Jacked: The unauthorized behind-the-scenes story of Grand Theft Auto. David Kushner
Читать онлайн книгу.
box—sort of like moving through a scripted shooting gallery—but Elite felt radically open. Players could chose from an array of galaxies, each with its own planets, to explore. It had become a phenomenon around England, selling hundreds of thousands of copies and earning its collegiate creators a following. Elite was so immersive, so transporting, it epitomized the essence of what a game, for Sam, could do: transport you to another world.
ONE BY ONE, the boys inched uniformly down the line—taking their plates of, say, shepherd’s pie, or steamed jam sponge and custard. They looked as neat and orderly as their trays. The dark blazers with the badges. The crisp white button-down shirts and dark ties. The charcoal pants and dark socks. The black leather dress shoes. All of the boys identical, almost, except the one seen around school with the Doc Martens boots poking out from under his slacks: Sam.
If Sam wanted to escape the real world, he would have to start here at St. Paul’s, the storied prep school on the River Thames. Since the 1500s, St. Paul’s had weaned some of the brightest young minds in the country, from Milton to Samuel Johnson. Now Sam and Dan, like many of the privileged young sons of London, had come to learn the finer things across forty-five leafy acres in Hammersmith: playing cricket on the lawns, studying Russian history, listening to the orchestra perform.
Yet as Sam’s unconventional choice of footwear proved, he had little interest in playing by the rules. Brash and iconoclastic, he was already living the rock-star lifestyle. He wore his hair long, let his shoes scuff, and was occasionally seen leaving school in a Rolls-Royce. By their teens, he and his brother dispensed of their dad’s music for something more vital: hip-hop.
Specifically, they dug Def Jam Recordings, an American music label already become legendary among hip kids in the know. Founded by a punk rocker named Rick Rubin in his New York University dorm room, the company had become the coolest and shrewdest start-up for the burgeoning East Coast rap scene. Rubin, along with his partner, club promoter Russell Simmons, began putting out singles from the freshest acts in the five boroughs. As a white Jewish kid from Long Island and a black guy from Queens, they were a unique and potent mix. They fused their love of rap and rock into acts with a decidedly mainstream flair, from a cocky kid named LL Cool J to a trio of bratty white rappers, the Beastie Boys.
They had more than great taste, though. Def Jam pioneered a new generation of guerrilla marketing. Simmons and Rubin had come from the urban underworld of street promotions—do-it-yourself campaigns used in both punk rock and rap to create word-of-mouth buzz. Simmons called it “running the track,” promoting each artist in as many ways as possible. They slapped stickers—bearing the iconic Def Jam logo, with its big letters D and J—on lampposts and buildings. They threw parties around New York, producing elaborate concerts with over-the-top props—such as the huge inflatable penises at the Beasties show.
Devout fans like Sam consumed not only Def Jam records, but the lifestyle. When Rubin’s single “Reign in Blood,” for the heavy metal band Slayer, came out, Sam hungrily bought it—slipping out the Def Jam patch that he wore like a badge of honor. Sam had taken on a way of ranting about his fixations. His mouth would motor, words firing like Missile Command bullets, hands gesturing, head swaying, as though he couldn’t contain the sheer awesomeness of his pop culture love.
“For me, a guy like Rick Rubin is such a fucking hero,” started one of his breathless rants, “to go from pioneering in that world to doing hip-hop and to doing the Cult. When he did that album Electric! When you can hear Rick Rubin and his sharp hip-hop street production coming out of these rockers from Newcastle! For me, seeing someone like him suddenly being in rock and the hardest form of rock—Slayer!—I was, like, ‘These guys don’t get any better, it doesn’t get cooler than that.’ And he kept on delivering . . . People like that inspire me so massively.”
Even better, Def Jam hailed from New York. Sam deeply admired the city, the fashion and culture and music. By day, he wore the stiff uniform of St. Paul’s, by night he fashioned the uniform of NYC. He sat in his room, piled with vinyl records and videotapes, weaving chunky shoelaces as the rappers in New York did. It wasn’t just a superficial love of fashion, it was about underdogs on the fringes who revolutionized a culture.
For Sam’s eighteenth birthday, his dad took him to New York. On arrival, Sam bought a leather jacket and Air Jordan Mach 4 sneakers, as he’d seen on MTV. He roamed the open world downtown, soaking in the sights and the sounds. The yellow taxis. The rising buildings. The surly pedestrians. The hookers in Times Square. “From that point I was chronically in love with the place,” he later recalled.
For lunch one afternoon, Sam’s dad took him out with his friend Heinz Henn, a marketing executive for BMG, the music label for the German company Bertelsmann. BMG, Henn explained, was struggling to cash in on youth culture. As Sam sat there listening, he couldn’t contain himself for long. “Why is everyone in the record business so old?” he asked, “Why don’t you have young people working in this business?”
Henn eyeballed this rich white kid dressed like Run DMC, then spoke to Sam’s dad. Who was this hot-tempered but very self-assured boy? “Your son is an utter lunatic,” Heinz told him, “but he has some good ideas.”
Sam had just scored himself a job.
I’m ’bout to bust some shots off. I’m ’bout to dust some cops off.”
It was July 16, 1992, as the performer rapped onstage in Beverly Hills, but this wasn’t Ice-T, the artist who wrote these lyrics. It was the square-jawed superstar actor Charlton Heston. Though best known for his portrayal of Moses in the Ten Commandments, Heston brought his booming voice to the Regent Beverly Wilshire Hotel for a higher cause today: getting this song, “Cop Killer,” banned.
The occasion was the annual shareholders meeting of Time Warner, which owned the label that put out this record. Since the release of the track in March, “Cop Killer” had become a national controversy, decried by police groups and President Bush. Ice-T, who had written it in the wake of the recent Rodney King riots, defended it as an honest wake of the recent Rodney King riots, defended it as an honest portrayal of a character fed up with police brutality.
Yet the shareholders in the crowd today seemed to be believing everything Heston had to say. As he bellowed the refrain—“Die die die pig die!”—one man watched the performance in awe: Jack Thompson. Born-again and Republican, Thompson had the readiness of a schoolboy dressed for a yearbook photo. He wore his suits crisp, his prematurely graying hair neatly combed at the part, his blue eyes twinkling. He could feel the electricity of the moment. Heston had, as Thompson later put it, “lit the fuse on the culture war.”And this young warrior was ready to fight.
Compared to the NRA supporter onstage, however, Thompson hardly seemed like the warring kind. Growing up a scrawny straight-A student from Cleveland with a debilitating stutter, Thompson was so myopic that he’d run across the Little League field chasing balls that didn’t exist. His fellow players hated him. “It was fairly traumatic,” he later recalled. One day he acted out. He went into his garage, poured gasoline on the floor, tossed gunpowder caps around, and started pounding them with a hammer until they exploded in flames.
Thompson survived the prank but enjoyed the heat. An eighteen-year-old Robert Kennedy acolyte and liberal, he got his tires slashed and life threatened after leading a student protest to desegregate housing. He listened to Crosby Stills and Nash, and hosted a radio show at Dennison University.
But Jack had a Ripper growing inside. When a Black Panther student replaced the school’s American flag with a Black Power flag, Thompson confronted him. “What are you doing?” he asked. “We share the American flag!” The guy pulled a machete on him. Thompson recoiled, literally and philosophically. “It was a radical time, and you had to choose sides,” he later recalled. “I became a conservative over the lunacies of political correctness.”
With a William Buckley book tucked under