The Bloods street gang is one of the largest and most dangerous gangs in America.
With chapters and sets in major cities all around the country,
there are a lot of rappers who have joined up formally or informally.
Most of them affiliate before they become rappers,
a connection that usually helps them out in the industry since there are so many of them there.
Tekashi 6ix9ine is probably the most notorious Blood at the moment
due to the current snitching situation he’s found himself in,
but let’s back up a minute.
6ix9ineis actually Daniel Hernandez,
a kid from the Bronx, raised by a single mom.
To help out financially,
he would pick up odd jobs to work after school.
After his stepfather was murdered near their home, though,
he started suffering from poor emotional health and got kicked out of school.
With all the free time on his hands,
he discovered he could make more money selling drugs than working at the deli,
so he started slinging weed and heroin,
bringing in enough cash to help with the bills and have a bit left for himself.
He was arrested pretty soon after he started but just got a few days of community service.
It wasn’t until 2017 that he decided to join up with a gang.
Fed up with not getting more famous for his music,
Tekashi decided that joining a gang would give him the street cred he needed to push his music career to the top.
He got more than he bargained for, though,
and discovered that life with the Nine Trey Gangsters wasn’t just about the street cred.
Unlike with other sets, a lot of the violence they were doing
was against their own members as everyone tried to show dominance
and increase their standing in the gang.
It’s no wonder that when he was arrested and charged,
he was so quick to give up names of fellow Nine Treys
in that set, it’s every man for himself,
so what did he have to lose?
Like SixNine, 21 Savage is another newish rapper with gang ties.
He was born in London to British parents,
but his mother took him to live with her in Atlanta, Georgia
while his sisters stayed in London with their dad.
Things didn’t go well for him and his mother when they moved over, though,
and they found themselves in the middle of Atlanta poverty,
crime, drug problems, and street violence.
After getting suspended for bringing a gun to school,
Savage’s youth was a series of fights and juvenile detention.
By eighth grade, he had dropped out of school completely to sell drugs fulltime.
Spending time on the streets,
he got to meet the local Bloods and affiliated soon after.
A couple more arrests and the loss of two friends later,
and the gang life was getting to be too much for the rapper.
21 was eager to leave the gang life behind
and turned to music instead,
where he found an outlet for his real-life mishaps.
21 Savage and SixNine are pretty new rappers, though,
and there are a lot of older rappers that have been in hip-hop and gangs longer than the new guys have been active.
“How We Do” rapper The Game was a rising star in the early 2000s
and a driving force hind bringing the West Coast gangster rap scene to mainstream audiences.
He was put into G-Unit by Dre,
a move that helped cement him into the hip-hop world.
Growing up in Compton,
he was raised by parents who were hardcore cripp members
and grew up in a cripp controlled hood called Santana Blocc.
But the rapper calls his family “dysfunctional”
as his older half-brother was a member of the Cedar Block Piru Bloods,
opposing the parents’ cripp status.
The Game decided to follow his brother’s lead instead of the parents and affiliated with the Bloods as a teenager.
In 2001, he was shot by rival gang members and ended up in the hospital to recover.
He had his brother go out and bring back a ton of classic hip-hop albums to listen to,
so while he recovered, he was studying music.
By the time he started making music himself,
he had a ton of the OGs as influence,
which helped him make it big when he started making music.
He didn’t participate much in the gang life after that,
but it came back to bite him when Canada wouldn’t let him in for his tour because of his alleged gang ties.
Giving up the gang life,
or at least most of the gang activities,
is something that a lot of rappers do once they make it big.
Selling millions of albums is a lot more lucrative than slinging dope,
so it makes sense that they’d spend their time in the studio instead of on the street.
Gucci Mane is an artist that has made big changes in his life after his Bloods affiliation got him in trouble.
But unlike other rappers in gangs,
he didn’t join up until he was nearly 30.
He spent most of his youth selling crack,
and then his twenties saw him busy making music,
releasing a few mixtapes,
and getting some collaborations going.
He escaped a murder charge in 2006 and continued focusing on his music.
But in 2009, when he was 29,
there was some serious beef going on between him and Young Jeezy.
Jeezy was affiliated with the cripps,
so Gucci felt that the best thing to do was hook up with the Bloods,
either to have some backup or to just make Jeezy mad.
Gucci started hanging out with The Game and other high-up Bloods for some clout
until he finally called a truce between himself and Jeezy.
The truce only lasted 3 years before Gucci Mane came back for Jeezy
after he brought up old stuff.
30-year-old rapper YG is a famous Blood that’s been with the gang for nearly half his life,
unlike the gang newcomer Gucci Mane.
He was born in Compton in 1990,
right during the big days of gang violence in the city.
His mother did her best, even moving the family out of Compton,
but YG, or Young Gangster,
kept going back because it was all he knew.
He says: “I was a bad, bad kid.
I’d be hanging out, doing crazy ****,
gangbanging, robbing.
I was doing residential burglaries, breaking into people’s houses,
and I went to jail for that.”
His album My Krazy Life
shows all the stuff that he’d been dealing with through childhood and teen years.
He joined up with the Tree Top Pirus,
a Bloods set in Compton,
and the lyrics in his songs are all about the typical gang activities
and the hatred for the rival cripps in the city.
Even as he was trying to make it big,
his time has been torn between the studio and the streets.
He says that even when he was making mixtapes and writing lyrics,
he was still very focused on repping the Bloods.
But his first album is a good look at what he went through,
and as he says, “I’m giving you stories, real-life ****.
I’m giving you me: YG.
My experiences make me who I am.
I want people to respect that.”
For every hardcore gang rapper, though,
there’s one who simply wants to look the part,
and that’s where Chris Brown comes in.
The former church choir singer turned hip-hop artist
is probably most famous for the controversial domestic violence case with then-girlfriend Rihanna.
Instead of a hardcore rapper,
he ended up looking more like a childish wife-beater
and found himself beaten down by early-days cancel culture while Rihanna shot to stardom.
He lost a ton of credibility by beating on a woman,
and he was desperate to get back to making music
that people would actually buy if they could just look over the fact that he hit Rihanna.
In an attempt to recover a bit of street cred
and get some backing from fans,
Chris started throwing up LA Bloods-related gang signs in videos and social media.
No one knew if he was actually affiliated since the signs kind of came out of nowhere,
but the Bloods set Fruit Town Piru
recognized signs Brown was throwing up in an Instagram post,
so he seemed legit.
However, the gang was quick to point out to TMZ that Chris is not officially affiliated with the gang;
he’s not an actual member.
But he apparently has the approval of the gang
since they haven’t said anything about repercussions for using their signs.