Thug Life Army

Taxi driver Michael Boldon was a family man who hailed from Michigan; and his passenger, Sandra Sutton-Wasmund, came from a loving Washington state family and was well regarded in her community.

The three lives ended early Thursday in violence normally seen only in movies: gunfire, a fiery crash and an explosion before dawn on the neon-lit Las Vegas Strip.

Police continued Saturday trying to find the gunman in a black Range Rover SUV who triggered the shocking chain of events, while families and friends in Las Vegas, California, Michigan and Washington tried to grasp the blink-of-an-eye finality of it all.

"Right now my heart is breaking," said Cherry's great aunt, Patricia Sims, of Oakland, Calif. "This has really been a tragedy. Kenny was just a delightful kid."

Sims, 75, said Cherry moved to Las Vegas from Northern California, though she didn't know her nephew was a rapper using the name Kenny Clutch.

Cherry's parents were in Las Vegas on Saturday to claim his body. The 27-year-old, whose full name is Kenneth Wayne Cherry Jr., was driving a Maserati that was peppered by gunfire before it sped through a red light and smashed into Boldon's taxi. The coroner said he died of a gunshot to the chest.

The taxi exploded into flames, killing Boldon and Sutton-Wasmund, and four other vehicles crashed like pinballs at an intersection overlooked by some of Las Vegas' most famous hotel-casinos: Bellagio, Caesars Palace, Bally's and the Flamingo.

Police think an argument at the valet area of the upscale Aria resort-casino led to the shooting, but they haven't shared details. The shooting happened the same night that Morocco-born rapper French Montana was playing at Aria's signature nightclub, Haze.

"What the original disagreement was is crucial to the ongoing investigation and the identification of the suspects," said Las Vegas police officer Bill Cassell.

He said investigators were examining surveillance video and enlisting help from federal authorities and agencies in neighboring states to look for the distinctive Range Rover. It had blackout windows and custom black rims and was last seen speeding away from the fiery scene around 4:30 a.m. Thursday.

Police said a passenger in the Maserati was wounded in the arm but was treated at a hospital and released. He was reported to be cooperating with investigators, and his name wasn't made public.

Cherry's father, Kenneth Cherry Sr., of Emeryville, Calif., said he was struggling to handle his grief.

He said his son started a music career in Oakland after attending two Catholic high schools. According to his father, Cherry was recognized by other rappers within a West Coast hip-hop strain called hyphy.

Cherry was not well-known in wider music circles, according to Chuck Creekmur, CEO of AllHipHop.com.

"I had never heard his name before," Creekmur said.

Kenny Clutch's YouTube music video, "Stay Schemin," shows scenes of hotels along the Strip as he sings about paying $120,000 for his Maserati.

"One mistake change lives all in one night," he raps in one verse.

Cherry Sr. said he didn't know how his son made money or if he had any other jobs.

"I want to make it clear that my son was no gangster or nothing like that," he told The Associated Press. "He moved to Vegas about six year ago and he was writing music and rap."

Court records show Cherry had no criminal cases or convictions in Las Vegas, and Cassell said there was no record of arrests.

The police spokesman wouldn't say whether investigators determined if Cherry owned, rented or borrowed the Maserati. Cassell called that information "integral to the investigation."

Meanwhile, Boldon's family struggled to cope with his death.

"It's very devastating for us, for my family," said Tehran Boldon, 50, younger brother of the 62-year-old taxi driver. "Our family has no history of violence or gang membership that would predict losing a family member to such an event."

Boldon's sister, Carolyn Jean Trimble, said Boldon was a father, a grandfather and a car enthusiast. He was one of five children born and raised in Michigan, where he took care of his ailing father, who fought cancer, before moving to Las Vegas to be with his 93-year-old mother.

Bolden had owned a clothing store in Detroit and worked at a car dealership, his sister said. He began driving taxis after moving to Las Vegas about 1 1/2 years ago.

Boldon loved watching IndyCar and NASCAR races and drove a Mercedes when he wasn't in a cab. An avid car enthusiast, he tried to persuade Trimble to buy a Bentley, she said.

"Everybody just loved him," the older sister said. "When that car hit that cab, Mike had to be in there talking and laughing."

The irony that a man with a taste for beautiful cars was killed by a sports car wasn't lost on Trimble.

"He would be tickled to death: 'Damn, of all things, a Maserati hit me, took me out like that,'" she said. "I'm happy he didn't suffer."

The Clark County coroner said both Boldon and his passenger, Sutton-Wasmund, died of blunt force injuries and ruled their deaths as homicides. Sutton-Wasmund, 48, was from Maple Valley, Wash.

Sutton-Wasmund co-owned a dress shop called The Dazzled Dame and had been in Las Vegas attending a trade show with her partner in the shop, said Debbie Tvedt, the office manager for a Maple Valley plumbing company, All Service Plumbing, that Sutton-Wasmund started with her husband, James Wasmund.

"It's a big loss," Tvedt said tearfully in a telephone interview with AP. "This woman was everything to this community.

"Sandi was very, very, very active with the Maple Valley Chamber of Commerce and our entire community," she said.

The Maple Valley-Black Diamond Chamber of Commerce website said Sutton-Wasmund was a board member from 2004 to 2011 before becoming a marketing representative.

Tvedt said her friend was a mother of three — a 17-year-old son, a 12-year-old daughter and an 11-year-old son.

"Sandi was a loving wife, mother, daughter and sister. Her innocent and tragic loss will be felt by all of those who knew and loved her and by the community at large," said a statement provided to KING-TV in Seattle on behalf of the woman's family.

A phone message left for James Wasmund was not immediately returned.

Besides Cherry's passenger, police said five people were treated for injuries after the six-vehicle crash. No one was said to face life-threatening injuries.

Jogger Eric Lackey snapped a cellphone photo of the blazing scene moments after the crash. Black smoke billowed from the flaming taxi, amid popping sounds from the fire.

The famously glowing, always-open Las Vegas Strip was closed for some 15 hours before reopening Thursday night. One Nevada Highway Patrol sergeant recalled a similarly long closure after the 1996 drive-by slaying of rapper Tupac Shakur.

That shooting — involving assailants opening fire on Shakur's luxury sedan from a vehicle on Flamingo Road — happened about a block away from Thursday's crash.

The Shakur killing has never been solved.

Among the most important rap albums released over the last year or so, one contains a song about Nas’ complicated relationship with his teenage daughter. Another has a track in which Killer Mike outlines President Reagan’s contribution to the prison-industrial complex. A third disc finds Drake pondering the impossibility of real-life romantic connection in the age of the nip-slip Twitpic.

The title of Drake’s record, which last week won the Grammy Award for rap album? “Take Care.”

To say that hip-hop has evolved over the last 25 years — since the days when rappers such as Ice-T and Ice Cube were terrorizing the likes of Tipper Gore, who famously lobbied for the adoption of the Parental Advisory sticker — seems an almost-laughable understatement, equal to saying that the Internet has had some effect on the way we consume music. Once perceived as a site of uncut nihilism, hip-hop has made room, in a way that outsiders can’t ignore, for practicality and ambivalence and staunchly middle-aged concerns. Achievement too.

And it’s become more peaceful, at least on the surface. At a moment in which the depiction of violence in other forms of media appears increasingly graphic, much of the conflict in hip-hop has moved inward, its players fighting battles of ideas and emotions.

How did this happen?

In a sense the music forced itself to change. The back-to-back slayings of 2Pac and the Notorious B.I.G. (in 1996 and 1997, respectively) served terrible notice that gangsta rap — with its ever-intensifying cycle of threats and reprisals — had gotten all too real, a verbal arms race turned dangerously corporeal. No longer were rappers working in the shadowy in-between-world of showbiz persona, portraying characters on record but retreating to safety outside the studio.

Avatars of a gang-related West Coast-East Coast feud, Tupac Shakur and Christopher “Biggie Smalls” Wallace died the deaths of their alter egos — a dramatic indication that in music, as distinct from movies and television, the separation sometimes disappears between art and artist. Try to imagine Oliver Stone, who last year took up the horrific Mexican drug war in his film “Savages,” in anything approaching the same kind of jeopardy.

But the diminishing role of violence in hip-hop also reflects the genre’s shifting circumstance. One of rap’s central victories is that it can move freely now through subject matter; it doesn’t have to adhere to an enforced set of topics — at least not any more than country or R&B or rock ‘n’ roll has to. And that’s opened the music to artists without the kind of street experience that once seemed required of them.

Drake, for instance, spent his adolescent years as the star of a Canadian teen TV show, while Kanye West (who’s done as much as anyone in recent years to destabilize old hip-hop verities) grew up in suburban Chicago the son of a prominent English professor. Do these performers know violence firsthand? Possibly. But it doesn’t seem to define their outlook, nor is it the thrill we seek vicariously in their records.

“The traditional gangsta-rap narratives don’t hold the grandiose power they used to,” said Nelson George, an author and filmmaker whose work includes “Hip Hop America,” as well as the Chris Rock gangsta-rap spoof “CB4.” Those narratives have been weakened in part through overuse, George said. But he added that violent thrills are emigrating to other forms, such as games. “If you’re 17 years old, you don’t want to listen to a guy shooting somebody,” he said. “You want to be the guy.”

In response, hip-hop’s allure, more often than not, has turned aspirational, as on ASAP Rocky’s 2013 major-label debut, “Long Live ASAP.” Here this young Harlem MC describes a tantalizing lifestyle populated by beautiful women and filled with high-end luxury goods; one track, “Fashion Killa,” basically amounts to a laundry list of fashion labels: “She got a lot of Prada, that Dolce & Gabbana / I can’t forget Escada and that Balenciaga.” Even-tempered and sleekly realized, the music on “Long Live ASAP” feels uninterested in (or perhaps unimpressed by) the rough concerns of the corner.

The same goes for “Finally Famous” by Big Sean, a West protege with little use for struggle. “I’m just doing better than what everyone projected,” he boasts in “My Last,” “I knew that I’d be here, so if you ask me how I feel / I’m-a just tell you it’s everything that I expected.”

If ASAP Rocky and Big Sean float above gang culture, as though its crude distractions had become passe, other rappers seem stationed outside it. On last year’s “good kid, m.A.A.d city” — named the best hip-hop album of 2012 by many critics — Kendrick Lamar details plenty of violence in his native Compton, where gangsta rap was more or less invented by N.W.A. in the late ‘80s. But Lamar presents himself as an observer, not a participant, a stance the Roots also took for their 2011 album, “Undun,” which recounts the short life of a small-time hood in painstaking reverse-chronological order.

“I turned 20 and realized that life wasn’t getting anyone anywhere,” Lamar told The Times in October. “You hear stories from the ‘80s about people selling dope and becoming millionaires, but in reality it’d just be guys walking around with $70 in their pockets. I knew I wanted something else.”

There are, of course, exceptions to this disarmament. The teenage Chicago rapper Chief Keef — the most visible member of that city’s so-called drill scene — spent a portion of 2012 under house arrest as a result of gun charges; he later made headlines when he appeared to joke about the murder of a rival MC on Twitter. And Rick Ross, that rotund purveyor of good-life extravagance, has been drawn into gang matters of late: Last month, he was caught up in a drive-by shooting in Florida, the apparent target of a group reportedly unhappy with Ross’ lyrical references to a gang leader.

Yet that development seemed to surprise even Ross, who’s happily (and successfully) made himself into a caricature in the years since a website revealed his background as a former corrections officer.

The violence on Ross’ records plays like Grand Guignol; it vibrates on an entirely different wavelength than N.W.A.’s did. The intrusion of actual gunplay into the rapper’s actual life felt weirdly old-fashioned.

http://www.heraldandnews.com

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