Brazilian tribal elders at an old church in East Hollywood, playing a late-night show at Lightning in a Bottle. In a city where connection is famously difficult, their mission is to foster meaningful interconnectedness between each other, with nature and with indigenous wisdom.

They feel that if there is hope for humanity, it’s in these activities.

While my Midwestern upbringing instilled in me a skepticism for false gods, flashy gurus and overt absurdity, the ceremony and the songs played during it are honest and powerful, having facilitated some of the more profound moments of my life. I can hum any one of them and remember what it was like to finally grieve the deaths of my grandparents, to forgive myself for all the moments I had failed myself and others, to cry until I couldn’t cry anymore, and to realize Magical Mystery Tour is gospel and all you really need is love. Thousands of people in Los Angeles can, more or less, say the same.

Birds in Paradise is the sonic component of this mission.

With it, Bird Tribe intends to share the depth of meaning and sense of connection inherent to ayahuasca with as many people as possible.

You might have the same gut reaction as many people have to the idea of going to Burning Man (in short, “no fucking way”). But take part in any of Bird Tribe’s events and you’ll likely be won over by their kindness, authenticity, diversity and depth of talent.

“Anybody that does this type of work absolutely knows that it’s ceremonial music,” says Tony Moss, the dreadlocked and quietly wise de facto leader of Bird Tribe. “But to other people, it might just sound like The Lion King.”

Music has always been part of the ayahuasca tradition, which originated in the Amazon Basin thousands of years ago and has found strong footing in Southern California, a region long receptive to all flavors of spiritual mysticism. Made of a vine and leaf boiled into a thick tea, this “plant medicine” is intended to induce a heart-and-mind-opening journey. It’s a bit like acid, and also kind of like church. While the local scene exists largely underground — ayahuasca is illegal in the United States — dozens of ceremonies may happen on any given weekend in the greater L.A. area.

In the Amazon, where tens of thousands of people descend each year to participate in ayahuasca tourism, songs range from simple melodies sung by a solo vocalist, to complex, almost alien song structures performed by a half-dozen signers. Considered the engine that moves each ceremony forward, the songs are traditionally called icaros, with each icaro believed to carry a particular type of healing — a song for a broken heart, for strength, for forgiveness, for peace. In certain traditions, songs are believed to carry the medicinal properties of the particular plant referenced in the lyrics. These songs are sung by curanderos and curanderas, healers who lead the ceremony, with melodies and styles passed down over centuries. But as the global revival of indigenous practices spreads ancient knowledge to new demographics and parts of the world, working in tandem with the so-called “psychedelic renaissance,” the music of Bird Tribe — original, contemporary, pop-oriented and produced using the same methods as most anything on the radio — is adapting tradition as much as it’s extending it. Not everyone approves.

“Understandably, many people who study shamanism and other traditional indigenous ceremony practices want to preserve tradition,” says Moss, who has studied plant medicines and shamanism since first drinking ayahuasca almost a quarter-century ago. Raised between Northern and Southern California, Moss grew up singing in church and is the son of singer Rejoyce Moss, who, along with two of her sisters, formed ’60s gospel act The Stovall Sisters. The trio sang backup for a long list of icons including Ray Charles, Etta James and Al Green and themselves pushed the boundaries of what traditional religious music could be with their eponymous 1970 gospel/R&B crossover album.

“There’s a concern about appropriation and misuse of traditional ceremony practice,” says Moss. “But traditions can and do evolve — and, more importantly, adapt to the culture and times.” On Birds in Paradise, the adaptation is distinctly Southern Californian. Moss considers the album a manifestation of L.A. culture in the same way Fleetwood Mac’s Rumours captured the crystal visions of 1970s SoCal. The album is an exquisitely pretty extension of the canyon music lineage of Joni Mitchell and Neil Young, with Bird Tribe offering the same low-key, nature-based spirituality of their counterculture predecessors. There are dreamy homages to the vitality of water dressed up in moody strings. “Kalyana” is a sing-along about the wind and would be a Top 40 hit had Ed Sheeran written it. “Pink Dolphins” honors the indigenous tribes who live along the rivers of the Amazon. “Sundance Song” represents the Lakota music often played in ceremony. Considered sacred and rarely performed in public, it’s shared on the album with permission.

Bird Tribe includes Moss (who’s worked in musical theater for over a decade and has released music under his own name), renowned frame drum player and singer Miranda Rondeau, Diana Carr (with a voice that rivals Feist), multi-instrumentalists Sunny Solwind, Tëté Bero, Shireen Jarrahian, David Daniel Brown and an extended network of guest players. Songs are sung in English, Spanish, Portuguese, Lakota, “spirit language” (channeled words that have meaning but don’t directly correlate to any known language) and Shipibo, the language of the Peruvian tribe most associated with the development of ayahuasca.

The Shipibo are among the Amazonian tribes thanked in the liner notes for the “friendship, knowledge and healing modalities that have blessed the lives of so many.” While mainstream media coverage of ayahuasca has largely obsessed on the wildness of the experience and the handful of deaths that have occurred at retreats (none actually from ingesting ayahuasca), what’s been less reported on are the millions of people who have achieved clarity, inspiration, hope, purpose and physical and emotional wellness through their work with the plant. Birds in Paradise aims to expand this influence. The album is structured to mimic a ceremony, with the same invocations, themes, moods and pacing. While it could easily fall in the world music genre, Moss calls Birds in Paradise “medicine music” — music created from, or intended for, ceremony that exists to support intentions of peace, love and healing. Those who have sat in ceremony — teachers, doctors, lawyers, movie stars and studio executives among them — will attest that it works in whatever way one needs it to, that the medicine is clever this way.

“Pop music will typically try to be as neutral as possible, as universal as possible,” Moss says. “An artist doing medicine music is unconcerned with that, because your whole point is to be direct about what you’re saying, whether it’s forgiveness or having gratitude.”

Of course, many songs are sincere, and all forms of music from Biggie to Backstreet Boys can inspire devotion.

But these songs and others like them are played explicitly to facilitate catharsis, spiritual connectedness and good feelings, rather than to validate the performer or entertain the audience. It’s the reason no one claps. This isn’t Coachella.

But considering L.A. is a world capital of the music industry, it’s logical that music in the ayahuasca scene would be elevated. Gifted musicians have naturally gravitated to the spiritual scene, with many of them finding a place to share their talents without the requisite pressures of achieving fame. Their work serves a higher purpose here: healing you, and through you, healing the world.

“Even when I’m stuck in traffic and in moments that can be challenging and jaded, listening to this music creates more space inside myself for creativity and play and activity and giving,” says Jarrahian, who played flute, handpan, jaw harp and more on the album. “Even my dog sings along with me.”

While Moss says there’s no way they’ll recoup the tens of thousands they spent on recording, it was more important to see where they could take each track, and how far beyond L.A.’s relatively insular spiritual community they can now share it. “Amazonia” will be remixed by a collection of DJs popular in the transformational festival scene, and several music videos will be released over the coming months. The potential, they believe, is tremendous. Anyone who listens might become that white-haired old man, laughing at the ceiling, seeing it all so clearly now.

The post The Secret Life of Plants appeared first on theLAnd.

2Pac said that Inglewood was “always up to no good,” but it’s unclear whether Suge ever brought the late, great Makaveli around the Bloods who ran the blocks between Centinela and Florence, La Cienega to La Brea. Nonetheless, “California Love” offered the state an official anthem and the city of champions a battle cry. That was 1995; Rucci was a toddler, and North Inglewood was a war zone.

Nearly a quarter-century later, this lopsided rectangle of color-coordinated asphalt, strip malls and tribal pride has slowly begun to gentrify. Billions of dollars of NFL and Madison Square Garden Company money have poured into the area, leading to the usual cycle of displacement, creeping rents and artisanal Bloody Mary bars on Market Street. But a mile or two away, you can still find Rucci, 24, who survived biblical trials and tragedies to become the neighborhood’s biggest young rap star since Mack 10 first backyard boogied. And if you want to understand Rucci, you need to start at 722 W. Beach Ave.

This was his father Big Tako’s spot. Well, technically, it belonged to Rucci’s grandmother, a domestic worker who fled the apocalyptic violence of the Salvadoran Civil War around the time that death squad demagogue Roberto D’Aubuisson ordered the assassination of Saint Óscar Romero. The murder of the beatified priest sent the Central American nation into chaos so grotesque that Joan Didion shrugged that “terror was the given of the place.” In response, refugees streamed north into the arrogant dawn of Reagan’s America. This torrent included Rucci’s grandmother, who survived a brutal journey full of mercenary coyotes and border control agents, to wind up working from sunup to well past sundown in the mansions of monied Angelenos — including Matthew McConaughey, if Rucci’s memory serves him right. ‘Pac wasn’t exaggerating. By the time the Martinez clan made it to Beach Avenue, the crack era was aflame and fast cash could be reaped if you were willing to risk running afoul of rival sets and the Inglewood Police Department, who were never too far away. Rucci’s father was born in El Salvador, where he lived with his grandparents until finally reuniting with his mom around his seventh birthday. She’d settled in the turf right near Rogers Park — a territory historically controlled by the Neighborhood Pirus (NHP) — an almost entirely black gang until Juan Martinez started wearing a red rag sometime during his later years at La Tijera Elementary. The alias, Big Tako, came almost immediately, a nod to his Latin American heritage. The spelling, well, that’s all Norf.

Racial tensions were rife between the NHP’s and the neighboring, mostly-Mexican Inglewood 13s. During a stint in Folsom, a rival gang member cut Tako’s scalp open. But in the North, the Martinezes’ and their new extended family lived harmoniously.

“I was raised around all black people,” Rucci explains. “Both of [my dads’] baby moms is black. My auntie’s baby daddy is black. My uncle’s baby momma is black…”

Shortly after dropping out of Inglewood High, Tako met Rucci’s mom, Angela, a Palmdale native who moved to Inglewood in her late teens. Rucci, née Juan Martinez Jr., was born in 1994. The joke was that his mom’s water broke at Rogers Park. One of Rucci’s first memories was going to Disneyland, age 3, standing up on one of the picnic tables in Mickey Mouse’s kingdom and rapping the lyrics to Suga Free’s, “Fly Fo Life.” “My mom didn’t know what to do!” Rucci laughs. “She was like, ‘Oh hell nah!”

Back then everyone called him “Midget,” a nod to his almost identical resemblance to his father and his uncle, Anthony “BD” Martinez, who rapped and made beats under the name, P-Funky.

“All the Martinezes look alike,” Rucci says. “Light-skinned and chubby with long hair.”

Last May’s “El Perro” opens with Rucci rapping: “I remember running around bad as fuck/only five but it ain’t seemed like I’d had enough/my pops put me in the corner when I was acting up/but that was so I ain’t see him sniff that line before he bagged it up.”

This is the residue of 722 W. Beach Ave. Rucci was roughly five when the Cashploitation opus Baller Blockin became the most influential straight-to-VHS film of the new millennium.

“We wanted to be like the Hot Boys so we turned Tako’s house into the projects,” remembers the rapper 2Eleven — a neighborhood hero close to Rucci’s father and uncle. “Rucci witnessed it all, but wasn’t old enough to be in the streets like that yet,” 2Eleven continues. “We knew not to have Midget on some crazy shit or else Pops was gonna go up. And none of us wanted that; his reputation was solidified. Rucci and his little brother Angel really were project babies.”

If you pulled up to 722 W. Beach, you had to be prepared for any outcome. Picture Pinocchio on Pleasure Island banging Piru. Girls in the back, dice games, brown-bagged 40s and backwoods. Homies crashed there for days, sometimes weeks. On the front porch, neighborhood sentinels sat on a couch, straight military, sometimes shooting at the encroaching enemy, sometimes heading out on retaliatory missions. Everyone sold dope back then, so crackheads staggered up and down the block. The candy spot was next door and they weren’t selling Now & Laters.

Other NHP nerve centers existed, but this was the only one that never got shut down. It wasn’t from a lack of police effort, either. There were too many raids to remember. Armed with automatic weapons and barking, drug-sniffing dogs, they’d break down the door and aim the barrel at Rucci’s grandmother, cussing her out, and screaming at everyone to hit the floor.

“You can’t be someone who just blossoms and wants to be from over here. I took too many losses for this shit,” Rucci explains. “As a baby, there’d be guns and bullets in the house. At age three, I knew to tell my dad when the police was coming.”

He depicts his father as an Italian mobster type, obsessed with valor and loyalty above money — someone for whom the code of omerta reigned absolute. His little brother, P-Funky, was an aspiring rapper and producer who once battled porn-star-cum-rapper Brian Pumper. Roughly a decade younger than Tako, he became Rucci’s best friend and helped nurtured his innate musical talent.

“I don’t like to brag,” Rucci says of his lyrical approach. “I just like showing people what’s going on.” Gangsta rap has long been demonized by those stressing the vulgarity of the hit singles over the agonizing consequences examined on deep cuts. Shrill outsiders who key in on “Nuthin’ But a G Thang” but ignore “Lil Ghetto Boy.” Like his stylistic predecessors (Snoop and Dre, 2Pac, Bone Thugs-N-Harmony, Westside Connection, Cash Money, Baton Rouge’s Boosie and Webbie), Rucci artfully hedges Hennessey-swilling, molly-popping bangers with mournful anthems consecrated by the struggle.

There are artists who swerve so far from tradition that decrypting their influences is like deciphering how sacramental animal glyphs cropped up in the sands of Southern Peru. Rucci isn’t one of them. If you listened to Doggystyle in 1993, closed your eyes, and imagined West Coast rap a quarter century later, you’d inevitably get something like Rucci’s 2017 mixtape, Dawgystyle.

It pays homage to the title and anthropomorphic canine lechery of the original cover, and swipes a hook from a Y2K-era Snoop and Kokane collaboration (“Pump Yo Breakz”). A G-Funk baby, Rucci mashes DJ Quik’s “Tonite” and Keith Sweat’s “Twisted” into an auto-tuned post-ratchet slapper built to raise the teen pregnancy rate within a five-square-mile radius of Randy’s Donuts. But like YG, 03 Greedo and even Kendrick (“Bumping Jeezy’s first album, looking distracted”), the slippery bounce and gelatinous shake of Southern rap unmistakably factors into Rucci’s DNA.

His honking “Hahhh” ad-lib comes from Juvenile and Cash Money; he brags about “gold in my mouth like a nigga from New Orleans.” When he shouts “Ayyy,” it smacks like a sinistral jab. There’s an almost Kobe Bryant-like ability to absorb the go-to moves of his inspirations and perfect them for the Instagram-snippet era. His voice bristles with a subtle volatility indebted to Boosie, mutating into a bayonet snarl, a high-pitched yawp, or an unleavened spitting-that-real rhythm.

The sound is raw, but the hooks are built for hollering at shows, twisted fingers optional. “That’s Norf” is a big-glock battle cry built for blood walking, but what makes Rucci special is his gift for conjuring songs like the tear-jerking but triumphant “Bodak Rucci.” The freestyled finale from last year’s El Perro starts with revelations of familial substance abuse before Rucci offers a bone-chilling confession about seeing his first dead body at age six. Many rappers have made similar admissions, but few would follow it up with visions of watching his father wipe off his brand-new shotgun. Or his uncle numbly explaining the need for self-defense to the first grader (“They was out of bounds, plus they don’t really like your daddy”). Rucci hears their laughter, calls them stone-cold killers and calmly goes back to sleep as though nothing happened.

“He raps about what he’s been through growing up over there,” says Big Tako. It’s not easy to get Tako on the phone. Real gangsters rarely do interviews and his reputation precedes him. He’s an outlaw shrouded in mystery and street lore. A rare triple-certified O.G. from his generation who remains alive, free, and without dirt on his name.

“Back then, gangsterism was at its peak,” Tako explains. “He saw a lot of things, but he also understands the concept of right and wrong. He stayed out of stupid shit, but knows that he represents Inglewood… where his family is from… the culture and history of what we represent.”

It’s something much more deeply rooted than an address. For much of his childhood, Rucci’s father cycled in and out of prison.

In an effort to protect her son from the chaos of the North, Rucci’s mother ensured that he went to Hawthorne elementary schools. He was extremely close to her and his stepfather, but ultimately, the siren lure of Beach Avenue remained too strong. Midget couldn’t help but want to be in the mix.

When it came time for high school, Rucci’s mother wisely sent him away, this time to Santa Monica, where he followed his older sister, an all-state softball player. It wasn’t like he was welcome in Inglewood anyway; his father’s reputation with school administrators was so bad that Rucci claims he was preemptively banned from enrolling. So the younger Martinez went from Beach to Ocean Avenue, which only sounds inconsequential if you’ve never been to L.A.. The project baby was suddenly playing defensive line on the well-funded football team, attending proms in lavish oceanfront hotels, befriended by rich kids. In the hopes that he’d stay out of trouble, his mom gave him $50 a day. Sometimes, he’d skip school and hang out at the Promenade or just take the Big Blue Bus up north past Montana to see what life was like among the real housewives of Brentwood.

“I had a bunch of white and Persian friends,” Rucci says, beaming. “Moms with fake titties in huge houses, not even tripping that we weren’t at school. It was like a movie.”

But the film’s first act ended abruptly in 2010. By then, Rucci’s grandmother had moved from Beach to nearby Victor Avenue, but trouble still followed. The Piru’s turned the new home into the second projects (“PS2”). With the NFL eyeing relocation and real-estate developers circling, the Inglewood police ratcheted up the injunctions and the intensity. Early one morning, a SWAT team ransacked his grandmother’s place, arresting Rucci’s father, uncle and several other NHP members on attempted murder charges. Rucci watched the handcuffs go on and heard the police sirens vanish in the distance.

This was around the time SaMo expelled the future hometown hero for carrying a gun to school. A day earlier, members of Santa Monica 13, a Sureño gang known as the Treces, had jumped him.

“The next day I saw them in the hallway and showed them the gun,” Rucci says. “I wasn’t gonna’ do nuthin’, but they told on me anyway.”

Meanwhile, his father, facing the traps of the system, copped a plea deal for five years in the penitentiary. Dead set on proving his innocence, Rucci’s uncle — the good son with no priors — took the case to trial. But this is America. Unless you can afford Johnnie Cochran’s holy ghost, good luck trying to beat a murder rap when you’re covered in tattoos and the prosecutors tar you as a sociopathic menace. The judge condemned him to 35-years-to-life, a state prison sentence that Rucci’s uncle still serves in Lancaster. In Inglewood, from that moment on, everything started to change.

For as long as anyone could remember, Inglewood was the red-bandanna’d stepchild to South Central and Compton. Outside the City of Champions, people really only knew Mack 10, the chicken hawk stomping from the Queen Street Bloods, longtime allies of NHP. On his debut single “Foe Life,” he boasted about putting “Inglewood on the map,” which he attempted to make a reality with his own Hoo-Bangin’ Records. His artists, Allfrumtha I and the Road Dawgs, earned local love, but little more. Later, the Westside Connection alum briefly signed to Cash Money, solidifying Birdman and Lil Wayne’s alliance with the Bloods.

Inglewood’s rap moment never materialized. Compton sustained its iron grip with The Game, somehow the only star to emerge from the land south of the 10 Freeway during the ‘00s. With many ‘90s gangbangers dead or in jail, a new generation emerged. Black and Latinx teenagers ditched low riders, Chucks and size XXL Dickies for skateboards, Vans and jerking. You might catch a Tec in their skinny jeans, but the hustle had evolved.

In the waning years of the last decade, rap group U-N-I earned heavy blog buzz and toured nationally but got lumped into the passing hipster rap fad and dissolved. There was 2Eleven, whose street cred was unimpeachable, but who got lost in the quagmire of Jeezy’s CTE imprint. The all-female jerk-rap quintet, Pink Dollaz, produced some of the best singles of the Myspace era, but never signed to a major. Skeme collaborated with TDE, ghost-wrote for Iggy Azalea, and built a sterling reputation, but never became a national phenomenon. Out of nowhere, the flamboyant FRosTydaSnowMann set the city on fire with a few 2016 singles, but quickly vanished into the Los Angeles County jail system. Amateur Twitter A&Rs often forget that rap is an inherently regional art form. In the clout-scrambled calculus of first week sales and streaming numbers, no Rap Caviar placement can match the respect of the blocks that raised you (although it might allow you to afford a house in the hills). Local legends are legends nonetheless. But you can’t ignore that Mack 10 is the only Inglewood rapper with a platinum plaque — which was all supposed to change with Sean Mackk.

“He was our 2Pac,” Rucci says about his former rap partner. “That was my big bro. He was the best scammer in the world, always coming around with these big-ass Cuban [link chains] on… fresh as fuck always…. always with 10 bands or more in his pocket.”

We’re inside 2Eleven’s Level Up store on Centinela, which everyone around here just calls “the Nela.” It’s a small streetwear boutique adjacent to a dry cleaners and a soul food restaurant. In the store window, there’s a mannequin in a tracksuit and a “Grind Till We Rich” jersey. Inglewood hats are next to “Bitch Relax” T-shirts and apparel from the Norf Clothing line that Mackk co-founded.

Rucci resembles a distant cousin of one of his original heroes, Bizzy Bone — his wavy hair pulled tight in a ponytail, beard and mustache carefully clipped. He wears a white and red Norf thermal and navy blue shorts. Crucifix earrings stud his ears, matching a cross tattoo on his left cheek. A tiny heartbreak symbol and a paw print linger next to his right eye.

The door is open and during a pause in the conversation, a man in a Panama hat loudly yells into his phone: “I’m from Detroit, baby, I know all about fish bones.”

Walking up to the mini-mall from the Centinela side, a narrow vertical banner advertises obituaries. Around the corner, a storefront next to Level Up has black and white obituary pamphlets scotch-taped inside a glass case. Teenagers martyred for causes that appear senseless and alien to outsiders, but depressingly familiar around here. Business doesn’t seem booming, but you don’t see these spots in Bel-Air either.

This corner was a safe haven to collectively mourn the tragedy of July 7, 2017. Early that morning, Sean Mackk was shot dead on an Inglewood cul-de-sac – an end like Mitch in Paid in Full. The flashy hustler, allegedly double-crossed by those close to him, dead at 24. No arrests made. “Sean was a leader to all the young homies,” 2Eleven says solemnly. “Always popular… getting all the girls. If someone asked who was who, you’d have pointed to him.”

Rucci and Mackk dropped solo music separately, but their lone MackkRucci album established them as the most ferocious L.A. rap duo since Tha Dogg Pound. Cameos came from nascent South Central stars G Perico, Drakeo and AzSwaye and a SuWoop Justice League of Joe Moses, 2Eleven and FreeAckrite. MackkRucci attacked like a two-headed Cerberus unchained, barking bloodthirsty murder raps over sinister minor chords that sounded like they were played with a scythe. Think Boosie and Webbie if you swapped out Waffle House for Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles.

Destiny doesn’t exist but inevitability does. Rucci and Mackk first met when the latter got put on the hood in Tako’s backyard around the time that “Wipe Me Down” dropped. A year older than Rucci, Mackk moved fast for his age. At 15, the Inglewood native was incarcerated in the same gang sweep that locked up Tako and his brother. After a short bid, Mackk, the son of “Getto Jam” rapper Domino, spent a year on the road as an affiliate of Waka Flocka’s West Coast Brick Squad. When he was finally back home, he reunited with Rucci, who had just taken his rap name to honor a paralyzed O.G. rolling around in garish wheelchair rims.

“I’ll never forget the first time Sean brought him into a session and I was like, ‘Oh nah, his dad is gonna call us out,’” 2Eleven says, laughing. “Rucci went the fuck off, and usually Sean was the type of nigga try to take over the session. He’s like, ‘This nigga’s name is Rucci.’ I was like, ‘No! His name is Midget!’”

“My dad used to get mad at me because I’d be hanging out with his homies, but I was always like, ‘These are my friends!’” Rucci counters. “All of us grew up together.”

For the last four years of his life, Mackk and Rucci were practically inseparable – a studio chemistry that could only come from fraternal kinship. For a while, they lived in a MackkRucci mansion in Westchester. If Mackk went out of town to hustle, they’d talk on the phone multiple times a day, right up until the very end.

“Even now, over a year later, I swear to god, I still don’t believe he’s gone,” Rucci shakes his head. “He used to be out of town all the time. I always feel like he’s about to call me and be like, ‘What are you doing?’”

Rucci’s creation myth begins when his father and uncle were taken from him. After the targeted killing of his surrogate brother, he became the Jon Snow of the other North, out for vengeance, governed by honor. The story might start with Beach Avenue, but Rucci always ends every interview with the same answer. Ask him if there’s anything that he wants to add and he’ll inevitably reply, “Sean Mackk forever.”

The cops have known Rucci since he was a baby, but that doesn’t mean that they’re friendly. They’ve memorized all his rap lyrics, but that doesn’t mean that they’re fans. Rogers Park is different now. Panoptic cameras survey almost the entire nine acres, including the baseball field and the basketball courts. There’s even a skate ramp where a white dude with dreads does a frontside 180 while a sleeveless bro walks a golden retriever past. In the ‘90s, both would’ve been terrified to head even a block south of Hollywood Park (RIP). But some things will never change. Rucci has just finished explaining why he rarely comes here anymore when, as if on cue, an Inglewood PD squad car slowly cruises into the parking lot where Rucci and a half-dozen friends are talking to the photographer and me. Had they arrived three minutes earlier, there might have been a major problem. For the purposes of high art, Rucci has been posing underneath the “No Smoking” sign, ripping the matte black plastic bong that he never leaves home without. It started as a way to conserve weed during times of scarcity, but now it’s evolved into aesthetic necessity. The police do not usually agree. The days of hanging out in the park without police persecution are long gone. Last month, they asked for his ID, snapped it in two and handed it back in pieces. No reason given.

“As soon as the police see me they’re going to start rapping my lyrics and throwing up a B,” Rucci sighs. “They’ll look out the window and say ‘Neighbors!’ If we say anything back to them, they’ll stop and get out. If we say nothing, they’ll keep driving.”

“Damn, they got the runner with them,” someone behind me says, as he points out the third police officer lurking in the backseat. “That’s when they bring a guy in the back to chase one of us down if we run away. Motherfucker looks like he be running marathons and shit.” The cops couldn’t look more out of central casting if they tried. The pair in the front seat sport sandy-brown mustaches and eyes like burnt quartz that make them look like pallbearers at Daryl Gates’ funeral. The runner looks like he owns every season of Cops on DVD.

I’d bet on Simi Valley home addresses for all three. Everyone looks around at each other, attempting to figure out the best plan of action. Wordlessly, confidently, Rucci strides over.

“They assholes,” someone mutters quietly. Everyone alternates between staring at their phones and monitoring the situation. If Rucci can’t defuse it, they’ll start searching us and none of this ends well.

This time it ends well.

“Man I’m the savior over here… they like me” Rucci says, half-sarcastic, but with a game-winning, buzzer-beater smile, as the cops leisurely exit the lot. Everyone congratulates him. “I swear to god, I’m Norf!” he crows.

“They was waiting for someone to run, too,” someone chimes in. “I ain’t gonna lie… if you run towards me I’m going to run away from you. Natural instinct nigga, you just go!”

“They’re looking for people that they don’t like,” another bystander says. “If they saw one of them, it would be over.”

“You probably saved us,” Natural Instinct tells the photographer. “They saw those cameras and don’t want no problems with the camera rolling.” Someone tells Rucci that they’re going to eat at Chili’s. He tells them to hold up for a minute. There’s still more left to say.

Winter is coming but it’s still hot out here. The adjective has been used multiple times this afternoon and it’s no weather reference. The war with the Treces rages unabated and it’s wise to keep a low profile.

“I didn’t ask for this shit.” Rucci flashes a resigned look. “My mom gets mad at me sometimes because I can’t go a lot of places with her, but I’m like, ‘It’s not because of the music! It’s because there are people who don’t like me.’”

These are the realities of being a North Side baby. The allegiances are generational and irrevocable; the consequences of betrayal are lethal. Peace might take hold, but it hasn’t yet. No margin of error exists when the other side is heavily strapped and you’re a prime target. And at this point, Rucci can’t afford to fail. He isn’t merely doing it for himself.

He’s doing it for the whole North, the team that surrounds him, the soil that raised him and those spirits at rest. Sean Mackk forever.

There are those still breathing, but scattered to the winds. Rucci’s uncle may spend the rest of his life locked up for a crime that he swears he didn’t commit. About a week after Mackk’s murder, Rucci’s brother Angel was shot in the head – but somehow survived. To complete this season in hell, ICE agents swarmed Big Tako’s house earlier this year and hauled him off to El Salvador — a country that he hadn’t visited since his childhood.

This is California, but the draconian policies of the Trump administration are everywhere. Tako, a legal American resident, tried to fight the deportation order, but as a convicted felon, his options were limited. As soon as he touched down in San Salvador, his troubles only multiplied. There are no Pirus there, just MS-13 and 18th Street, L.A. gangs re-formed by those condemned to a nation that they never knew. They start recruiting new members as soon as the bus pulls into the station, and you know they don’t take kindly to Salvadorans repping the wrong side.

“I have black gang tattoos, so as soon as I got there, the MS-13 and the 18s tried to kill me,” Tako says by phone. “It’s murderous. You look down the block and you just see death.”

After 30 days, Tako fled in search of refuge, traveling north through Mexico, winding up in Tijuana. He’s selling insurance now for Allstate, living close to the beach. There are worse outcomes, of course, but he’s barred from returning to America, where his children and entire family still reside.

“I’ve been shot, I’ve been in prison. I lived that life and escaped without getting killed, life in jail, or having smut on my name,” Tako adds. “My son looks at all these things and raps about it. It makes me feel good, even though I was portraying something that was wrong.”

If Tako is ever allowed – or able – to return, Rogers Park won’t even remotely be the same. They probably won’t be selling Moon Juice on Centinela anytime soon, but art galleries keep popping up on the perimeter of the set. Rents are growing exponentially.

In 2020, the Rams and Chargers start playing in Los Angeles Stadium at Hollywood Park, a $5 billion development that arrives with an 8.5-million-square-foot entertainment center for business parks and condos. There’s going to be a 6,000-seat music venue, ballrooms, an outdoor movie screen, a lake with a water fountain, a luxury hotel, casino and an upscale shopping center. That’s Norf?

“The cops keep telling me, ‘The Bloods gonna be gone!’” Rucci says, his smile still bright and fixed. “I be like, ‘We gonna have a house party with the white people. I’m going to be at the Rams games with ‘em!’”

In the interim, Inglewood is still Inglewood. A short scrunched-face guy in a red “Dam-U-niversity” shirt walks up to Rucci, greeting him, filming him for his Instagram Story.

“You see what’s going on homie… what up Rucci, Norf… you know what time it is Blood… Woop woop… We in Rogers putting on for the city.” Rucci throws up the set for the camera and keeps talking. There is a certain preternatural wisdom to him, the sort that you can only get from seeing too much too young, and recognizing the ability to separate what’s crucial from what’s mere posturing. He’s a natural peacemaker, handling the politics between sides, carefully navigating the myriad sects and affiliations of L.A. gangsta rap – a labyrinth unto itself, but one Rucci was born into and seems destined to conquer.

If Rucci writes songs that transcend the regional vortex of Southern California gangsta rap, everything figures to fall into place. Hood politics have forced him to be around here less, but his career has begun to ignite nationally. He recently completed a U.S. tour with Shoreline Mafia and followed it up with spot dates up and down the West Coast. He played Rolling Loud too. Over the last 13 months, he’s released four projects (three solo, one in collaboration with 1TakeJay and AzChike), with more on the way. The labels keep calling, but no deal is yet in place. If you ask those close to him, they’ll tell you that something changed in Rucci when Sean Mackk died. No one wants to lapse into spiritual clichés, but the gist is that Rucci absorbed an even greater intensity, an awareness that he has to make it for both of them now. He’s become equally adept at writing fun party slappers and ferocious pain rap dirges, gangsta rap indebted to history but hounded by the demons of the present.

In person, he’s sanguine, determined not to let his enemies get him down. He still dreams about Sean Mackk all the time, but insists that what’s most important is staying positive – never letting anyone think for a second that he can’t cope. He didn’t survive all this just to lose.

“I’m just here to put my name in the pavement, bro,” Rucci says, his voice rising above the din of the airplanes on their flight path to LAX. “It’s about being different and confident and real,” he adds. “I’m doing it for everybody around me and I want to let people know that I’m here to stay. Of course it’s on me to keep growing and to get there, but I got so much confidence in myself.”

His last syllables linger like a smoke ring. Silence screams for a few seconds, until someone mentions Chili’s again. Time to go eat. Goodbyes are exchanged, daps, pounds, etc. And as soon as Rucci and his crew get in the car to leave, the cops pull into the parking lot. Back like they never left.

The post King of the Norf appeared first on theLAnd.

Chinatown is gentrifying, and with wealthier Chinese immigrants overwhelmingly choosing the suburban comforts of the San Gabriel Valley, centuries-old customs like mahjong feel incongruous in an enclave awash with art galleries and stylish restaurants. Middleton – a Pasadena native and modern funk innovator of Hawaiian extraction – is keenly aware of his place in the shifting cosmology of Chinatown.

“I have to stop and check myself, like ‘Am I behaving like a gentrifier?’” says the producer and label owner, whose record shop, Salt Box Records, replaced a travel agency in July 2017. “I think one of the most important things to not be that person is to interact with the community that’s already here. Even though the shop’s been open for over a year, I’m still a guest in a lot of ways. All those guys at those tables, playing mahjong, they’ve been here and I think it’s important to respect that.”

Middleton, who had long dreamt of opening a record store in Chinatown, isn’t the first musician to be smitten with the neighborhood’s kitsch and arcana. In the late 1970s and early ‘80s, rival nightclubs situated across from each other on Gin Ling Way, Madam Wong’s and the Hong Kong Café, hosted scores of influential punk, hardcore and New Wave bands.

Between 1998 and 2009, ethnically diverse, like-minded DJ’s and visual artists gathered at Grand Star Restaurant for Firecracker, confusingly held on the first, third and fifth Friday of every month. For several years in the early 2010s, the Beat Swap Meet — a dude-ly assembly of vinyl obsessives — was held in the shadow of Central Plaza’s Bruce Lee statue. Each generation of hip Angelenos is charmed anew by Chinatown’s cramped alleyways, curling pagodas and bobbing paper lanterns because, in a city defined by ravenous newness, time has afforded the neighborhood a comforting historicity.

“The thought of writing whole verses that were just sung and not rapped –– when you come from a hip-hop background that feels like such a big jump,” Middleton says. “Especially coming from the ‘90s era […]  It took some time, having songs in the vault. I had to be content with ‘Maybe I’m never going to put this out, but it’s a stepping-stone to something that’s going to be better.’”

Middleton’s music satisfies these same desires. His work is a bright Southland amalgam of boogie’s squiggly synthesizers, funk’s lusty slap-bass bump, and G-funk’s unyielding hydraulic bounce. It sounds like: the giddy chatter of springtime’s first barbecue; a pungent sidewalk weed waft of unknowable provenance; a dramatic purple-orange dusk revealing itself as you crest Sunset Boulevard; the odd and ambient melancholia of trying to live in Los Angeles, a denuded and dehydrated should-have-been paradise. It was in modern funk that Middleton (who spent his childhood playing Scott Joplin’s ragtime compositions and most of his adulthood producing for rappers) found himself.

“The thought of writing whole verses that were just sung and not rapped –– when you come from a hip-hop background that feels like such a big jump,” Middleton says. “Especially coming from the ‘90s era […]  It took some time, having songs in the vault. I had to be content with ‘Maybe I’m never going to put this out, but it’s a stepping-stone to something that’s going to be better.’”

It was his discovery of modern funk creator Dam-Funk that led Middleton, who’d long associated “nightlife” with the soulless bacchanalia of Hollywood nightclubs, to Funkmosphere. During its 11-year run, Dam-Funk’s Funkmosphere was an unpretentious, eminently groovable weekly gathering of synth-funk devotees. There were unselfconscious pop-locking dance circles, slow-vibing oldheads, and, just once, Faith Evans in a KISS T-shirt. It was where an idea conjured in Dam-Funk’s analog, gear-cluttered bedroom became real and where another Pasadena native, Eddy Funkster, DJ’ed.

Had a friend of Middleton’s not reached into the “Free” box at Pasadena’s Poo-Bah Records and grabbed an Eddy Funkster CD in 2011, modern funk might be drastically different. The erstwhile partnership between Middleton and Funkster was a driving force in the scene: their EP, XL Middleton + Eddy Funkster, is a modern funk standard and the label they co-founded, MoFunk Records, has released albums by talkboxing San Francisco polymath Diamond Ortiz, Pasadena songstress Moniquea and cocaine-dealer-turned-SpaceX employee Zackey Force Funk. (As of this writing, Funkster is no longer involved in MoFunk.)

“You can tell that he’s a sweetheart when you meet him,” Zackey says of Middleton in quick-clipped diction. “He’s got a good ear for different sounds of funk, and when it comes to boogie sounds he’s one of the best, if not the best. You can just see that everyone’s got their own style in modern funk – which is a great fuckin’ thing – but when it comes to cholo, boogie, lowrider funk, I think he’s doing it the best.”

Although Middleton prefers to work in isolation because, as he says, he has “little thought bubbles that get popped easily,” Moniquea, like Zackey Force Funk, has benefited from his exacting ear. But, unlike Zackey, who was initially loath to let Middleton edit his acapellas, Moniquea and Middleton’s process was less charged. With two albums largely produced by Middleton (Yes No Maybe and Blackwavefunk), Moniquea, who has the voice of a Jones Girl, has nearly a decade of experience working with Pasadena’s most amiable keyboardist.

“He’s very easy to work with. It probably stems from his general good-hearted nature. It’s fun […] We started working together at the end of 2010, early 2011, I kind of got used to his to his style and production early on,” Moniquea says. “That was something we learned together: what my vocals should be like.”

Middleton’s kindness seems to be infectious––the modern funk scene is less concerned with technical perfection or the cultivation of individual stardom than it is with openness, diversity and positivity. For artists like Middleton, Zackey Force Funk (who oversees the making of composites at SpaceX by day) and Moniquea (an office specialist and funding coordinator for City Councilman David Ryu), modern funk is a cooperative and spiritual pursuit.

“It’s a scene that’s actively trying to create space for people to come together and feel like they can be themselves,” Middleton says. “They say ‘funk is freedom’ and I believe that. I think that there’s something in the quirky synthesizer squiggle. When you hear a synth go bew-bew-dew-duh-nyew-nyew, that might make you feel kinda silly in a way. That might make you feel like busting a move on the dance floor that you might not do normally.”

Of all the available visions for Los Angeles, this is among the most harmonious. And from a bright yellow, red, and turquoise storefront, Middleton creates a space for it. One Sunday per month, a rotating cast of DJs sets up outside Salt Box Records and serenades Mei Ling Way’s curdled mahjong players with pastel synthesizers and roiling bass licks.

But where DJ and mahjong players bicker, there once sat Little Italy, where Apulians, Calabrians, and Sicilians wasted afternoons on Briscola, a card game likely taken from Dutch sailors. And, before provincial Chinese and Italians, there were fields riven by the zanjamadre, the aqueduct which brought water to the pueblo. And before the conquistadors, who arrived with a city grid copied from the Archive of the Indies in Seville, there were Tongva, with willow reed huts and morally ambiguous gods. And now XL Middleton, a beatific half-white, half-Hawaiian-Japanese funkster and record merchant.

The post Somewhere in the Middle appeared first on theLAnd.

A revolutionary thing occurs in writer/director Nijla Mu’min’s romantic teen drama Jinn. It’s a scene of utmost importance, urgency, and splendor. It’s something we’ve never seen before in mainstream cinema. And when you see what it is, you might be shocked that it’s taken this long to appear, because it’s so simple and elegant, but a statement all the same: A black Muslim girl quietly and happily reading the Quran in a typical American teenager’s bedroom.

American Muslims have had to combat stereotypes of terrorists in movies and television for so long that other issues of their representation often fall by the wayside. As advocates search to commit any positive depiction of Muslims to the screen, even the positive depictions sometimes fail to address gender and ethnic or racial diversity within the Muslim identity. Islam is, after all, the world’s fastest-growing religion. And nearly a third of U.S.-born Muslims are black. The lack of representation of black Muslim women was on Mu’min’s mind as she embarked on her feature debut. Jinn is a story about Summer (Zoe Renee), an African American girl who navigates friendships, romance and a troubled relationship with her mother as she begins to embrace Muslim teachings.

Mu’min’s been doing press tours throughout the film’s festival and theatrical run. (Jinn was released in theaters in November and is available now through VOD.) She says it’s been an overwhelming experience to watch people watch themselves on the screen, possibly for the first time ever. “I’ve seen people in tears, so full of joy and need,” she says, referencing that scene of Summer reading the Quran. “I thought that image alone is really unheard of, just to see a kid peacefully reading Islamic texts.”

Though Jinn is set in the Bay Area, where Mu’min grew up, she shot the majority of the film in Leimert Park, a South L.A. neighborhood that’s home to a vibrant middle-class black community. Much like Oakland, Leimert Park is also being transformed by development — including the forthcoming Metro Crenshaw light rail line, slated to open with a stop in Leimert Park later this year — and gentrification, spurred in part by a wave of white homebuyers. African Americans, who once comprised 84 percent of the population, now account for 70 percent of Leimert Park residents.

Mu’min lived in Leimert Park from 2012 to 2014, when she moved to Los Angeles to study film at CalArts. School was a 40-mile commute, but it was important to her that she live in a neighborhood that most resembled the artistic, intellectual and mixed-economic makeup of Oakland.

When it came time to film Jinn, she felt a deep need to document Leimert as it is now, with happy black people just riding their bikes, taking walks and being themselves in public, together.

“The history of black artists in Leimert Park is so rich, and with my film being about a young black girl who’s going to be a dancer and wants to be an artist, that fits into this community where that legacy already exists,” she says.

But shooting in Leimert Park isn’t the norm for many films, because so many movies featuring African American characters focus specifically on those of a lower socioeconomic class. Mu’min wanted to do something different. “Black characters are often up against poverty or drugs or very harsh circumstances, which is true to a lot of people, but with this story I thought it more important to honor the themes around religion and sexuality and finding yourself,” Mu’min says. “I found that this is such a new thing for writers or critics to see a black story that’s not concerned with those tropes of blackness and struggle.”

Over and over again, she heard the same comparison: Gina Prince-Bythewood’s Love & Basketball (2000). Mu’min loves that people are putting her film in the same class with Prince-Bythewood’s. But it’s also been 18 years since the release of Love & Basketball, which had Mu’min wondering why it’s taken that long for a black artist to be embraced for making a coming-of-age romantic drama.

“Certain black stories can be more palatable to some audiences when they have that edge of hardship in them,” Mu’min says.

“Someone called my film ‘cute’ and that irked me.”

Mu’min’s assessments in that regard aren’t wrong. One only has to look to the black cinema of 1991, which saw the premieres of both Julie Dash’s feminine utopic fantasy Daughters of the Dust alongside John Singleton’s class- and male-focused Boyz n the Hood.

Though Dash’s film is enjoying its own renaissance today, it still lost out in awards, distribution and popular culture to what Mu’min calls “edge of hardship,” which earned Singleton an Oscar nomination. And when dealing with Muslim African American characters specifically, film tends to be more on the muscular side, too — think Spike Lee’s Malcolm X and Michael Mann’s Ali.

Just because Mu’min’s film features a lighter storyline doesn’t mean it’s devoid of drama or tension, or that she paints Islam with some kind of rainbow brush. She also lightly interrogates her own community.

“When you’re black and Muslim and maybe an immigrant, you don’t want to liken yourself to any of the negative stereotypes. There’s already enough you have to go through,” Mu’min says. “But as a lot of Muslims know, not everyone is perfect.” She was intentional about complicating her characters, not making them limp, dull projections of perfection but rather whole humans who at times err and correct themselves. It worried her at first how black Muslims would see those characters, like the lightly misogynist imam who everyone rolls their eyes at until the community has to come together to set him on a better course.

To her surprise, she watched audience after audience laugh at those moments and imperfect characters, perhaps locating a few of their own flaws on screen and finally being able to let out a sigh of relief. That’s only steeled Mu’min’s resolve to commit the communities she knows so well to film.

“It’s our role as artists,” she says. “We have to get away from making safe portrayals.”

The post Love & Leimert appeared first on theLAnd.

Our homelessness crisis continues to spiral. A UN report recently compared Skid Row’s conditions to a Syrian refugee camp, while those living in ramshackle tents have repeatedly complained that city sweeps have left them bereft of their already meager possessions. Despite the advocacy of several members of the City Council, Garcetti has resisted declaring L.A. a “sanctuary city,” fatuously claiming that he doesn’t even understand the meaning of the term. He’s stayed silent while immigrants in Lincoln Heights — attempting to drop off their children at school — have been thrown against their car, handcuffed and deported by ICE agents.

Traffic? It’s been named the world’s worst during each of Garcetti’s half-dozen years at the helm (according to INRIX). And even if that’s a concern often championed by right-wing NIMBY gadflies, it remains a maddening quality-of-life issue that affects nearly all working Angelenos. (The guy could at least go hard to add more left-turn arrows or something). Meanwhile, rent prices have increased exponentially and nearly every corner of the city has sprouted luxury condos that shoo long-time residents to the outskirts of the county. Oh, and that doesn’t even get into the FBI-led corruption probe that’s threatening to ensnare current and former members of the Garcetti administration, including his former deputy mayor for economic development.

It would stand to reason that a major city’s media-savvy mayor would at least feign grave concern. And yet ours has spent an ungodly portion of his time in office traveling away from Los Angeles, racking up hundreds of thousands of dollars in security costs paid by taxpayers, as he sustains his forever war for higher office––a war he’s eventually bound to lose. Until very recently, City Hall rumors alleged that his grand scheme was to run for president in order to build statewide name recognition, and then eventually swoop in to take Dianne Feinstein’s Senate seat. Instead, he stoked a false “will he or won’t he” campaign to garner fawning GQ and Rolling Stone coverage before bowing out of a race that he had a 0.0 percent chance of winning. The soulless bet-hedging seemingly explains his reluctance to declare L.A. a “sanctuary city” — as part of a broader plot to win a jungle primary by convincing Bakersfield residents that he’s the “sane and centrist” Democrat.

Of course, being apoplectic at politicians angling for a promotion is like being angry at the sun. But that doesn’t mean that he has the right to hold L.A. hostage while chasing his dream of playing Beethoven on a special celebrity edition of America’s Got Talent. Neither a lack of concrete civic progress nor a failure to stick as a national political darling is surprising on its own, but even the most cynical and/or charmless politicians can usually trade one for the other. It’s like Garcetti’s getting ripped off by Faust. It would be tempting to call him the Drake of mayors––slick and empty, focus-grouped and too big to fail, desperate to be something to everyone––but at least Drake has convinced tens of millions of people that he’s Cool and Fun and Real. Garcetti struggles to convince Jimmy Fallon. Whether he’s truly, in the depths of his marrow, devoid of courage, substance, or the willingness to risk alienating anyone comes secondary to the fact that he’s failed to convincingly mime those things, in office or on basic cable. He’s the embodiment of neo-liberal vacancy: nominally progressive but always kowtowing to business, pro-immigrant in public but cozy with ICE. He is friends with Steve Aoki.

In November, Rolling Stone published an email that contained a campaign track called “Ready for Garcetti,” which features lyrics predominantly in Spanish. It tells the tale of an L.A. mayor who cares deeply about Latinx and immigrant groups; the press blast hails it as a “an urban latino beat song.” (It was completely scraped from the Internet following Garcetti’s Tuesday announcement that he’s not, in fact, ready for the presidency. Seriously, we looked for it.)

Garcetti was assuredly not programmed in a subterranean government research facility designed to create politicians whose chief erotic fantasy is playing themselves on TNT procedural dramas. No sir. Take the time that he said “fuck” at the Kings Stanley Cup victory celebration while totally normally sipping a Bud Light from what he definitely does not call “mouth holes,” and telling the crowd that the only rules in politics are “never be pictured with a drink in your hand, and never swear.” That’s like claiming you’re about to ditch school, but making sure you ask your parents first.

He reads as someone who has wanted to be president since the second grade, which is not a crime, but also does not confer on anyone the wisdom, vision or grit required to be an effective one. There’s a sense of entitlement that can only come from someone for whom politics is the family business. The winds of public opinion in Los Angeles are not hard to read, but he has told crowds of protestors aghast at the concentration camps massed at the U.S. border that we should let ICE “do its job.” Even though he gives droning speeches on homelessness, his political M.O. has been to cow to the interests of wealthy homeowners and developers. He’s a major cheerleader for gentrification-fueling real estate projects and has taken plenty of money from development moguls, telecom CEOs, Harvey Weinstein, oil lobbyists and Wal-Mart, which only pours fuel on to the fire that is burning down our affordable housing infrastructure.

His greatest success as mayor might be something that he would describe as a failure: his inability to woo Amazon’s HQ2, which would’ve decimated the creative class, public sector and the working poor, who would’ve been forced to move further and further into the distant suburbs (a phenomenon which, on top of being horrifying on the surface, creates even more traffic and pollution, becoming a public health hazard and decimating our quality of life). Garcetti claims Google’s takeover of the Westside Pavilion as a personal victory, while failing to offset it with the civic planning that would allow for regular working people to live side-by-side with the computers. He’s co-signed the Lyle Lanley gimmicks of Elon Musk with such credulousness that he probably will lavish him with tax breaks and insist that they do a duet of “The Monorail Song.”

When the Los Angeles Times was being plundered by out-of-town grifters actively destroying the city’s most vital news source, he didn’t say a word until after Patrick Soon-Shiong saved them in the 11^th Hour. When a cabal of right-wing operatives destroyed the LA Weekly (RIP), Garcetti didn’t as much as yawn, unless he was yawning in Des Moines. As the Los Angeles Teachers Union went on strike, Garcetti failed to help avert it, perhaps because the superintendent of LAUSD is his ultra-rich, investment banker crony and former deputy mayor, Austin Beutner. To be fair, Garcetti offered to help mediate between the UTLA and LAUSD, but both sides declined — a sad commentary on his lack of engagement, credibility and negotiating power. (Once it became a national issue and obvious black mark on his presidential ambitions, he finally stepped into the fray in the full force-but-somehow-tepid Garcetti way.)

In his defense, there is hope for the city’s near future. Garcetti has three major accomplishments to his name: he raised the city’s minimum wage; he campaigned hard for Measure M, a sales tax increase which funds transportation projects including a rail line to LAX, a subway under Sepulveda, and money for sidewalk improvements and pothole repairs; and he helped pass Measure HHH, and the Bridge Home initiative, which should help those without housing and those struggling to stay afloat. But even in the face of a nominal success, Garcetti has somehow managed to flounder. Astronomical development costs have nearly halved the number of homeless and affordable housing units that HHH promised to build, shrinking the count from 10,000 to 6,000. And even though the money is there, he’s struggled to break ground on anything.

By allowing L.A.’s transportation, affordable housing and homelessness problems to spiral to catastrophic inflection points, he has failed the city. By failing to regularly be in Los Angeles, he has abdicated his duty to its citizens and deprived them of a potentially effective mayor who might have solved, or at least curbed these myriad crises.The sense of urgency is simply not there. Which is why it’s so astonishing that Garcetti would have the gall to tout himself as a “fix-it” mayor capable of mending America’s deep rifts and systemic inequalities, when he can’t even fix the problems in his backyard. Maybe now that he doesn’t want to be the president, he can start being the Mayor.

The post The Mayor <br>Who Wasn’t <br>There appeared first on theLAnd.

It’s Saturday afternoon on Marmion Way and Avenue 56 in Highland Park, and the smell of peeled shrimp and chiltepin chiles searing on a hot plancha perfumes the air. The ferocious picking of a 12-string guitar echoes through the intersection. A young man sings his heart out in Spanish, backed by a fast-paced Mexican polka beat heard through a speaker in a backyard. “En toditos los lugares, siempre lo miran pasar, disfrutando de la vida … el Angelino-Culiacán. Dicen que hay que confiar el guero, pero es mejor no confiar. Nunca olvides de donde vienes, aunque sepas a dónde vas.”

They are lyrics to an original corrido by Los Muchachos de Dena, a four-piece band made up of two Guatemalan American brothers and two Mexican Americans. Two of them are 18 and the other two are in their early 20s.

They all grew up in Highland Park and perform in backyards and the occasional Mexican seafood restaurant that doubles as a venue for this particular genre of regional Mexican folk music, which has exploded in popularity over the last decade on both sides of the border thanks to a wave of new young bands from Southern California like Los Muchachos that are bringing their own bicultural experiences to bear on a style that, up until recently, was only celebrated in the coastal Mexican state of Sinaloa.

In English, the lyrics to this self-titled song, “El Muchacho de [Pasa]Dena,” read like a poem, rife with references to a coming-of-aging spent in a neighborhood that has undergone as many changes as quickly as Highland Park.

“You’ll always see him walking by everywhere enjoying life… The Angeleno-Culiacán.

They say we should trust the white man, but it’s better to not give away your trust. Never forget where you come from, even if you know where you are going.”

While this song’s lyrics are focused on more of the storytelling side of this genre, corridos Sinaloenses have a lot more in common with hip-hop than anything else. They chronicle a life of gangs, drugs, cars, women and violence.

However, there is one thing that distinguishes the two raw genres of music: mariscos.

Aguachile, ceviche, coctel de camarón and oysters have become status foods. They’re the lifeblood of this flashy genre of music. Preferably, they’re paired with buckets full of ice-cold Mexican beer and bottles of Buchanan’s blended Scotch whisky  — which, thanks to corrido rock stars who sing about it and chug it straight from the bottle in music videos (like Patrón or Hennessy in rap), have become the genre’s official liquor.

“El Muchacho de [Pasa]Dena” is a ballad modeled on Aresvi Ibañez, the 24-year-old frontman, who was born in Mazatlan, Sinaloa, and moved to Highland Park with his mother, Ana Victoria Ibañez, when he was 10 years old.

He is performing for a family gathering. There are at least 20 pounds of pristine Pacific shrimp for the grill, Sinaloa-style shrimp ceviche (made with bigger cuts instead of the mulched-up shrimp you see in most ceviche spots in the city), a big pot of shell-on shrimp soup, at least a hundred ice-cold Tecates and a couple bottles of Buchanan’s.

One of Aresvi’s uncles grabs a handful of raw shrimp and puts it on a plate. He then takes out his pocket knife, cuts up some serrano chiles and limes, grabs a handful of rock salt and creates a makeshift aguachile (a spicier variation of ceviche) as effortlessly as someone would assemble a ham-and-cheese sandwich in the States.

When I ask about his boss-level seafood literacy, Aresvi’s uncle responds, “I grew up next to a shrimp farm in Mazatlan, and as a child I used to buy five pesos worth of dog food, throw it in the tank so that all the fresh shrimp would jump out of the water, and then use my sombrero to catch as many as I could at a time for dinner.”  

“When you’re from Mazatlan, mariscos is a part of you,” he tells me. This loud, proud and seafood-based way of celebrating life is the quintessential Sinaloan-Angeleno experience, something that this family continues to do both in their leisure time and at their family-run mariscos food truck, Mariscos El Faro, that sets up a mile north, in front of the Highland Park Recreation Center.

Despite the hot yoga studio and the $70-an-hour bowling alley that has transformed this part of Figueroa Street into a destination neighborhood, this unassuming food truck is putting out some of the best ceviche in L.A. “When listening to corridos, eating mariscos is the next best thing to being at the beach,” says Aresvi as he stuffs his face with an off-menu dish at Mariscos El Faro: a bed of Cheetos with a couple of heaping scoops of their fish and shrimp ceviches on top.

“The community has changed a lot in these last five years. It’s gone from mostly Latino to a lot of Americans who came out of nowhere,” Ana Victoria shares with me in Spanish back at the truck. “But the good thing is that everyone loves our [food], no matter the background.” This is mostly thanks to Ana Victoria’s partner, Noel Rayos, and his flavor-bomb interpretations of Sinaloan classics like callo de lobina, a ceviche made from salt-cured sea bass in inch-thick, sashimi-like slices, and empanadas de camarón, crispy masa turnovers filled with shrimp and served with electrically hot dried chiltepin chile salsa brought from Rayos’ hometown of Badiraguato, Sinaloa, where El Chapo is also from.

Like any other full-blooded Sinaloan, Aresvi has eaten mariscos almost every day since he was a child and has many seafood-based stories of growing up in Mazatlan. “I remember my uncle used to shuck fresh clams and feed it to me when I was just a little kid,” he says very humbly.

“I’m giving myself five more years doing this,” Aresvi says, clearing his sinuses in reaction to the fierce level of chiles in his custom ceviche. “If I don’t make it big, I’m going to go back to school and try something else.”

He and his band have big dreams of getting signed to Rancho Humilde or DEL Records, the two main labels that have minted other Modern Corrido hitmakers from the Southern California area including El De La Guitarra, Fuerza Regida and Arsenal Efectivo. El De La Guitarra’s hit “A Lo Lejos Me Veran” has over 72 million views on YouTube; Fuerza Regida has 56 million views for their anthem “Radicamos en South Central,” which celebrates being from South Los Angeles; and Arsenal Efectivo has nearly 9 million on their music video for “Lolo Felix” featuring low riders, palm trees and scantily-clad women.

According to Aresvi, what separates traditional corridos Sinaloenses and this new school of Southern California-based corridos is California’s weed culture. “Weed combined with corridos popped the fuck off,” he says. “They call them corridos verdes [green].”

In just three years of being together, and even with half of the band being underage, Los Muchachos de Dena has 17 original songs and is booked for parties almost every weekend. They charge $400 an hour, and if you want them to compose a custom song honoring you, they charge $2,000 for that.

This is a feat to admire in the extremely competitive scene in L.A. County, where hundreds of live corrido bands are all fighting for the same dream. Although, the band’s quick rise hasn’t came without risk. Aresvi will tell you about the crazy situations his music has gotten him into, from seeing happy and/or drunk partygoers shoot round after round into the air to playing for 16 hours straight at a kingpin’s secret rancho in the Inland Empire to almost getting beaten up by a bride’s family for not knowing the lyrics to “El Corrido Del Chapo.”

Ana Victoria is the one who worries the most. “I can’t go to sleep unless I know that he’s back home safe after a show,” she says as she serves him up another plate of ceviche.

“I invested so much money into private schools for him growing up and then he ended up singing?!” she jokes. But behind this tough love for her only child, she’s Aresvi’s number one fan. She claps, dances and sings along at every non-private show they perform.

“It’s just who we are as Sinaloenses,” Aresvi says unapologetically as we finish lunch. “We like our mariscos fresh and our corridos real, and you can’t have one without the other.”

The post Narco-Comida appeared first on theLAnd.

There is no dictionary definition for a real one. Realness is subjective and intangible, but unmistakably obvious. As game always recognizes game, real will always recognize real. Realness is being genuine, understanding your inner self and never abandoning your core values. Realness is being loyal to the soil, respectful of tradition and fearless in the face of cynics. It’s never going Hollywood or acting brand new to your day ones. It’s using timeless ingredients to conjure something startlingly original. It is Roy Choi.

Over the last decade, the Dr. Dre of the food truck revolution improbably transformed himself from a journeyman hotel chef into an avatar of Los Angeles’ vibrant, diverse and demotic food culture. His abridged resume includes stints as a restaurateur, author, host, go-to culinary consultant for film directors (Jon Favreau’s Chef) and a two-time member of Time’s 100 Most Influential People. The Beastie Boys tapped him to a write a mini-chapter in their autobiography. But the day after our interview—amidst the stress of hosting a television show (Broken Bread on KCET) and opening up a 9,000-square-foot restaurant at Park MGM in Las Vegas—Choi emails me to change his Top 5 all-time rappers list. He’d made a grave omission by forgetting Scarface, the Houston rap legend so real that his breakthrough album’s cover showed him wheeling his partner Bushwick Bill out of the hospital after his eye had been shot out.

It’s easy to take Choi for granted. The 48-year-old has reached a level of ubiquity to where his celebrity occasionally shrouds his lasting imprint. But in an era where chefs became “rock stars,” complete with clownish gimmicks and sordid allegations, the Seoul-born embodiment of L.A. hip-hop and car culture ultimately made his reputation by staying cool and selling $10 rice bowls and tacos out of a truck.

But sometimes a taco is not a taco. The Kogi taco was an idea, Southern California’s sabor sublimated into a feast that could fit in the palm of your hand. The components were plucked out of the familiar ether like a scene from Iron Chef Fantasia. Fresh steaming-hot corn tortillas, a blizzard of sweet chopped onions, Napa cabbage, and cilantro, a tangy acceleration of lime juice and salsa roja, and of course, the BBQ short-rib beef, practically caramelized but still savory, chopped into divine oblivion and tossed on the plancha like a sacred rite.

When Choi first began serving from a truck called “Roja” on a rainy Thanksgiving weekend in 2008, it felt less like an invention than a discovery; If you grew up in L.A., the first time you had a Kogi taco, it hacked into an atavistic code scrawled in the recesses of your cerebral cortex. The favorite taco truck you’d grown up going to in pre-Internet days that one day suddenly disappeared into the freeway archipelago never to return, colliding with the K-BBQ strip mall spot with the god-level bulgogi, that you could only go to with your Korean homie because the menu was entirely in Hangul. The Kogi taco was Magic hitting James Worthy on the fast break. Herb Hudson in 1975 renting out a storefront on Sunset and Gower to tell the world about the holy alchemy of fried chicken and waffles. Snoop teaming up with 2Pac, two of Amerika’s most wanted in the same motherfucking place at the same motherfucking time. No champagne glasses necessary at Kogi, but a Mexican Coke couldn’t hurt.

Choi’s almost mythic backstory screams for cinematic adaptation. Chronicled in his excellent memoir/cookbook L.A. Son: My Life, My City, My Food, Choi immigrated to L.A. from South Korea with his parents as a toddler. His madeleine’s were Tommy Burgers, Chinatown almond cookies and Bob’s Big Boy’s chili spaghetti, accompanied by his mom’s dazzling heaps of home-cooked Korean food. His family weathered struggles with alcoholism, financial pressure and countless relocations all across L.A. They eventually settled in Orange County, where they briefly ran a restaurant that served the best kimchi in Garden Grove. After multiple business failures, his parents finally hit it big in the discount jewelry business and bought Nolan Ryan’s house after he left Anaheim to sign with the Houston Astros.

His coming-of-age was tumultuous. An outsider behind the Orange Curtain, Choi cliqued up with a tough crew of mostly black and Hispanic friends who called themselves the Grove Street Mob. His book devotes an interstitial chapter to a friend who never made it out, dead from a car accident of murky circumstance (written with the pour-out-a-little-liquor pathos expected from a real one.) At one point, Choi joined a Norwalk and Whittier-based Latin car crew called the Street City Minis. Zapp was bumped—more bounce to the ounce was accomplished. There were bouts with drugs, a ferocious gambling addiction and innumerable wild and violent nights in Koreatown. Somehow, Choi survived and wound up at the Culinary Institute of America in Hyde Park, New York. And then a decade wandering the gustatory Sinai: he worked in country clubs and for Embassy Suites, at the Beverly Hilton and a Century City pan-Asian mall restaurant from the founder of The Cheesecake Factory. The last business fired him, leaving him down and out and ostensibly marked for career death at age 38. Instead, Choi built an empire by doubling down on himself and the very thing that made him singular but symbolic of the city writ large.

2018 was a year of transition and grief. On the professional level, he parted ways with Koreatown’s Line Hotel after overseeing its food and beverage program since its opening in 2014. Last August, he closed both the Oakland and Watts locations of LocoL, his and chef Daniel Patterson’s fast food concept that sought to bring cheap and healthy options to historically underserved communities. Last year also found Choi grappling with the deaths of his friends, Anthony Bourdain and legendary L.A. Times food critic Jonathan Gold—one of Choi’s most steadfast champions.

To understand Choi is to understand someone possessed with a streak of indomitability. He is fiery and passionate, willing to humbly listen to criticism, but quick to lash out if he feels it unfounded. So here we are on a winter afternoon in Chinatown in the shadow of Chego, his rice bowl Nirvana located in the Far East Plaza. It’s one of Choi’s three current restaurants in the L.A. area (including the Hawaiian-themed A-Frame and a Kogi brick and mortar).

His latest venture is Best Friend, a Korean BBQ restaurant in Vegas with a menu advertised as Choi’s greatest hits—including a chili spaghetti homage to Bob’s and slippery shrimp inspired by Yang Chow. There’s an entire section of the menu titled “L.A. Shit,” featuring Kogi Tacos, carrots and elotes from his Line Hotel rooftop restaurant Commissary. Best Friend’s name is fitting because that’s the vibe Choi exudes. You know Roy Choi even if you don’t. He’s the O.G. pulling up to you at the stoplight blaring “Computer Love” from the booming system, the two of you silently nodding at each other as a sign of respect. The badass older brother of your friend that always snuck you cigarettes, who your parents said to avoid because he’d never amount to nothing. But they were wrong.

Best Friend opened around New Year’s Eve with a weekend of shows from The Beat Junkies (a very real one booking). Consider Choi the only person on earth who could bring Katy Perry and Y.G. out to a restaurant launch party. If Vegas feels permanently corny and garish, Choi aspires to bring the L.A. that exists to locals to the land of Liberace. A tall order, but one that almost feels fated, the ambassador of staying true transplanted to the city that revels in artifice. I wouldn’t bet against him.

When did your vision with food crystalize? Was it Kogi or before that?

I think I’ve always had it. But the crystallization, as far as me being able to ‘be one’ with it was Kogi. Before it, there were signs for sure. Like when I had a regular job, I’d get other jobs that I wasn’t normally supposed to get. For example, I was the corporate chef for The Embassy Suites, a mid-level type hotel.

There’s no way in the world that an Embassy Suites chef is supposed to become the chef of the Beverly Hilton. It’s just two different class levels. But the corporate side really wanted me to go to the Beverly Hilton and turn it around. When I got there, they really put me through the ringer. I was like someone showing up uninvited to a cocktail party. I could tell they didn’t want me, but they were going through the steps because their boss was like ‘you gotta give this motherfucker a chance.’

I knew that if me getting the job was only based on the interview, I wouldn’t get it. But then I always understood that if I cooked for everyone, it would be over [and I’d get the job].  I’ve always had that experience where I’ll stutter or mess up, but as soon as I’m able to cook, everything crystallizes. Just like the performer who grabs a mic and takes over. But I was only a salary man at the time, so I didn’t know what that power meant yet.

And then Kogi hit and changed everything.

It’s a weird thing. You have to have the talent, the charisma and the experience to do it. But there’s also a moment where rising to that, whether it’s in sports or music or food, where one thing can change the trajectory of everything. You can be a journeyman or a bench player and when you hit that shot, it changes everything. For me that was Kogi.

It’s like [L.A. Dodger] Justin Turner—the nobody who signs a minor league contract at almost 30 and suddenly becomes an All-Star.

That’s what happened. I was a journeyman in my mid-30’s. There was no indication that I was supposed to start a food revolution. Then there was that moment where I saw 300 people in front of me and knew exactly what to do.

How soon into Kogi were there lines like that?

Week three. Week two required a different sixth sense. It was about knowing where to go. Our first pull-up was next to [what was then] the Cabana Club on Ivar. It was Green Door at the time. [It’s now Lure nightclub.]

I found myself there on consecutive weekends once, saw Colin Farrell twice and was like ‘what’s wrong with you, never come back here again.’

We got chased out with billy clubs; it was crazy. At that time, [in 2008] things weren’t as conscious as they are now. Street food is now legal. There’s social media and everyone has these hashtags and movements. Everyone gets behind immigration. There are arguments and debates on both sides. Back then it was still run like street politics. We would park on Ivar and the cops would immediately roll through.

It was literally like Boardwalk Empire. There were nights where we’d be serving and these cops would roll up, and one guy with a tilted hat and an Irish cigarette would be swinging this billy club around, hitting the side of our truck. In the early days, we’d just show up in different hoods and serve late nights. We didn’t get threats, but a lot of signs were thrown up and names were called. We just constantly extended with love. Cars would roll up and be like, ‘fuck is you doing here, foo?’ I’d just hand them a burrito. A lot of my instincts kicked in in those moments, hand them a burrito, hand them a taco. They’d eat it; you’d see everyone’s head nod. That was the beginning of Kogi culture.

Where did those instincts came from?

I grew up in Koreatown, but moved to Orange County in the 7th grade. So it’s this tough situation where I had to live my puberty and high school years in the suburbs, but grew up in the city. I spent five years always having this longing to come back to L.A. Once I got my license, I would drive up here and roll through every corner, every block. I got into cruising. I got into lowriding. Anything I could do to get out on the streets. Sometimes, I would take the train here and just walk.

You were doing that at 14-years-old, right?

Yup. Anything I could do to be in the city. The only time I’d stay in Orange County was basically to go to school. All those things became a blueprint for the first two weeks of Kogi. I’d remember the spots I used to drive by. All these random corners in Carson, Wilmington, Hawthorne, the Valley, the East Side. I’d say ‘okay, lets go to that spot.’ We’d go there, pop up, and people would show up.

It was about the third week when it started blowing up around Miracle Mile, Wilshire and Cloverdale, and different parts of Venice. There was no blueprint for it. That moment was everything. It felt like early hip-hop, where you don’t have any experience that necessarily mimics that ‘right thing to do.’ But you grab the mic, step on stage and move the crowd. It’s over after that. There’s a moment where everything crystallizes, and you become that icon. That was Kogi for me.

One of the things that resonated with me about your book was your willingness to cop to the dark periods of your life: whether family-related or concerning your own struggles with drugs and gambling. Do you think those experiences helped you build the strength to handle success and the long road leading up to it?

Definitely. When you’re raised in those situations, and where you’ve seen the worst of it all, nothing really fazes you. Nothing can touch you. Koreans are really strong because of that mentality. Nothing fucks with us because we’re our own worst enemy. I think that’s where a lot of the older tensions between Korean merchants and black communities [which culminated during the L.A. Riots of 1992] began.

I honestly believe a lot of it was the fault of Korean merchants. I understand where that fault was. They were so stubborn, so strong-willed and strong-minded. They felt like they needed to endure the punishment to provide for their family. If they weren’t that strong, they really could’ve opened up and gotten to know what was around them. They could’ve figured out the flexibility between stealing a pack of gum and armed robbery. The problem is that in the ‘80s, those were treated as the same thing. That’s where the fault was. I’m trying to repair some of that with Broken Bread. I wish I could turn back the clock and figure out how to ease the cultural understandings. I was only a kid then…

That’s around the time when Ice Cube’s song ‘Black Korea’ came out, and it obviously contained a lot of racist invective directed at Korean people.

I’ve never crossed paths with Ice Cube, but if I ever do—now that I’m at this position in life—I’d want to talk to him about it. I imagine his argument would be that Koreans were racist towards them. And that’s the tough part. I can’t really argue against that. I just wish those artists at that time would’ve used their platforms in a more holistic way to be able to address some of those concerns.

I’d say 85-95 percent of the time, people were just living their lives. ‘Mr. Kim what’s up?’ ‘Hey how’s you doing, how’s your boy?’ And then there’s just certain bad scenes. Just like with police. Most Korean-owned businesses had really deep relationships with the neighborhood. But I’d say one out of 10 had really bad ones. Those became the target at that time. Again, I feel like the Korean folks didn’t take the time to understand. They’re probably coming from a home in Norwalk or Paramount or Fullerton, driving to the middle of South Central Los Angeles, and they open up a store and go into commando mode.

And a lot of them are born in a post-war environment of deprivation.

They’re hard on themselves. Hard on their kids. They don’t take the cultural differences into consideration. They’re treating people the same way they’re treating their kids. They probably weren’t going out of their way to be mean or racist. If you were my kid, and I was that liquor store owner, I’d grab you and smack you. You come home with an A minus, you can’t go out for a month. It was 0 to 100 when it came to punishment.

Were your parents like that with you when you were really young?

Kinda. It was 0 to 100, and that’s what I think contributed to the tension. A pack of gum. Little kid coming in, you know, being a kid, and the next thing you know it escalates out of control. But yeah, ‘Black Korea.” I dunno, man. I hope one day I can talk to Ice Cube about that.

What would you want to tell him?

I’d probably want him to re-address that song. We all make mistakes. I’m trying to make up for the years of my mistakes with everything that Kogi has given me. I’m trying to bring love and light to this world. I think something as mean-spirited as that maybe deserves a second look. Especially since you are still a very current and relevant artist in a sense.

Did you ever expect any of this to happen?

I’ve never been the center of attention until Kogi happened. That’s why my [Twitter and Instagram] name is “Riding Shotgun [LA].” I’ve always been riding shotgun.

I thought it was interesting how in your book one of your favorite literary characters was Sal Paradise because he was perhaps the most iconic person riding shotgun.

I’ve been a latchkey kid since I was four years old. I used to ride the bus here and walk around the jewelry district, Chinatown, and Koreatown, all by myself. I don’t know what people were thinking then. It was the ‘70s — a different time. If you saw a 4-year-old kid walking around alone today, you’d think something was weird. I was always a quiet kid left to roam, almost like an alley cat, so I’ve been always been able to connect and always be in the mix.

In the ‘80s, I was deep in the B-Boy mix, lowriding all throughout Norwalk and that continued on through high school joining different gangs, this and that, connected to the weed world. Now as an adult, a lot of people don’t know where I come from. People have written or commented that he’s trying to be gangster. Maybe because I come from an older generation, but I never really understood these Internet haters and commenters. Because they don’t know anything about me, they comment that I’m just trying to gain street cred. They don’t understand this is who I’ve been the whole time. LocoL and Kogi are things that I’ve always been, but now finally as an adult they’re things I now have the ability to execute.

Do you think the historically tumultuous relationship between Koreans and Black people in South L.A. led to you wanting to bridge the divide with LocoL?

It’s really just that now as an adult I have the ability to do what I want to do. These are the things I did when I didn’t have money or the ability, or when I was a child. I don’t know any other way. That’s why LocoL existed. I had to get to a place where I got the platform to talk about these things. Everything was lining up for this moment: having these relationships, putting in the work beforehand, having a direct contact to Watts, being accepted by Watts. Everything was set up for it.

You hired exclusively people who came from Watts, right?

They were all folks who accepted us. We became part of their lives and they became part of ours. When I was younger, I used to have homies from Watts who I would pick up and drop off there. In the second part of my life, I met a gentleman named Aqeela Sherrills, one of the architects of the Peace Treaty [also known as the Watts gang truce] in ‘92 with Jim Brown. Around 2011, I was doing a lot of charity work at Jefferson High School and through a community redevelopment organization, I got connected to Aqeela. We hit it off and remained friends.

When LocoL came around, I hit him up for recommendations for a real estate agent. He said, ‘Listen, if you come into Watts, let me bring you in. I’m gonna be your chaperone. I’m gonna connect you to everyone from grandmothers to shooters to young bangers to OGs to triple OGs. You get in, we get you the hood pass, and you be you.’ So that’s what I did for six months.

Before you even opened?

Before we even signed the lease. He walked me through the Jordan Downs [public housing projects] and brought every OG out and every single young banger. Then we brought the whole thing and concept to them. It was really just us presenting this plan and asking the community ‘are you cool with this?’ We got the co-sign from Aqeela and everyone looked at it with clear eyes and said ‘OK, we fuck with that.’ The thing that kept us going was that we delivered on every promise we made: hiring, development, investing, ingredients in the food.

I imagine that a lot of your frustration with the press coverage of the closure was that few people knew how deep the commitment to Watts went.

They didn’t. A lot of journalists summarized everything as if it was a matter of fact thing. The headlines bothered me because they started with ‘failure.’ But that’s only if you equate success and failure based upon financial gain. We invested about $4 million into this project. We built a $1.5 million facility, which is still running. We gave over 50 jobs to the community, and there are about 10 people who have learned and gained skills and moved onto other jobs. We brought a world conversation to a situation that’s happening in towns like Watts and Baton Rouge and St. Louis.

You’re talking about food deserts?

Yeah. We got the world to talk about those things. We brought people to 103rd and Grape Street that would’ve never come there before. We got a lot of social services reinstated since bringing LocoL over, like street cleaning and parking enforcement. On top of that, there are children that we affected during the almost three years we stayed open. There were elementary school kids able to see their family members working in the facilities, having this as a memory point. These are all huge things.

Even the way we presented it, we said ‘We’re gonna take a different look at the retail side; LocoL is not closing, we’re going to start catering.’ And all of a sudden, all the headlines are ‘LocoL is a failure.’ ‘LocoL is closing.’ As soon as the announcement was made, reporters showed up for lunch and interviewed two people. Those people aren’t media savvy. They just said whatever was on their mind in the moment. On top of that, it was only two people. They took those two people’s statements as proof of why the community didn’t want LocoL there. They framed the whole thing as like this savior thing, and it was never that. We came from the inside out, not the outside in. And that bothered me. It didn’t bother me in the sense of armchair quarterback criticism: I can handle that. It bothered me because it perpetuated the narrative of poor black communities and crime. As though it couldn’t work. And that doesn’t do any good for anyone.

I feel the same way about this magazine. If we only do a handful of issues and stop, it won’t be a failure. It’s a success that we got a DIY enterprise off the ground and hopefully produced quality work. Nothing lasts forever.

I felt the Pete Wells thing was unfair [The New York Times restaurant critic gave the Oakland location of LocoL a zero stars review], not because I can’t take the shots. You wanna take me down, cool. But what bothered me was that he didn’t take the time to understand the context of what we were doing. He shot it down as if it’s no good and these people didn’t know how to execute. He didn’t understand. The only person who really understood was Jonathan. [Jonathan Gold named LocoL the L.A. Times 2017 Restaurant of the Year.]

Jonathan understood where we were coming from, what the current state of existence is, and how we’re all starting a new process together. I responded to [Wells] in this sense like, he came to a junior high school play and yelled ‘boo.’ You’re not understanding that these kids are just figuring it out.

The other thing that bothered me about the articles was that no one took into context all the different layers. It was just success or failure.

It’s inevitably a function of celebrity. Anything that is ‘less successful’ than Kogi is considered a failure. Do you feel like having that fame has made for a bigger target on your back?

Yeah. And I can take all of that for normal, for-profit restaurant work. If someone wants to give Best Friend a zero stars and say ‘He fucked up. He lost his touch,’ fine, whatever. It is what it is. The thing that stung with LocoL was that it wasn’t about Daniel Patterson or myself. It was about trying to come up with new ideas to talk about and bring to life the reality of poverty, the reality of food access. Him and I, we’re not looking to be heroes. It was a project.

It felt like an experiment and obviously experiments need to be refined.

It was tough because those articles from the New York Times and the headlines about failure, really hurt the movement. Who’s to say that the success was garnered upon the first wave of it? The first wave is where I could get the conversation across in this very binary, over-stimulated world. We’re in it for the long run.

This first wave was literally just to get it open, to get the conversation going. If I look back on it, that was a success. We got it open; we got people talking about it. We got more people going than had ever been before. People started to discuss the idea of food access. The 2.0 version could be what the next step is.

What would you do differently?

I’m very happy with the way it came out. The only thing I’d do differently is try to raise more money. We ran out of money after three years. Based upon the history and the impact of segregation and systematic inequality, all these things lead to disparity in this country. For this little hamburger shop, those first three years were about working through the weeds of that — trying to get up to sea level.

Even $6 million is nothing compared to most of these start-ups. Even if we had another $3 million, we would only be in a position to stretch our legs. We were given a chance to solve this equation in the first round. Because we didn’t solve this equation, all the funding dried up. I really wish we could’ve raised double what we did. It took that much money to get to the position where we could talk about the goals everyone wanted in the first place.

It’s also insanely difficult to alter the eating habits of generations of people who grew up eating fast food. You’re not just competing with McDonald’s or In-N-Out, you’re competing with deep taste bud memories of childhood.

There’s that saying that it takes about as long to unravel a problem as it does to create it. It’s unrealistic to expect to change overnight after a 50-year infiltration of fast food into these communities. Looking back, I realize how unrealistic that was. It’s going to take a little more time.

For some folks, there is the issue of habit. A lot of people don’t want to write about that or think about that. In the three years we survived as a retail outlet in Watts, the economic situation of the community didn’t really change. Even though we got all this press and attention, there still aren’t enough jobs in Watts. No restaurants opened up after us. There’s still no access or education in these fields.

Somehow it got turned into that Watts didn’t want LocoL. That’s the part that hurt me. How the fuck did they know what Watts wanted? Our employees were the ones living there. We’re the ones who spent three years there and we didn’t even know in full. We can’t even speak for the community.

Did you ever meet 03 Greedo during your time over in Watts?

Yeah, Greedo and his team were like family to us. He used to hang out in our parking lot…used to come up to the Oakland store. He had connects everywhere. We used to feed him. I love Wolf of Grape Street and Purple Summer 03.

What was your first introduction to rap?

Ironically, when I moved to Orange Country at 13. I went to my friend’s house, and he put the needle on the record to Run-DMC’s “It’s Like That,” and I was instantly like ‘Whoa, what the fuck is this?’

Around the same time, “Jam On It” came into my life. “Rapper’s Delight” came into my life. LL came into my life. Ice-T’s “6 in The Mornin'” came into my life. I was kind of fucking up at that time as well and got sent to military school in Long Beach. I saw Beat Street and Krush Groove, and it was on from there.

What were you listening to before that?

It started with my parents’ music: Delfonics, Nat King Cole, Frank Sinatra, Tony Bennett,  Gladys Knight, Elvis.

Then during my rebellious period where I was moving from L.A. to Orange County, I became a metal kid. Suddenly, I was surrounded by almost entirely affluent white people. It was cool, but all deep suburban, and I looked different from everyone else.  My parents were also going through a lot of ups and downs. They were starting to drink a lot more. So from like 13 to 15, I was really into Slayer, Judas Priest, Black Sabbath, Pink Floyd, Motorhead, Metallica.

What was your first concert?

I remember going to a lot of hippie concerts in the park and stuff like that with my parents. But my first real concert was KISS in like ‘78 or something like that. And then Missing Persons, X, and The Who in the early ‘80s. I’d go with friends, but this was the ‘70s, so our parents would just drop us off.

We’d be two 8-year-olds at a KISS concert and the venue would let us in. You can’t even imagine that right now. Even at a Taylor Swift show you’d have to have a chaperone. And then in high school, I started going to a lot of Dead shows.

Was there a specific thing that changed everything other than just hearing Run-DMC?

When I first got to high school, I’d get picked on [by] older jocks, who called me ‘chink’ and pushed me out of line. I wouldn’t take it. So I beat up this other kid and a crew of kids from Orange saw me and said ‘what’s up.’ I started hanging with them and got really introduced to hip-hop. Those kids were breaking, popping, DJing and writing graffiti. N.W.A. hadn’t come out, so we were still listening to World Class Wreckin’ Cru, buying mixtapes at the swap meets.

Did you ever make music?

Yeah, I did. My crew was called Legion of Doom — LOD. We had two rappers up front, a DJ and I was like a hype man. We made a few songs, but I was always kinda the homie dude. I’d help my DJ friend Carlos — bringing the records and rolling the joints. His record collection was really when I started getting into hip-hop like the Egyptian Lover and Rodney-O and Joe Cooley. It was that era that really kind of moved me from Slayer to hip-hop.

How did your parents react to all of this?

I was always trapped between my parents’ expectation and me being this free spirit. All my friends were getting laid. I didn’t get laid until I was 19. They were dancing, spray-painting, DJing, rapping, singing. Always getting girls. I was always part of that crew; I was in the mix, but couldn’t express myself. I was a real quiet kid, y’know? A stoner living a double life because I was Korean and raised to be studious. I was in the GATE Program, honors classes, AP classes. And I was having a lot of trouble and trying to figure it all out.

Did things change for you when N.W.A. came out?

I listened to them, but wasn’t a huge fan [at] first. It was really Public Enemy that got me into hardcore rap. I was working at the Montgomery Ward, and picked up my first Public Enemy album. From that point I really started to get serious with it. Ice Cube’s Amerikkka’s Most Wanted was the one where I really started to get deep into gangsta rap.

I understood the anger and angst of everything that was going on with N.W.A., but for me, I was more of a quiet nerdy-type dude, and I was never really a violent guy, so those weren’t my problems at the time. I was angry at other shit. I was never militant in that respect, but I have been militant in how I approach my life.

Did you go to any of the early legendary L.A. rap shows?

I caught Public Enemy at the Palace and that was fucking great. Chuck D was just on the rise and I was right up in the front, so I remember that show vividly. I caught a bunch of small shows where World Class Wreckin’ Cru was playing, and when Cube was coming up. I can remember Cube hanging with Dre and freestyling in the parking lot.

I caught 2Pac before he was ‘Pac too. I went to a Digital Underground, Queen Latifah and Naughty by Nature show at the Palladium, and ‘Pac had just come out, with “Same Song,” and he was there just wildin’ out onstage with Digital Underground. So I was at that show. That was a great show. I saw Too Short early on, E-40, early Ice-T, Tha Alkaholiks, Del tha Funkee Homosapien.

Even if it’s not explicitly political, much of what you do is political in some respect. How do you feel the current political climate affects you?

I try to be political by never being political. I’m not afraid, but you won’t hear sound bites from me. I’m tackling these issues head on. I’m not tackling them in a way of battle, or winning by way of putting a person down. I’m not looking for debates, I’m looking for answers.

What’s an example of that?

Just look at the show Broken Bread. I’m taking topics like food access, food justice, food waste, homelessness, vegetarianism, veganism and people on the fringes. Instead of debating or expressing my political beliefs and saying you’re either with me or you’re not, I present the argument, and try to find or give solutions.

We’re doing an episode about criminalization of cannabis and the entire episode examines all areas of cannabis: the gentrification of it, the legalization, the beauty of the plant itself. We’re also focusing on those who were unfairly criminalized for it and serving sentences. We’re finding people on the ground trying to overturn those laws.

I look at it like a chef does. Where I get political is, I’ll say ‘Here’s the problem, here’s what I think of it and here’s my solution.’ It’s the same thing I do in the kitchen. There are 200 people to serve tonight. We have about three hours of work left. Here’s what we need to do. Forget about your arguing — what he or she did or didn’t do. Here’s the plan. I tend to do a lot of audibles. Let’s throw that old plan out—here’s the new plan. Let’s just get to the finish line.

What I see right now in social media and other forms of media is everyone is arguing the micro-concept of everything. Everyone wants an absolute answer or fix to these really complicated, large, multi-tentacle issues. What I try to do instead, with things like LocoL, is just pick off one thing and try to make it better.

What advice do you give to your teenage daughter about the world?

I tell her to always be kind and extremely aware. Be very giving, but be critical. Never assume anything and never take anything for granted. I tell her to listen and to try to have a lot of love and understanding. I try to prepare her to defend herself and be confident in situations. In a nutshell I guess, to be open-minded, say please and thank you. Don’t be afraid to offer your opinion and don’t be afraid to disagree, but don’t be hung up on your disagreement being the absolute truth.

Do you get caught up in obsessing over the latest daily insanity in the news?

I don’t. I know a lot of it is rhetoric. Whether it’s Trump or Kavanaugh, I believe that there’s someone behind them holding the puppet strings. I try not to get caught up in the rhetoric. I hear that type of shit every day because I’m a boss. I hear ‘so and so didn’t do this so that’s why we failed at that.’ ‘I gotta make up for his lack of execution that’s why I couldn’t do this.’ I’m always forced into situations where I have to look at every single thing and analyze what’s really going on here. Is something really burning on the stove or not?

It doesn’t bother me to be honest because I don’t take it personally and I’m out there trying to make small little changes. I’m better at mobilizing in the shadows. I’m better at internalizing everything going on, all the frequencies and algorithms, then putting up a piece on the wall that makes everyone think. That’s my role in life. If there’s a family fighting with each other, I’m the little kid that puts the needle on an Al Green record and gets everyone to just stop the feuding for a moment and to try to figure out a solution.

You employ a bunch of people. How does being a business owner affect the way you see complex situations that could potentially cut into your profits like minimum wage or health care?

I feel like America has to adopt some form of socialism. We’re unwilling to confront the issues of our past. I think that’s the biggest obstacle in our existence. We’re unwilling to confront what our country was built upon: the genocide of the Native Americans and the slavery of the black community. And we don’t want to admit that these things can’t be fixed unless we provide a pathway for them to be fixed. We’re going to be constantly arguing with each other until we say that everyone deserves a basic amount of rights and living standards. Those who have been marginalized deserve some form of reparation.

I’ve been with a lot of folks in the Watts community who say, ‘Let’s take $7 trillion dollars, give $1 trillion to each of the seven major inner cities of America, start there. No payback, just reparations. Let the community rebuild itself.’ I feel like that combined with healthcare, education, and certain living standards would get us to a point where we can talk about how to create some sort of healing between both parties.

Are you a religious or spiritual person?

I’m very spiritual. As I continue to get older and a little bit wiser, I’m in tune with the echoes and reverberations of what I feel is beyond our physical self. I’ve been heavily meditating for the last six years. Dreaming and seeing things. Feeling things. Leading with love. Those things have helped me to be able to search for one thing deeper than I normally can. I don’t know if I’m religious. I don’t believe in the stories as they are in the Bible. I can’t believe those, because of very specific facts that don’t line up. Then that fundamental detective quality comes out within me.

As a chef, I have to have that detective quality. You’re telling me you did all the prep work on a dish. My sixth sense is saying you didn’t. I have to go through and investigate. I realize you cut corners on the sauce. I say, ‘no you didn’t,’ and I can break it down to you. I also don’t understand how one type of people, whether it’s Judaism, Christianity, Buddhism, Hinduism or Islam can decide that they’re the only belief that can understand the relationship with God.

How much has doing psychedelics shaped your consciousness?

When I do take psychedelics, whether it be acid, ‘shrooms, even highly potent forms of THC—like in the crystallized sugar form—that’s where I believe in spirituality and a religion that goes beyond us. Even meditation to be honest is a form of psychedelic transformation. These things open the door.

Was there a formative psychedelic experience in your life?

I remember one experience where I was frying and listening to an R.E.M. tape at my friend’s house. The whole tape played through and started over again without rewinding in my head. But it really happened too. Things were also coming out. And actual beings were touching me. They were pulling me in and moving this whole thing.

Another experience was with my mom. There’s a whole other level of psychedelic experience, which concerns fortune telling in Asia. There are these half-human half transformative beings. Essentially, they’re shamans. I witnessed her transform into my ancestors and saw their ghosts coming out of their body. I saw that in a small little room in a hillside in Seoul, Korea.

On acid or sober?

Sober. There was a process to get to that point. The shaman starts chanting, sets the room, gets you going. I don’t know how to explain those two things.

This year has had a lot of tragedies within your orbit, particularly regarding the deaths of Anthony Bourdain and Jonathan Gold. Where are you in the grieving process?

I’m definitely still grieving both. Jonathan’s death really affected me. We were really friends. We were from different times, different upbringings and different styles, but we were homies, man. Over the past three months, I’ve been stricken with these waves of grief that come out of nowhere. I could be chilling with you like this, and it comes and hits me and rips me apart.

With Jonathan and Tony, I never really had the high-minded intellectual relationship with either one. I always had a relationship with Jonathan like kids in the room playing Sega together. We never talked that much, to be honest, not as much as people believed. But we could spend figuratively 48 hours playing Genesis together, not saying anything.

That’s actually what people have told me how Dilla and Madlib were. They barely spoke, just communicated almost telepathically and through a series of grunts and gestures.

That’s how J Gold and I were. I didn’t have to explain to him, he didn’t have to explain to me. We were just the Dilla and Madlib of the food world. He got it. He understood everything I was trying to translate. He was the guy able to put it all in ink. All the stuff he used to write about me, I never told him. He was the only guy able to get it right, just from being able to eat it.

What was your relationship like with Bourdain?

Tony felt like this iconic force. A Jimi Hendrix, a Janis Joplin. When I look at his shows now that he’s gone, it affects me the same way as when I think of people like ‘Pac or Hendrix or Cobain. They were here eternally even when they weren’t.

Who are your Top 5 favorite rappers?

We’re not doing this.

You can do a top 10. I’ll even include this caveat that, of course, you are going to leave people out and no one should complain.  

Okay. Definitely A Tribe Called Quest, Rakim, early Public Enemy, Dilated Peoples, EPMD, early MC Lyte. A whole mix of Top Dawg between Ab-Soul, Schoolboy, and Kendrick. Mos Def. Okay, I got eight. [He later emails me to include Scarface, as one should]

What are you working on in the immediate future?

Broken Bread and Best Friend. What I’m trying to do with Best Friend is bring L.A. to Vegas. I want to bring everything we’re about and have been about, everything that I love. I want there to be a bit of nerdiness and smiles and wackiness. A greatest hits of sorts but with a bunch of new stuff too. I want to create our own lane and make it very L.A.—a platform for L.A. culture in Vegas where we can share that love with the Vegas audience.

In terms of L.A., what’s your next move?

I’d love to see where we take LocoL from here. I guess I’m Dre after Death Row right now. I have to look at what is the aftermath of everyone’s perception and misinformation about LocoL. Where do we go from here? I don’t need to open any more restaurants right now. I want to spend my energy in L.A. figuring out how to turn around LocoL and just keeping Kogi and Chego alive. I like being low-key.

I’m sure you’ve had tons of offers to franchise Kogi.

I know you asked me earlier about the price of fame, but if you really take a step back and look at the chessboard, I run taco trucks and a $10 rice bowl restaurant. You know what I mean? It’s what I do for the city. I know that it comes with a lot of baggage and hot air. It’s just something that comes with who I am. I don’t know why. I don’t know why people are so interested in distorting or amplifying what I’m about without actually looking at what I’m about. But maybe that doesn’t matter, I know those who fuck with me really understand what I’m about.

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