Dirty Boyz discuss rap scene in Montgomery Montgomery Advertiser


When Cortez Harris first started rapping, it was his younger cousin, Lamark Stinson, who helped get him into the scene.

Without a car, Stinson took Harris, known as Rubberband OG, to the club each night, making sure the DJs played his songs. Stinson came to all his shows. Today, Harris has videos with more than 1 million views, but Stinson was a major Rubberband supporter before anyone really knew who Rubberband was. 

Then Stinson was shot and killed.

“Now I don’t even have no love for music like I did back then,” Harris said. “Now it’s because I gotta pay bills.”

Looking at the history of Montgomery’s rap scene, it is a storyline filled with murder.

'We can’t take no more losses on the East'

Glenn Thomas, known as Doe B, was murdered inside the Centennial Hill Bar and Grill in 2013. Four years earlier, he survived being shot in the head while leaving a performance.

More: 'A lot of hope died with him': How Doe B impacted Montgomery's rap scene before and after death

More: A Montgomery family has waited two years for justice. It still hasn't come

“God allowed him to live until 22 because he had more to do,” his mother said.

Eugene “Nawty Shawty” Smith lost his life at the same club as Doe B, shot during the seventh anniversary celebration for his group, Deuce Komradz, in March 2007. He was 25.

Reginald "Lil Reggie" Shackleford, 30, was murdered inside his home in June 2012.

Sylvester Morris, 32, known as Fat Head, was murdered in June 2015.

More: Is Happiness Avenue happy? The once alluring Ridgecrest street is filled with gunfire, violence

Why has Montgomery suffered the loss of so many both to murder and to prison? In 2018, 28 of Montgomery's 39 deaths ruled homicides were black males.  

This violence, which isn't solely targeted at rappers but toward young black men throughout Montgomery, symbolizes an intense level of division among different sides of the city, many believe. 

Jonathan Jordan — stage name ‘DOA Jonathan’ — released a video with Rubberband OG in July 2017. 

The song’s chorus asks, “If the good die young, do the bad live forever?”

The video cuts to the tombstone of Stinson, 24, — shot January 2016.

To the grave of Zhivago Hines,19, — shot September 2016.

To the burial spot of Jacurtis Howard, 31, — shot November 2016.

And to Chavez Hamilton, 22, — shot February 2017. 

Naming each of his friends, Rubberband raps,  “We can’t take no more losses on the East.”

Six months after the video release, in December 2017, DOA Jonathan, 18, was shot to death.

How Montgomery's rappers feel about the violence

For most of Montgomery’s rappers, young men in their early to mid-20s, their desires are just like so many others: make a living, provide for their families and perhaps earn enough to give back to their communities.

In their efforts lies an uncommon acceptance, however. They may die doing so.

Raised in poverty, accustomed to the street life and surrounded by people who would rather keep them down than allow any level of success not expected from them or from their neighborhoods, is dangerous. 

As one rapper said, “They won’t let you get too much of anything.”

“The city is so small with so much hatred,” said Mac 'Dukie' Hopkins, an artist manager and event promoter who has been involved with Montgomery’s rap scene since the early 2000s.

The violence, he said, comes from being raised around it and among people who promote it.

“Not everybody is going to be like that, but 95% living in those sorts of environments are going to be products,” Hopkins said. “If you’re around robbers, you gonna rob. If you around killers, you’re going to kill. If you’re around someone doing something positive, you’ll do something positive.”

Since Doe B’s death, major rap artists rarely come to Montgomery. The violence prevents promoters, like Hopkins, from being able to make a profit.

“I try so hard to keep a positive look on it, but our city is so divided. I can go anywhere across this country and pack a show out but when I come here I pull my hair out wondering how many people I’ll get to come out,” he said.

Some local rappers feel the same way about performing in their hometown. Being in Montgomery is a far more dangerous feat than traveling to another Alabama city.

At shows in other cities, Hopkins said, security is always tight, but “it seems where you really need it is at home.”

Looking at the violence that has seemingly defined rap here, Jerome Davidson, manager for local rapper D-Aye, said it is rarely the cause of the artists themselves. Each was raised in an impoverished neighborhood in a particular side of town, running with a group of guys from that side of town, too.

“You wouldn’t believe the amount of stuff that goes on out here,” Davidson said. “And it boils down to neighborhoods — north side, south side, west side — that’s the bulk of it out here.”

Show Thumbnails
Show Captions

This can lead to an east side artist becoming a target when the people he’s surrounded himself with have issues with the people surrounding a north side artist, and vice versa.

“There’s been so much blood shed over the years, they’ll never get along,” Davidson said.

'If someone is shooting, that is normal'

The rappers themselves have a lot on the line, but that doesn’t necessarily mean their friends do.

“At this point if someone is shooting, that is normal,” Davidson said, adding that, “It’s just one element of being a black man in Montgomery.”

The fact is D-Aye, 24, and other young rappers like him who have been raised in this element have accepted their murders as a potential reality, Davidson said. 

“If you’re living on Southern Street in north Montgomery and you’re walking to school, there’s Bloods. There’s Crips. There’s shootings,” he said. “You become a part of that environment or you become a victim of it. You have to have that around you, if you want to survive.”

Show Thumbnails
Show Captions

Pointing to the guns found within Robert E. Lee High after a February shooting inside the school’s gym, Davidson said, “They got guns there because there can be a shootout on their way home from school any day. On any day. Those kids carry pistols because the environment and lives they are living.”

Davidson said, “(D-Aye) doesn’t go anywhere alone. He’s too important to what we have going on here. If he went down, it’d be a war. You won’t see him by himself.”

How things have changed the early 2000s

Montgomery’s first rap group to be recognized nationally was the Dirty Boyz, composed of "Big Pimp" and "Gangster." The duo hails from west Montgomery, and the rap scene during the early 2000s saw the south side’s Deuce Komradz and the north’s Small Tyme Ballazs take the stage.

Daniel Thomas, known as Big Pimp, has watched parts of Montgomery’s rap scene evolve over the past two decades, while other parts have stagnated.

Like Davidson, he cast blame away from the artists themselves for the violence.

The division that existed within the rap scene when his group was first making it big, he said, wasn’t necessarily between the members of the different groups, “but had a lot to do with surrounding friends of the groups that kept us apart.”

In a tribute song to Doe B after his murder, Thomas rapped, “Separation between the three, we paid the ultimate cost. Not sticking together is the real reason we all lost. … If we did it together, we would have been eating forever.”

Things were different back then though.

“It’s more violent now,” Thomas said. “If you say something about me, we have to make an example out of you – versus back in our day, if you said something about me, we’re just not going to work with you.

“You have so many sides beefing to where it's unsafe to move through the city like you want because you don’t know who’s beefing with who.”

Partnered with poverty and the divide is a level of jealousy that makes success a treacherous achievement.

“There’s a lot of hate in this city. It’s a ‘crab in the barrel’ mentality. You might start doing good for yourself and everyone feels like you’re supposed to reach back,” he said, adding that when you don’t, that causes a confrontation. “It can be seen in the deaths of the guys that have been murdered.”

“Fat Head helped a lot of people on the west side. He was paying the rent for a lot of people. Fat Head was giving scholarships, buying cars for young ladies that didn’t have a way back and forth to work. So why would someone want to take his life?” Thomas asked. “People will look at you and say ‘I’m supposed to have that. Why don’t I have that?’ People will hate you for literally nothing.”

Guidance for the next generation

For this era’s rappers, he said, “I don’t know if I’d tell them to leave Montgomery, but I’d tell them to broaden their horizons and move carefully. The stats show if you make it and are doing good — you don’t have to be doing anything bad — you could be murdered.”

The names who represent those stats, he said, "It had nothing to do with lyrics or them being rappers, it was more of the success that they had. They had people out there that hated their success because they weren’t successful.”

As Doe B said, “When you start making money, trouble tends to come your way.” 

And as T.I. asked, "Would I cherish the fame if God lowered the cost?"

For Rubberband OG, all of this is encompassed in who he was raised to be.

The division, he said, “It’s just been like that for generations. I don’t know if it’ll ever end. ... My mom and dad didn’t like the other sides' moms and dads and it just got passed down to us. … You can’t have all sides of town in the building, there’s going to be something. It doesn’t matter if you play gospel music, there’s going to be something.”

The violence is nothing new either. Aside from his friends, his uncle was killed before he was born, and his brother was shot a few years back.

“I’m not gonna say I’m immune to it. But it’s done happened so much around me now, you just have to watch how you move," He said. "… I’ve done lost so many people now I can’t even cry. I’ve cried all my tears.”

Does it worry him?

“No. Not for real," he said. "Before I was rapping, I was already in the streets anyways. Like I know what comes with the streets. You just gotta know how to move down here. You know you’re beefing with that side of town you just try to stay away from it."

Plus, “I feel like you can’t run from it. If it’s gonna happen, it's gonna happen. Folks die in church. People shoot the movies up.”

Read or Share this story: