Rap refugees: older and wiser

Queens, N.Y.

When you’re young, it’s all about the music. It gives you something to do, to think about, to be.

But days after the funeral of a pioneering rap deejay, two friends approaching middle age were still trying to square his life with theirs.

Edward McCoy, 35, and Tyrone Williams, 45, had both known Jason “Jam Master Jay” Mizell of Run-DMC, and when the church filled with a soul singer’s rendering of “Amazing Grace” at his funeral last week, both men became lost in thought.

From the balcony of a cavernous church brimming with hip-hop trailblazers, Williams said he couldn’t take his eyes off the front pew where Mizell’s young sons kept their heads buried in their mother’s lap. “My life is all about my kids now,” Williams said. “I know those boys will miss Jay.”

McCoy also was struck by Mizell’s photograph in the funeral program. Instead of his usual stage garb -- a scowl, a black leather jacket and unlaced Adidas sneakers -- Mizell wore the uniform of tree-lined street Queens where he grew up. He had a contented smile and a black-and-yellow flannel shirt. He looked happy, posed under a dogwood tree.

In the 1980s, Mizell came to fame scratching a needle back and forth on vinyl records. With crushing beats and inclusive lyrics about life on the street, Run-DMC made hip-hop history by bringing it into the mainstream. Then the trio settled into a bourgeois dream. For Mizell, that meant a family and recording studio in his Queens neighborhood. Although the trio hadn’t had a hit in years, they endured as impressive live performers.

Then, suddenly, Mizell was dead, slain at 37 before he could fashion a second act.

Hope, success, tragedy -- his life becomes another rap story. The hero of such a tale does not confront the complexities of middle age. That is what is left for Williams and McCoy, both ex-rappers.

McCoy is an intimidating figure. At 6-foot-3, he appeared at the funeral in clothes fitting his street name, Lux Diamond. He wore a black leather jacket and matching pants, gold-buckled shoes, diamond studs in his ears and a wide-brimmed black fedora.

A day later, however, he had transformed back into Mr. McCoy. “That’s what they call me at work,” he said.

Mr. McCoy is a New York City bus driver. He lives with his wife of 16 years and three children not far from where he grew up in the Bronx.

“I was never the type of person who threw all my eggs in one basket,” he said. Even when he was rapping at night in a gang, carrying a gun, he was also driving a Coca-Cola truck to support himself, which he did from age 12.

But it was music that sustained him, music that provided all the answers to his questions about life, music that made him feel free -- things that a Buddy Holly or John Lennon or even a Kurt Cobain fan could understand.

A member of the gang Zulu Nation, McCoy spent his teens emceeing at outdoor parties in public parks around the Bronx projects. His friends would plug a sound system into a street power box, play records and McCoy would rhyme over the beats while the kids danced. Mostly, he rapped about his prowess -- his looks, his brim, how good he was.

“I was a battle rapper, but my thing wasn’t ‘I’m the neighborhood street gangsta,’ ” he said. “I almost turned to that. But I liked party raps better.”

Eventually, rap wasn’t enough. Though he had a producer and a record company backing him, he looked at other artists and their dramas and nightmares and realized it wasn’t for him.

“Hanging out all night,” he recalled, “moving around at a whim, I couldn’t live like that. I wanted to keep my family together and build a foundation so my kids wouldn’t go through what I did.”

McCoy has thought about dabbling again in the rap business. But it’s not the same. “I wouldn’t know where I fit in now,” he said.

Williams also got frustrated with the business before he got out; he, too, wishes he could find a way back but is convinced rap has gone beyond him.

As a parent, for example, he doesn’t like rap’s dirty talk. His 11-year-old daughter, Brittney, was dancing in the back seat recently with headphones on when she began to sing a Nelly song. “It’s getting hot in here, I want to take my clothes off,” she crooned. From the front seat Williams yelled at her: “What did you say?”

“I felt like such a hypocrite,” he admitted.

Raised by his grandparents in the Albany projects of Brooklyn, Williams graduated from Howard University and eventually landed at WBLS, a local black radio station, where he ran a news and rap show. Kids like Lux Diamond would bring their tapes and he played them. And then Williams would introduce them to producers. That’s how he got to know Mizell. Finally, Williams started his own business, Cold Chillin’, and affiliated with Warner Bros.

“We’d take the kids on the road and we’d be rappin’ on the bus and behind the stage,” Williams said. “It was the first time these kids had ever left the projects. Money wasn’t so important. It was the fun.”

He had several successful acts -- MC Shan, Big Daddy Kane, Kool G Rap, Roxanne Shante and Biz Markie -- all platinum. His acts came from all the New York boroughs, from the roughest to the most suburban. But he, too, finally let go. “What really made me give it up was in 1995 my son was in Little League. I wanted to coach. So I eased out of it, found a new business.”

Neither Williams nor McCoy understands how violence could have spilled into the life of Mizell, someone they thought immune.

“It doesn’t fit ... the way he died,” Williams said. He never pictured Mizell in a fight that needed settling with a gun.

“With Tupac and Biggie I kind of expected it,” Williams said. “Tupac was looking to die. But Jason didn’t want to. He had kids.”

They still have his music, Williams and McCoy insist. But it had seemed to offer so much more, once, when they were young.