“It is almost midnight in Harlem,” Barry Michael Cooper wrote at the start of his article about crack cocaine for “Spin” magazine in 1986, “and the colorless summer night has painted the row of tenement buildings, storefronts, sidewalks, cars, buses, and people in shades of the unknown in this concrete netherworld.” That article earned him an award from the National Association of Black Journalists. Those images would later be cinematically embellished in the script of his films; they also proliferated in his journalism.
According to the Nelson George mixtape, Cooper, 66, died on Jan. 21 or 22 in Baltimore. George, who once shared the pages of the “Village Voice” with Cooper, said Cooper made it possible for him to write for the publication. “It was a key moment in my career and life,” George said.
Like another writer at the “Voice,” the late Greg Tate, a voice for hip-hop and rap, Cooper captured the zeitgeist of the crack epidemic, and incorporated it into such films as “New Jack City” (1991), “Sugar Hill” (1993), and “Above the Rim” (1994). Harlem was the location for the films, and as George related, Cooper was an embodiment of the community where he was born. He grew up in Washington Heights and the Esplanade Gardens, a co-op high rise.
Cooper’s writing career began and flourished at the “Voice,” where his music criticism soon combined with his investigative journalism. After the publication of his story about “Teddy Riley’s New Jack Swing: Harlem Gangsters Raise a Genius,” he was credited with coining the emerging hybrid of R&B and rap as “New Jack Swing.”
A subsequent article, “Kids Killing Kids: New Jack City Eats Its Young,” caught the attention of Quincy Jones, who hired Cooper to rewrite a screenplay about Nicky Barnes, the Harlem heroin dealer. Cooper updated the drug kingpin’s story to the decade-later crack craze; the result starred Wesley Snipes, with Chris Rock and Ice T. During an interview, Cooper said he wanted the movie to be both educational and entertaining — “edutainment,” a phrase he attributed to the vocalese Eddie Jefferson.
The film rings with authenticity that Cooper packs into nearly every line, such as Nino (Snipes) saying, “Brothers don’t wait to get paid. Money walks and bullshit runs the marathon.”
In 1994, I watched the film crew arrive in my neighborhood to shoot portions of “Above the Rim,” featuring Tupac Shukur. “The casting is especially adroit, with Leon (the handsome star of ‘Cool Runnings’) well used as a foil for Birdie,” Janet Maslin of the “New York Times” wrote in her review. “Leon is as much the cool customer as Mr. Shakur is the angry hothead, so the casting works strictly as a matter of contrast. The story, by Mr. Pollack and Benny Medina (Mr. Pollack wrote the screenplay with Barry Michael Cooper), gives this relationship an effective extra twist. But as Dean Van Nguyen observes in his new biography of Shakur, the film is ‘a solid enough street basketball flick, neither as raw and from the gut as Juice, or an effective showcase for Tupac’s acting ability as Poetic Justice.’”
In 2005, Cooper made his debut as a director with “Blood on the Wall$,” a 14-part web series starring Michael Wright of “Sugar Hill.” Three years later, he produced the “Larry Davis episode” of a BET crime documentary, “American Gangster,” the highest -rated original-series telecast in BET’s history.
For the remainder of his life, Cooper published a blog,”Hooked on the American Dream.” In 2011, “Hooked on the American Dream,” Vol. 1: “New Jack City Eats Its Young,” was a collection of essays in the American Kindle edition.
Many of Cooper’s fans were hoping that he would one day complete his thoughts about the conjunction of Dr. King and Malcolm X’s speeches, particularly “I Have a Dream” and “Message to the Grassroots,” with the world of hip-hop and New Jack Swing.
