The following is a article that ran as a special feature in this past Sunday’s Post-Tribune:
Gary Rapper a throwback to 1990s’ heyday of gangsta rap
The landmarks of rising gangsta rap star Freddie Gibbs’ youth rise bleakly against a gray December sky:
Here is the house where Gibbs was raised, and the burned-out crack house next door; worn-out looking Washington Park, where Gibbs climbed on the jungle gym and shot baskets; the cracked, weed-strewn concrete pad on Virginia Street that was a Dairy Queen; a few blocks away is the liquor store where his cousin was shot dead.
On a freezing December day, Gibbs is taking his California-born girlfriend on a tour of the pothole-pitted streets of his hometown, the subject of his critically acclaimed mix tapes. The scenery is familiar material to gangsta rap music listeners, a genre decried for glorifying the culture of violence and drugs in American inner cities, though the settings more often are Brooklyn, Los Angeles or, in more recent releases, New Orleans, Houston or Chicago.
Gary is apparently fertile ground for rap, to judge the acclaim for Gibbs’ Gary-centric mix tapes — including “Live From Gary, Indiana.”
Gibbs has not signed to any record label since he was dropped from a development deal with Interscope Records two years ago, but has built a following on the Internet that includes critics from The New Yorker, LA Weekly and the music Web site Pitchfork, who praise his gruff, staccato delivery of stories bleak, violent and, in the strange nostalgia of gangsta rap, sentimental.
The New Yorker dubbed him the future of hip-hop music. Pitchfork’s review of one of Gibbs’ online record releases ends: “Guys like Freddie Gibbs are saving rap.”
By all accounts, Gibbs is on the way to something big. Record companies have come calling again.
“They’re all coming around, offering the same deal, a $250,000 advance,” Gibbs said. “I’m holding out for at least $1 million. I can make $250,000 on my own, doing what I’m doing.”
If Gibbs seems to hold outsize hopes for his future, keep in mind, he already has caught more breaks than most 27-year-olds from Gary. He clearly is expecting another.
“When I get there, I’d like to do something with that park,” he says as he turns past Washington Park, motes of gray snow serpentining across frozen brown grass. “Maybe they’ll name it after me.”
If the day ever comes when the city considers a Gibbs Park, there may be more debate than when city leaders were begging Michael Jackson and his family to locate a museum in Gary.
While Michael had courtroom baggage and died of drug-related causes, he never, as Gibbs does in nearly every one of his videos, smoked marijuana on camera. And Gibbs’ hit “Murder On My Mind” is unlikely to have the same toe-tapping, multigenerational appeal as Jackson’s “Thriller.”
Freddie Gibbs is not, in fact, his name. Gibbs’ real name, confirmed by Gary Police Vice Squad detectives, is Freddie Tipton.
As Freddie Tipton, he starred as a wide receiver at West Side High School and made the team at Ball State University. Gibbs was the alias he gave to police throughout his youth, to avoid embarrassing his father, a Gary police officer who moonlighted as a singer.
Freddie Tipton was arrested more than six years ago for gun possession in Tolleston Park in what he admits was an obvious, late-night marijuana deal.
Gibbs’ parents were mortified at the arrest. At a court hearing, Gibbs refused to tell the judge where he’d gotten the gun, and said he found it at the park.
“And she (the judge) said, ‘You mean to tell me if I go to Tolleston Park, I’ll find a gun lying there?’ And Freddie said, ‘Maybe you will and maybe you won’t,’ ” said his mother, Linda. “I would have locked him up.”
Gibbs, who said he was kicked out of Ball State after his freshman year, got and lost a succession of minimum-wage jobs. When he was charged again with drug possession, he was given the chance to avoid jail time by enlisting in the Army.
He finished boot camp and managed to almost immediately earn a dishonorable discharge by regularly smoking weed. He made his way into music when he went to a Gary recording studio to sell drugs to aspiring rappers.
All of this is no longer news to Linda Tipton, who has read about Gibbs’ street life in magazine profiles and heard about it in her son’s lyrics. But it remains a mystery to her.
Gibbs’ younger sister is a graduate student in environmental science. His younger brother graduated from Notre Dame and is applying to medical school.
“We are all hoping he turns his rap around for Jesus,” Linda Tipton said, shortly after she is handed a copy of LA Weekly with her oldest son glowering on the cover.
Asked, after his mother has left, about his plans for a Christian rap career, Gibbs said, “That ain’t gonna happen.”
Throwback to earlier rap era
Gibbs’ musical stylings are a throwback to the 1990s’ heyday of gangsta, when Ice Cube and Tupac Shakur shocked audiences with violent images of life as a young black man in a blighted city.
The scene for much of the West Coast gangsta rap were locales like South Central Los Angeles or Compton, Calif., areas about Gary’s size, with a comparable murder rates.
“The stuff I rap about, that’s just what it is. It’s like being a journalist,” he said. “Even when I was selling drugs, it was just to get a little something, a pair of shoes, a girlfriend. I never saw myself becoming a big player.”
Gibbs said he works eight-hour days — his mixtape “The Labels Tryin to Kill Me!” has 81 tracks — with producers from his Interscope days.
His income comes from live shows and he’s finding himself in demand and bigger venues thanks to the Web and critical buzz. This time, he’s made his own break.
He left Gary to avoid the fate of former Gary rap groups that achieved regional fame when Gibbs was in high school, like MCA and The Grind Family — which broke up after key members of the groups were convicted in massive drug conspiracies. Gibbs regularly talks to Grind Family member and current federal inmate Will Scrilla.
For Gibbs’ part, he is serving probation for a second gun charge in California and he avoids trouble.
“My music doesn’t tell people to go out and do the things I’ve done,” Gibbs said. “Those guys that have $5 million in the bank and get caught with a gun? That won’t be me.
“I was carrying because I needed to be carrying then. When I’ve got $10 million, I’ll have security.”
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