Many millennials, if their YouTube videos started getting hundreds of thousands of hits, might start a website, but 22-year-old east Baltimore rapper Young Moose opened a store.
“I gotta start a movement,” Moose said. “Why not have a store?”
Moose, whose real name is Kevron Evans, operates the Out the Mud store, on a section of East Monument Street that may feel more like Spike Lee’s Brooklyn of the 70s or 80s than the burnt-out vacants familiar from The Wire.
The store’s name comes from Young Moose’s mixtapes – Out the Mud Vols 1-3 – and originated in the Louisiana street rap of Lil’ Boosie (now Boosie Badazz), who recently signed Moose to his label. It means coming up from nothing and finding success.
But there are different views of success. However close he has been to breaking out as a national star, Moose has been thwarted by his run-ins with the law. And he seems to keep his eyes firmly fixed on his own neighborhood, where the kids come close to worshipping him.
As he walked the couple of blocks from the store to the house where his grandmother died in a fire when he was 14 – an event which prompted his first song – neighborhood kids followed behind, sometimes at a distance, sometimes joining the crowd of Moose’s crew and a couple reporters. Two fathers came up to ask if their children could get a picture with the swaggering young rapper known for songs about guns and drugs.
“That’s what I feel like, a hero, a young god,” Young Moose said grinning through his gold fronts back at the store on a hot day last summer.
Since Cameron Crowe’s Almost Famous spoofed the rock star as “golden god”, probably not even the most brazen and privileged cock-rocker would make such a claim. But here was a guy in one of the poorest parts of one of the poorest and most segregated cities in America saying he felt like a god.
Moose walks with the swagger and lazy, sly grin of a young Elvis. After what has been, by some measures, Baltimore’s most violent year, Young Moose’s music speaks to the crisis of the city. This summer’s mixtape Moose Leroy: The Last Draggin’ is an ode to malaise and murder.
One mother who lives near Moose’s family in East Baltimore said she banned her older kids from playing Young Moose in the house when her three-year-old started singing his biggest hit, Dumb Dumb.
“They like: ‘Them guns in your video, boy, that’s dumb dumb,’” he raps in the song. “I’m like: ‘I had to let them ... know that we got dumb guns/ Enough for everybody – when we bust we gon’ have dumb fun’.”
Later in the song, he raps about selling both heroin and cocaine.
Lyrics like those – and the videos that show him and his crew with guns and cooking crack – ultimately caught the attention of a Baltimore police detective. Daniel T Hersl knew Young Moose. He’d arrested him before, in 2012, when he went by the name Loose Tooth, and they’d had several more run-ins. In fact, when other cops first started telling Hersl about the videos, Moose was still awaiting trial on his last charge.
Hersl wrote in his statement of probable cause for the warrant that he was “advised by numerous police officers that Kevron Evans has numerous rap music videos on YouTube” and that he “viewed the videos and in them observed Kevron Evans and his associated in possession of multiple firearms”.
The documents paint a picture of a detective who saw the music and videos as an extension of a criminal career, rather than a pathway out of it. “Young Moose even raps about ‘trapping’ which this detective knows through training and experience to be the concealment of illegal street narcotics for distribution, which was the same method used to conceal narcotics in the dwelling,” he wrote.
Now that southern trap music has gone mainstream and Fetty Wap’s Trap Queen spent part of the year at the top of the rap charts, the terminology is common enough that it might not help bolster charges in a criminal case. But at the time, it did.
Using the videos and a controlled buy from a confidential informant, Hersl raided the home of Kevin Evans, Moose’s father, and allegedly found numerous packages of cocaine and heroin hidden in a trap door in a pinball machine in the basement.
But Moose wasn’t at the house. The rest of his family – his father, his two brothers and his mother, who said she just pulled up to see what was going on – were arrested that day. According to the family, Hersl told them he would arrest Moose – and he did, just before Moose was supposed to open for Lil’ Boosie at the Royal Farms arena.
Moose’s trial on these charges begins on Monday and there’s a fair chance he will beat them. Hersl had a bad reputation in the neighborhood and was one of the subjects of a Baltimore Sun investigative report on police officers for whom the city had paid numerous brutality settlements, equalling several hundred thousand dollars in Hersl’s case. And using lyrics in a case, even as part of a probable cause, raises constitutional questions.
Erik Nielson, a professor at the University of Richmond who has served as an expert witness in a number of hip-hop related trials, said this was a growing trend.
“We’re noticing an uptick in the use of rap lyrics and rap videos in the criminal justice process. We’ve identified hundreds of cases where rap lyrics or videos were used in prosecutions where rap was used either as evidence of a defendant’s guilt or lyrics are introduced as threats. The lyrics are the sole basis of the charge,” he said. “Many people will frame it as a first amendment issue with racial implications. I maintain it is a race issue with first amendment implications.”
“It’s never been argued in Maryland on a constitutional basis of freedom of speech,” said Richard Woods, Moose’s lawyer. “It chills free expression if you have non-autobiographical writing used against you in criminal proceedings.”
Originally, Moose was held without bail until a judge ruled it was cruel and unusual punishment. He was released until trial. But Moose’s return home gave the cops a place to focus their attention. For months, there was often a car posted up across the street and both Kevin Evans and Moose’s manager Teron Matthews said that the store was regularly raided, without a warrant.
But there was a warrant in early March, when police raided his family’s home and the Out the Mud store, and charged Moose and three others, including his father, with numerous firearms and drug charges.
His lawyer, who has said the police department has singled out his client for special prosecution, said this was another instance of harassment.
And Moose, still web savvy, managed to post a photo of himself in Central Booking, standing against a wall, wearing a yellow jail jumpsuit.
On last summer’s Ain’t No Sunshine, he teamed up with a young female emcee named Martina Lynch to commemorate the death of Freddie Gray over a sample of the Bill Withers song, reflecting on the way his relationship with Baltimore’s law enforcement is tied both to the death of Gray in police custody and a larger historical trend.
“It been going on like a history,” he said at the store before his arrest. “They did it to Emmett Till, they did it to Rodney King … to Billie Holiday. It’s just history. It’s the truth.”
