Baggs Lo
interview excerpt
BL: And then I moved to Bedstuy and never moved back, right.
SG: That’s a fact.
BL: Yeah so, it was Bedstuy Do or Die after that.
SG: Then there’s you. What about Bedstuy makes you represent it in that way?
BL: You know what man, Bedstuy just turns you into something. You know, you kind of had options, right? There was just a variety of things to do in Bedstuy. You can go down any road you wanted to, pick your path. It just turned you into a , I can’t say it turned you into a man because we were still little kids, doing little kid things, right. But it made you grow up a lot faster because you had to be aware of your surroundings. We grew up in an era when there were a lot of variables.
SG: Yeah, just for context we’ve gone down the yellow brick road with these interviews. So, you don’t gotta keep it cute. We’ve spoken about niggas running up in the spot. Cats getting into shit downtown. We’ve done all that.
BL: Oh, so it aint PG? It’s aint PG.
SG: Nah, Nah! It ain’t PG. You can go ahead
BL: Ok, so it was the devils hop yard at one point. We was swimming in crack. As soon as you went outside you just saw everything that was going on in the neighborhood. As a child we didn’t realize that these were not normal things to see for a childs eyes. You know what I mean. You see all these things going on in your environment and you think it’s normal. Like, I literally, when we moved to Bedstuy, we moved from an apartment in Flatbush to a brownstone in Bedstuy, right. Now, this is 1988 I want to say, and that brownstone at the time cost $28,000 you know what I mean? No, I’m wrong, my fault, $29,000, right. And, it was a crack house before we moved in there. I didn’t know these things when I moved in there though. You know I was a child. The house next to it was a crack house and was a crack house up until 8 or 9 years ago. You know what I mean. My whole life I grew up next door to a crack house, and that was normal. You know we knew the people who lived there. We go outside we see fiends, you see people just running up and down doing craziness. House getting broken into. I never knew my mother used to stay up at the front door, with a, what she say with a machete in her hand waiting for somebody to come. So, I’m like yall was ready. That’s crazy like to think that that’s what they had to do to keep us safe. Like I said, at that time I didn’t have a conscience. I was going crazy. It was an addictive thing, especially before you got caught.
