#SIXNINE GOOBA CODE#
#SIXNINE GOOBA TRIAL#

Iandoli likens this to “ Eminem’s final battle in 8 Mile” and explains: “If you say everything everyone is thinking first, people can’t use it against you. Of course, 6ix9ine soon played Redd at his own game with the ‘GOOBA’ video, reclaiming the image of the rodent.

#SIXNINE GOOBA TRIAL#

After ‘GOOBA’ smashed YouTube records, Snoop Dogg demanded via Instagram: “They gotta stop pushing this rat!” Young artists don’t seem much fonder of him: back in September, when outraged media coverage of 6ix9ine’s trial was at fever pitch, Ohio SoundCloud rapper Trippie Redd released the track ‘Under Enemy Arms’, the video for which featured a rat with his trademark multi-coloured hair. This hasn’t stopped one high-profile spokesperson of hip-hop’s old guard from denouncing 6ix9ine. They don’t even match in sound and style, in content, in lifestyle – so why start there?”

#SIXNINE GOOBA CODE#

You can’t hold these new artists to the hip-hop standard code on the streets in the ‘90s. Since hip-hop is founded on anti-authoritarian values, though, shouldn’t turning informant have spelled the end of 6ix9ine’s music career? “You would think so,” agrees Iandoli, “but you’re talking about a different type of hip-hop. He spent six months in jail (he’d already served 13 months while on trial) and announced his comeback with lyrics barked to the camera with bug-eyed defiance in the ‘GOOBA’ video: “ You’re mad – I’m back.” Anyone expecting 6ix9ine to lay low, fearing potential repercussions of turning on a violent gang (“I come from old-school hip-hop culture,” says Iandoli, “so I’m nervous to see the outcome”), was clearly wide of the mark. He traded the information to avoid 47 years behind bars, instead receiving a two-year sentence. Hernandez claimed that his role had been to “keep making hits and be the financial support for the gang … so they could buy guns and stuff like that.” In return, he explained, “I got the street credibility – the videos, the music, the protection.” Last November, he was arrested in his native New York on firearms and racketeering charges and accused of involvement with the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods gang, an affiliation that reportedly encompassed armed robbery, drug trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder. The rapper admitted to appearing in – and posting to Instagram – a video of a sexual nature with a 13-year-old girl, claiming he believed her to be older. Tekashi 6ix9ine is an artist so steeped in controversy and transgression – without the positive connotations that those words usually carry in music – that, strictly in terms of the news cycle, his more recent activity has eclipsed the child sex charge he faced in 2015. Because social media plays into that so much, the entire scenario reads like a continuous Twitter thread – you’re always tuned in even when the music isn’t there.” “So much of that is the story element around him. “6ix9ine had been building momentum for what that moment would be,” says Kathy Iandoli, a New Jersey-based hip-hop writer whose book God Save The Queens: The Essential History of Women in Hip-hopwas published by Harper Collins last year. At the time of writing, the YouTube views of ‘GOOBA’ stand at more than 279 million. In a brief but telling jump cut, acknowledging that he outraged members of the hip-hop community by ‘ratting’, he transforms into a cartoon rodent.

On May 8, 43 million people tuned in to see the face-tatted social media celebrity, on house arrest and fresh from prison after an astonishing and highly publicized legal case that saw him offer authorities information on a New York gang, flash his ankle bracelet and give an obnoxious grin. The typically nonsensical track is one-part generic trap song and three-parts Fatman Scoop, and its video – 6ix9ine leering at paint-splattered women in a bland studio somewhere – duly became the most-watched hip-hop video on YouTube in a 24-hour period. Last month saw the rapper, whose criminal record makes for truly depressing reading and who is better known as Tekashi 6ix9ine, release the gaudy comeback single ‘GOOBA’.

At just 24 years old, Daniel Hernandez is most hate-watched man in the world.

Sixnine gooba