Young rapper Olondis “O-Zone” Walker sat at his studio console, eyes closed, listening to the voice of his dead mentor pour out of the speakers. It was a rap they’d cut a few weeks before that mentor, the hip-hop star called the Jacka, fell to a flurry of bullets a few miles southwest of where O-Zone sat in Oakland.
“F— a handout, I don’t wanna beg,” Jacka raps as an urgent beat propels the words along. “Nobody gave a jack s—, but still a n—a gave. Count my blessings every time I lay.”
O-Zone sighed and clicked off the track. “That’s who Jacka was,” he said softly. “He gave. He told us we gotta do it ourselves, make our lives better ourselves. He was everywhere and anywhere, and he gave a s—.”
It’s a refrain heard last week throughout the hip-hop world, from Oakland to Los Angeles to New York, about a loss that’s being mourned on the same scale as fellow Bay Area rap giants Tupac Shakur and Andre “Mac Dre” Hicks.
Beginning with the Mob Figaz group in the late 1990s, Jacka cut dozens of hard-edged, gritty albums that sold in the hundreds of thousands, becoming a superstar yet never forsaking his roots in the Bay Area’s underground hip-hop scene.
In the videos and publicity stills for the hundreds of songs that the Pittsburg-raised rapper cut, he presents the image of the true hip-hop artist of the street: mean face on, guns sometimes pointed to the camera, a marijuana blunt in his mouth. He spat out and sometimes crooned gangsta lyrics of the ghetto, of growing up poor, dealing drugs, winding up in prison.
But what set the 37-year-old rapper apart is what he said in those lyrics: urging his black brothers and sisters to get clean, pray for deliverance from despair, to drag themselves up with strength and hope. It’s what he tried to demonstrate in his own life — a life that touched millions.
Hard beginning
As with so many starting on the bottom, the future held little light in 1977 when Jacka was born Dominic Newton in Pittsburg to 14-year-old parents. His mother struggled with drugs, his father went to prison, and by the time he was a teenager, he was peddling dope and working odd jobs to help put the food on the table.
But even as he trod what appeared to be the hopeless path of too many minorities without money, the signs were clear early on that he was something special.
Those who knew him best describe Jacka as always having been a humble and spiritual person, but he knew how to kick things up a notch when he had to — in sports, for instance. He excelled in football and basketball, where because of his large size, opponents often underestimated his speed.
“We used to play each other in Pop Warner little league football and Jacka was a defensive linemen,” said Robert “Rob Lo” Mixon, a close friend and longtime music collaborator with Jacka. “The coaches didn’t realize he was fast, though. One game in particular, I remember he recovered a fumble and scored a touchdown. From then on, he was a running back.”
When the music bug bit in his early teens, it bit hard. Rob Lo recalled that in high school, he was awakened by a knock on his door every day at 6 a.m. from Jacka to work on tunes. The two would sit down and record songs for hours, with Rob Lo searching for the right sound to sample from his parents’ record collection, which included the Temptations and the Commodores.
“We were known around the neighborhood for selling $20 to $30 cassette mixtapes of our music,” Rob Lo said. “There would be several songs and beats on those tapes that would circulate throughout the city.”
Growing popularity
It soon became evident that Jacka had talent, and his music rose in popularity on the street. At that point, Rob Lo and Tony “Montana” Core, working as producers and marketers, would help their friend call local record stores in the hopes of getting Jacka’s music in the bins. The trio stuck up hundreds of promotional posters at local high schools until administrators complained.
Jacka was the level-headed, de facto leader, someone who made sure that all his friends had food on their table. In high school, even after he dropped out to pursue music, it wasn’t uncommon to see people waiting in his garage to get a $2 haircut from Jacka, or playing basketball by his house. He was known as a real character, not just for his music.
“I remember he came to my high school for a dunk contest,” Montana said. “He put a 10-speed bike in the gym underneath the basketball rim, ran from half court, and dunked over it. Everyone went crazy, and he won the dunk contest. It was funny because he didn’t even go to the school.”
Rise, fall and return
Radio play led to better sales and better club dates, and by 1999, Jacka was in the Pittsburg hip-hop troupe Mob Figaz. Their debut album on the local West Coast Mafia Records label, “C-Bo’s Mob Figaz,” climbed to No. 63 on the Billboard hip-hop chart on the strength of such vivid songs as “Prepare to Die.”
Then the drugs and criminal life caught up with him. Jacka was convicted of grand theft in Contra Costa County in 2000 and spent a year in prison. That’s when inmates nicknamed him Jacka — and it stuck.
Though his time behind bars looked like the end, it was instead the beginning.
Jacka committed to the Muslim religion that he had studied since he was a boy. And by the time he left jail, friends said, he was clean of dope and determined to do better with the years he had left.
Within months of his release, Jacka dropped his debut solo, “Jacka of the Mob Figaz,” a huge local hit that sold about 30,000 copies.
“He was pro-black, pro-community, pro-kids,” said friend Rocky Rivera, program director of Oakland Kids First.
Jacka continued to refine his message of healing — without help from a major label.
He was following the tradition of “underground rap,” so revered in the Bay Area, in which artists create their own companies — like Jacka’s the Artist Records — and chase success outside the mainstream music industry. With the Internet and state-of-the-art home studios making top-notch tune creation possible for anybody, making good money is also possible — and Jacka did very well.
Soon, as album after album sold thousands of copies and he began to tour the world, Jacka wasn’t just a forceful voice on their radios, say community and music leaders leaders throughout the Bay Area. He was in their lives. Literally.
Everywhere there was a youth cause or organization in Oakland, Richmond, and especially the poorest neighborhoods around, Jacka was known as the smiling superstar who gave his time and his talent freely. He kept his personal life — brother, sisters, mother, children — very private, but one on one, he was an openhearted book.
“He was always so giving,” said longtime manager Prashant Kumar. “Every time we did a show, we couldn’t sell most of the merchandise because Jacka would be giving it away to fans as soon as he got it.”
From “turf summits” to quell gang violence to downtown clubs, youth music programs and the living rooms of aspiring rappers, Jacka spoke and rapped of using prayer to overcome the oppression of poverty and neighborhood killings that can seem as common as the wind.
“His music wasn’t about glorifying, it was about acknowledging life in the ’hood,” said radio personality Leon “DNas” Sykes, who works with Youth Radio in Oakland. “He wasn’t a cold-hearted thug. His time in prison wasn’t his defining piece. He was a brother who’d turned his life around, and everybody respected that.”
Even as his videos and CDs — which he did with many star collaborators, including the godfather of Oakland rap, Too Short — featured pot smoking and tough imagery, Jacka had a positive message. And he wasn’t sneered at when he spoke of peace, because he had legitimacy.
Lyrics convey positivity
In his ode to the Bay Area rap scene, “From the Bay,” he says: “Adolescents tuck weapons, n—as bleed every day, you got to have heart, just to fit up where I stay.”
And from “Kuran,” an exploration of the healing of religion with the spelling he used for his daughter’s name: “I pray to give thanks, and for forgiveness. Allah is my witness, means I’m telling the truth.”
And from “Never Blink,” a bleak representation of why so many turn to drugs and thuggery in the ghetto, he slipped in this exhortation to stay strong: “Man my life ain’t no walk in the park, I spent many nights alone, in the cold, lost in the dark. Me & my sister, nothin but death can break us apart. Inside I’m superman, ain’t nothin breakin this heart.”
Rapper Kevin “Erk tha Jerk” Allen — who got his launch from Jacka in 2007 when he featured him on a track — remembered the star asking him on tour along with rap icons Freeway and Dom Kennedy to perform in the northeastern African country Djibouti in 2011. Freeway and Jacka had been invited as devout Muslims — and Erk said Jacka clearly wasn’t out there just for fun and games, but rather to experience the real culture of the people.
“While we were there we had a deep conversation about religion, and Jacka invited me to attend a mosque with him and Freeway,” Erk said. “We also visited a nearby orphanage and spent time with the homeless kids there. That experience changed my perspective on religion and allowed me to be more open-minded.”
Fellow rap star Stanley “Mistah F.A.B.” Cox, 33, toured the world’s stages with Jacka for the past 17 years, but the bold beats weren’t what touched him most about his friend.
