Barry Michael Cooper, a pioneering journalist and screenwriter, died on Tuesday, Jan. 21, in Baltimore, Md., at 66. Cooper’s death was confirmed by a representative for Spike Lee, according to “Variety.”
Cooper is best known for penning a trifecta of Hollywood films in the early ’90s, collectively called the “Harlem Trilogy.” The first, the Mario Van Peebles crime-drama “New Jack City” (1991), starring Wesley Snipes, placed viewers smack-dab in the middle of Harlem at the height of the crack epidemic. “Sugar Hill” (1994) and “Above the Rim” (1994) soon followed.
When I connected with Cooper by phone last year for a story I was doing for the 30th anniversary of the “Above the Rim” soundtrack, I was humbled to find him more curious about me and my writing. He even told me he read some of it. “You found a lane for yourself, brother. I commend you, one journalist to another.” Then he told me to get to it because he had to get back to rewrites on a Spike Lee project.
Born in Harlem, N.Y., and raised in Little Washington Heights between 164th and 165th Streets on Amsterdam Avenue, Cooper was a lifelong writer. He spent his first year of college at his mother’s alma mater, the HBCU North Carolina Central University. There, he continued to hone his craft in an honor’s English program, enveloping himself in the works of Richard Wright and Flannery O’Connor.
A year later, he transferred to Medgar Evers College in Brooklyn where in the late 1970s he wrote an unpublished novel, “Out of the Mouth,” which he described as a quasi-science fiction book set in Harlem. Throughout Cooper’s life, the Black Mecca was always on his mind.
When the book failed to land a publisher, Cooper’s girlfriend at the time encouraged him to take up journalism, reminding him that Wright and Hemmingway started out as journalists.
Cooper said his first piece was for a local circular called Big Red in Brooklyn. He sent another one of his early pieces to the Amsterdam News, because he was always fond of Nelson George’s writing.
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Soon, Cooper made inroads at the “Village Voice,” too, including with editor Robert Christgau, affectionately known as the “grand poobah.” Cooper penned a spec review of Parliament’s “Gloryhallastoopid” (1979), and combed through the White Pages to find Christgau’s number, calling him at “damn near at 12 midnight” to pitch. “‘I’ll tell you what. Bring it to me. Let me take a look at it,’ Cooper recalled Christgau saying. “‘If it’s good, I’ll run the piece. If not, don’t ever call me at 12 midnight because I’ll call the cops on you.’”
Cooper showed his chops and started writing regularly for the “Voice,” including its first piece explicitly about rap music, “Buckaroos of the Bugaloo,” about Funky 4 + 1, in January 1981.
Cooper also started writing for the “Voice” competitor, the “SoHo Weekly News,” where he did a piece on Prince’s 1980 “Dirty Mind” album and got to interview the legend himself. He told me he didn’t take it lightly that he and George were the only two Black journalists to talk to Prince during that time.
Soon, Cooper found a desire to move beyond just writing about music. By 1984, he was living in Baltimore with his wife and kids, and started hearing through sources about a new epidemic rocking the streets of Harlem. Hot on the trail and pitching the story around, he was initially met with skepticism. Some even thought he made the entire story up. But the groundbreaking feature, “CRACK,” found a home in the February 1986 edition of “SPIN” and became the first national magazine story to examine the emerging crack-cocaine epidemic of the 1980s.
The hits kept coming for Cooper, including a 1988 cover story about Teddy Riley that had the journalist coining the term “new jack swing” to describe the piping-hot brand of funky R&B with a hip-hop twist that was all the rage in the late ’80s and early ’90s. A year prior, “New Jack City Eats Its Young” in the “Village Voice” got the attention of Quincy Jones, leading Cooper the journalist to Hollywood.
“New Jack City” became the highest-grossing independent film of 1991, paving the way for a host of other films to come. In 1994, Cooper somehow performed the sleight of hand of having two movies released within a month of each other — a first for a Black scribe, according to him. In “Above the Rim,” basketball is at once poetry and pugilism, with Tupac, Leon, Duane Martin, Bernie Mac, and many others delivering classic performances.
Cooper said the film was based on the life of Lloyd “Swee’Pea” Daniels, a Queens basketball high school standout, but Cooper flipped that to Harlem with specificity as the camera lingered on fixtures like Wilson’s Bakery and Movie Center 5.
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Growing up in the area, Cooper and his friends regularly went to Rucker Park to watch Dr. J, Tiny Archibald, and other stars hit the court. After a quick stop at the corner store for juice, Cooper said he and his pals had to get a seat by 7:30 in the morning if they were going to see Dr. J play by 5 in the evening.
Cooper recalled almost meeting Tupac on set one day in October 1993, with the writer having to jet uptown from a Jeff Redd project in SoHo during rush hour traffic. He just missed the rapper.
Cooper’s films were part of a larger tapestry of a major Black filmmaking renaissance, and the soundtracks of these films, replete with classic ’90s hip-hop and R&B, was the cherry on top. Even during the Blaxploitation era, Cooper noted, most of the people behind the camera — those with real power — weren’t Black, but in the ’90s, Black stories were told with all of our images and all of our sounds.
“We’ll never see a time like the early ’90s,” Cooper told me. “That was to me, the belle epoch of Black film. It caught white people off guard. They weren’t ready for ‘New Jack City’; they weren’t ready for ‘Boyz n the Hood.’”
Cooper continued to work steadily between journalism and film, including serving as a supervising producer and writer on the Netflix series reboot of “She’s Gotta Have It.” Cooper was also deeply supportive of the next generation of Black storytellers. Donovan X Ramsey, author of “When Crack Was King” (2023), shared Cooper’s influence.
“Barry Michael Cooper was a giant of Black storytelling — which is, in my opinion, the richest storytelling tradition. For kids like me growing up in the ’80s and ’90s, his tales of Black life in Harlem loomed larger than the works of Shakespeare, Dickens, or Twain. I learned more from Nino Brown than I ever did from Huck Finn.”
Cooper talked about being drawn to stories told from the inside out and said that today, this is still the call for any serious Black storyteller: to focus on telling those real, interior stories about communities too often marginalized, minimized, or misunderstood. In the words of Flip (Bernie Mac) in “Above the Rim”: “They can’t erase what we were.” Neither can anyone erase Cooper’s enduring impact on the culture.
Cooper is survived by his younger son, Matthew, also a filmmaker. His older son died in 2020 during the pandemic. Other information about his survivors was not immediately available.
Ade Adeniji is a culture writer based in Los Angeles and his native New York City. He has been published in outlets such as WIRED, VICE, Rolling Stone, SPIN, CBS News, Newsweek, the Daily Beast, the Guardian, Okayplayer, and Time Out.