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Music by VICE

Never Party with the Brick Squad

How a VICE reporter nearly died trying to hang with Gucci Mane and Waka Flocka Flame.

by Wilbert L. Cooper
Feb 4 2013, 1:00pm

Illustration by Meaghan Garvey

As the host of Noisey Raps, the new hip-hop show on VICE's music site, I've been spending a ton of time with famous rappers who like to get loco and do things poor degenerates only dream of. Getting fucked up is a time-honored tradition for musicians of all genres, but rappers, as with everything else they do, take inebriation to absurd new levels. They even invent weird new drugs and give them cute nicknames like "hokey-pokey" and "pterodactyl." You might think, I love the hokey-pokey. This must be harmless. Then, the next thing you know, you're being arrested for wiggling your genitals at an old lady, while the famous rapper you just made "friends" with is riding away in his Maybach, sandwiched between two gorgeous models, laughing his ass off. The thing to remember is that these guys are professionals at getting wasted. They rage day in and day out, one dust-laced blunt after another, and then they get paid exorbitant sums of cash to write songs about it. Trying to keep up with them is stupid and dangerous. Unfortunately, I had to learn this lesson the hard way from members of the 1017 Brick Squad.

It was a chilly night in October, and I had been invited to shoot Waka Flocka Flame and Gucci Mane backstage at their show at New York's Irving Plaza. Unless you're a geriatric or in jail, you should know that Waka and Gucci are two Atlanta MCs who make unrepentant Southern gangster rap known as trap music.


I'm usually disappointed when I meet rappers in person because they're often short, meek versions of what you see in their videos. Waka and Gucci, however, look like a couple of linebackers. Their presence is super-imposing, and this was only the second on-camera work I'd done in my life. In hindsight, I should've taken some more time thinking about my appearance before the interview: I was wearing pop-bottle glasses and a Cosby-like Pendleton sweater. They immediately started clowning me.

The instructions my producer Andy Capper gave me were to "hang out and get some natural footage." But Waka and Gucci took one look at me, and it became awkwardly obvious that they weren't trying to hang with me at all. After a pretty terse greeting that resulted in Waka practically breaking my hand when he shook it, the rappers formed a smokers' huddle on the other side of the room that I couldn't breach. Precious time was being wasted. I had to do something quick to get in good with these guys or else I wouldn't be asked to host anything ever again.

Like everyone backstage, Waka, Gucci, and a couple of their lackeys were passing fat blunts back and forth to one another. To break the ice, I thought it'd be a good idea to ask them what kind of weed they were burning. Gucci just looked down at me like I was a narc, handed over the blunt, and said, "You tell me."

Now, I've been smoking blunts since I was 11 years old. And I grew up in the suburbs, so I'm no stranger to bongs, bowls, and weird white-people shit like vaporizers. But nothing prepared me for how high I was about to become after hitting Gucci's burner. The closest thing I can compare it to is being pushed headfirst down a K-hole. The second after the smoke left my lungs, I couldn't even form a complete sentence. Andy was whispering in my ear, trying to tell me what questions to ask because I was just standing there like a zombie with the microphone limp in my hand. And then everything just went black.

Next thing I knew, I was sweating bullets outside the backstage area with Andy fanning me like I was a menopausal mom who'd just had a hot flash. But I stood up and told Andy I couldn't go out like a punk; he had to let me go back and finish the interview. It was a terrible decision. A real man knows when to call it quits, but I was on a foolhardy mission and probably still very high.


Problem was, I had no idea I was on level one. "What's level two?" I asked. Waka then opened up an astronomically expensive bottle of Hennessy and handed it to me. I grabbed it and took a big swig with my eyes closed. When I opened them, everyone in the room was looking at me once again, except this time they were all extremely pissed off. "Did you just put your lips on that bottle?!" Waka said. "That is a violation of the man code. You know what that means? That's your bottle. You've got to drink the whole bottle."


I stayed rational and didn't bow to the pressure until one of Waka's hangers-on said, "I thought you worked for VICE magazine?" And that was it. He planted a seed in my mind that, in the heat of the moment, made me think that if I didn't drink this fucker it would hurt my career. So I started taking big monster gulps. Stupid move.




Watch episode one of Noisey Raps:

And be sure to watch Wilbert become a drug-and-Hennessy-induced zombie in an upcoming episode of Noisey Raps this spring at


More of Wilbert's run-ins with rappers:

A$AP Rocky and Jeremy Scott Schooled Me on How to be a Pretty Motherfucker

Gunplay Doesn't Fear the Pine Box or Prison

Pimp Rap Has a New Prince and His Name is 100s