How De La Soul Made the Best Song Ever Made About Crack
Posdnous really had a brother who was a crackhead
The crack epidemic ran from the mid 80s to the early 90s and it’s hard to overestimate how hard crack hit Black America. The devil couldn’t have come up with a more insidious drug. In the 80s there was an army of crackheads scrounging for every dollar they could get which is why, as criminologist David Kennedy once said, crack blew through America’s poor Black neighborhoods like the four horsemen of the apocalypse had traded their steeds for supercharged bulldozers.
Crack led to the homicide rate for young Black men skyrocketing. The fetal death rate rose. The number of break-ins and robberies rose—cars were routinely attacked for their radios and the more cars attacked/ cars vandalized. Brazen addicts would run into homes and steal TVs and VCRs and anything that could be sold for a quick buck. In the big cities it felt like there was an all-out assault of drugs and bullets and theft and crack zombies.
KRS-One told me quote “Crack came like a monsoon. Everyone in the ghetto got drenched. Business was good, so the competition was murder. The gun epidemic screeched in. Territory wars went nuclear. The innocent got killed with regularity. Basketball courts became war zones.”
Nas once told me, “Crack sucked the life out of people. They'd lose not just their weight but their minds. It destroyed people. When you became a crackhead you lost your soul and I started to feel like New York had a sort of a gloom about it.”
The crack era felt like an apocalypse and it had a massive impact on Black America—the drugs ruined lives and the country’s response to it led to an explosion in the number of Black people who were incarcerated which ruined MORE lives and families and an entire generation.
But, somehow, one of the greatest songs ever made about the crack epidemic is a rap song with a fun, playful feel. “My Brother’s A Basehead” tells the true and tragic story of the brother of one of the guys in De La Soul because that brother was a crack addict.