Counter-Currents
Jamell Demons, aka YNW Melly
1,404 words / 10:59
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On February 11, 2019, a 19-year-old rapper who calls himself YNW Melly — the “YNW” stands for “Young Nigga World” — led a Manhattan nightclub crowd in a singalong of his 2017 single “Murder on My Mind.” The song’s lyrics include:
I wake up in the morning, I got murder on my mind
AK-47’s, MAC-11, Glocks, and nines . . .
And all these pussy niggas hating, tryna knock me off my grind
But I can’t let ’em do it, I got murder on my mind . . .
Bitch, I got murder on my mind (Bitch, I got murder on my mind)
I got murder on my mind (On my mind)
I got murder on my mind (I got murder on my mind)
I got murder on my mind, I got murder on my mind
Heady stuff.
The video for “Murder on My Mind,” which at last count has racked up over a half-billion views on YouTube, depicts Melly shooting a close friend and cradling him in his arms as he dies. Melly — born Jamell Maurice Demons in Gifford, Florida to a single mother who became pregnant with him at age 14 — claims he composed the ditty while serving a yearlong jail sentence for shooting at (and missing) three people near Vero Beach High School in southern Florida when he was 16. (It’s the first time I’ve heard the surname “Demons,” too, but apparently it’s French.)
On February 13, 2019 — only two days after the rousing New York City singalong of “Murder on My Mind” — Melly turned himself in to Florida authorities. He was charged with two counts of first-degree premeditated murder in connection with the October 2018 shooting deaths of two of his closest childhood friends and members of his Young Nigga World hip-hop collective: 21-year-old Anthony “YNW Sakchaser” Williams and 19-year-old Christopher “YNW Juvy” Thomas. Melly’s alleged accomplice, Cortlen Malik “YNW Bortlen” Henry, had been arrested in Texas the previous day.
Young Nigga World Melly, who a month before his apprehension had scored a #73 charting song in a collaboration with intellectual titan and part-time Jew-namer Kanye West, would see “Murder on My Mind” reach #1 on the US Apple Music Chart only a week after his arrest. The song was eventually certified Quadruple Platinum.
It was an extraordinary time to be a Young Nigga in Young Nigga World.
Police in Miramar, Florida allege that YNW Melly and YNW Bortlen had concocted a zany plot whereby they’d kill their two associates and make it look as if they’d been gunned down in a drive-by shooting while they were sitting peacefully in their Jeep Compass. They allege that sometime after midnight on October 26, 2018, Melly, sitting in the Jeep’s back seat, shot and killed his two childhood buddies. They say that after the slayings, both YNW Melly and YNW Bortlen drove around with the bullet-riddled bodies of YNW Sakchaser and YNW Juvy “prior to entering the hospital” in “a calculated effort to establish their version of the incident[.]” Around 4:35 AM, YNW Bortlen, apparently alone by that time, pulled into Memorial Hospital Miramar with two dead YNWs.
Investigators say the following facts contradict the Two Young Niggas’ story that the other Two Young Niggas were killed by strangers in a drive-by shooting:
- There were no reports of gunshots in the area where Melly and Bortlen say the shooting occurred. Neither was there any forensic evidence of shots having been fired in that area.
- According to forensic evidence, the actual crime scene, which was determined by cell-phone records and a K-9 search, had no other vehicles present when the shooting occurred.
- Surveillance video and mobile-phone geotagging contradict Bortlen’s account of the path he drove from the area of the shooting to the hospital.
- Analysis of a .40-caliber shell casing that was found on the floor of the Jeep’s left-rear passenger’s side matched casings found at the crime scene. Surveillance footage reveals that Melly had been sitting in the left-rear passenger’s seat.
- An autopsy on YNW Sakchaser showed that he’d been shot from behind and that the bullet had been fired from less than a yard away, meaning he had to have been shot from someone sitting in the back seat.
- Phone and video evidence contradict testimony from an associate of Melly’s — it’s unclear whether the associate is also a member of Young Nigga World — about the “Murder on My Mind” rapper’s whereabouts at the time of the shooting.
You can buy Jim Goad’s ANSWER Me! here.
If police are correct in their suspicions, it was a brazen plot, if not a very bright one.
It’s unclear why Melly and Bortlen may have schemed to kill their two friends and make it look like a drive-by shooting. If I had to hazard a guess, I’d say they were seeking to snatch the golden ring of the online age: attention.
Melly’s criminal record will work against him at trial, which has been delayed numerous times but may finally begin in the third week of June — more than four years after his arrest.
Apart from the aforementioned bungled school shooting in 2015, he was arrested in July 2016 after fleeing from Florida deputies, who had to tackle him after a routine traffic stop. He was charged with being a felon in possession of a firearm in connection with that incident, but somehow, in this white-supremacist police gulag we pretend is a free country, he evaded the mandatory five years that I was always told comes with such a charge. He is also a suspect in the 2017 shooting death of an off-duty black Florida sheriff’s deputy named Garry Chambliss. In 2018, he was arrested in Fort Myers, Florida and charged with possession of marijuana, as well as possession of a firearm or ammunition by a felon. Yet again, he somehow evaded what every convict I’ve ever known told me was a mandatory five years for the ex-con-with-a-gun charge. Instead, he only spent 25 days in jail.
If he’s found guilty of the double murder rap, Young Nigga World Melly would hardly be the first rapper to be convicted of killing someone.
In 2003, Louisiana rapper C-Murder, born Corey Miller and the voice behind such watershed albums as Life or Death and The Truest Shit Ever Said, was convicted of beating and shooting a 16-year-old fan of his to death at a nightclub.
The same year, Texas-based rapper Big Lurch, née Antron Singleton, was sentenced to life in prison for murder and aggravated mayhem after stabbing his roommate’s girlfriend to death, ripping her lungs from her chest, and leaving bite marks on both her lungs and her face. A witness testified that he saw Lurch, who reportedly had been using PCP the day before the 2002 murder, standing outside naked, blood-smeared, and staring blankly upward in the moments after the grisly killing. Forensic technicians found scraps of human flesh in Lurch’s stomach.
In 2017 Kidd Creole, a founding member of pioneering hip-hop group Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, was arrested and eventually convicted of manslaughter for the stabbing death of a homeless man.
There are plenty of others, too. Rappers with colorful monikers such as Cool C, G. Dep, Chi-Ali, Rosco P. Coldchain, X-Raided, Max B, Mac Minister, J-Dee, and Ra Diggs have all been criminally convicted of either murder or manslaughter.
And that doesn’t count rappers such as widely-beloved American celebrity Snoop Dogg, who was charged with murder but beat the rap. Nor does it count Chicago-born King Von, who was only 11 when his father was killed, was suspected (but not convicted) of over 10 other killings, and was the subject of a documentary that called him “Rap’s First Serial Killer.” He himself was fatally gunned down in Atlanta at age 26.
And it certainly doesn’t tally up the mile-high piles of black bodies slain by rappers and aspiring rappers who were never convicted, charged, nor even suspected.
But if YNM Melly’s trial finally starts later this month, and he is found guilty of premeditated murder and sentenced to death, he will be the first rapper whose fame and chart success qualifies him as more than a mere “aspiring rapper” to receive capital punishment, which in Florida involves either lethal injection or the electric chair. And this will earn him a cherished spot in the hip-hop pantheon, although he’ll probably be too dead to enjoy all the adulation.
Otherwise, it’ll be just another day in Young Nigga World.
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26 comments
And here I thought that these ordinary tales of garden variety sub Saharans was growing tiresome. Is there anything they’d do that would shock anyone??
There is a lot they could do that would shock me. Are they capable of doing these things? Yes, I’d put nothing past them.
Jim saying nigga, in the audio version, is priceless.
If we’re talking menace to society rappers, you also have to include 22 yo Houston rapper Guero 10K, a white Mexican who has gunned down at least four people and is currently incarcerated. ‘Shit can get dark in the daytime, I just smoked me an opp and a wood at the same time.’ He also drops constant n-bombs in his songs but apparently because he is homies with lots of blacks, that is accepted. We also have to throw in there menacing melanated megastars with long rap sheets like 23 yo NBA YoungBoy, 31 yo Young Thug, 31 yo Da Baby, 30 yo Lil Durk, 27 yo Chief Keef, among countless others. We also have to consider rappers that while probably not actually murdering people are so unapologetically dark lyrically that it has to be bad to listeners like 53 yo black Sacramento rapper Brotha Lynch Hung, who since the 90s has made countless horror-themed albums portraying the deeds of a cannibalistic serial killer-rapper. ‘But now I’m like J. Dhamer, I’m chewing up all the evidence, I kill to get my fix, that human meat fix, bite until the skin rips that sick nigga so sick, living dead ever since.’ Other rap groups like the iconic Memphis group Triple Six Mafia and their wildly successful millennial white proteges, New Orleans rap duo Suicideboys, also traffick in shock value and extremely dark imagery in their lyrics. By comparison, YNW Melly is a lightweight. A deeply disturbed and unwell young person sure, but that’s not exceptional or particularly interesting in itself.
Although I have never looked up the lyrics, I did endure hearing about 20 minutes of “Death Metal” at someone’s house — the father of the lead singer — before I had to call a halt. So, my friendly White folks, we have our weird tales to tell as well. The music alone was earthshaking to listen to, though I hope it doesn’t induce anyone to kill another or off themselves.
I would wager that, as with most of the stuff that passes for ‘poetry’ nowadays, the lyrics were bereft of syntax, scansion or correct spelling. Verse is not, as is popularly imagined, an ad lib assemblage of prose lines with the occasional attempt at rhyme or half-rhyme thrown in. Children are capable of that, so that despite being fawned over by trendy academics, the lyrics of rappers seem to us infantile in both intention and construction. A poet is expected to make sense within the constraints of his (or her) chosen metrical form(*) and it is, or ought to be, supreme artistry to enrich the words with music: refer to Schubert or Richard Strauss to give but two examples. At the other end of the aesthetic ladder we have the tuneless dirges of the death-metallists and the orc-chants of the rappers, and it is not edifying to hear too much of those, for they convey only the spiritual void and societal chaos that spawned their creators,
(*) See Stephen Fry’s superb primer The Ode Less Travelled.
Most music of that type is truly painful to listen to, in part because you’re thinking “What kind of sickos would seek this out to enjoy?”
The evil of it gets ratcheted up when it’s forced on unwilling listeners via loud car & home stereos. Modern trash culture is vile and disturbing. Harley loud pipes are a related topic. People think being a scumbag is a source of pride.
I find it impossible to listen to that cacophonous, manic yapping for even one second.
I’ve got no idea who these untalented cunts are.
‘Sakchaser’ ?
Was he gay?
Remember, these people are only a dozen or so generations removed from actually killing each for fresh meat on the hoof. Cannibalism.
Antron Singleton is, in fact, a Vampire.
This story is so mind blowing that I hardly know how to comment. But the sentence that stands out the most involves the fact that this horrid rap ‘song’ has sold or been down-loaded a half-billion times. That’s like pouring black tar in both your ears. No wonder there is still such a massive divide on all levels in the U.S. between Blacks and the rest of us.
Unfortunately, the biggest consumers of this worthless audio diarrhea are whites.
I wonder if Death Row records will try to sign Mr. YNW. A few years back a high court ruled it allowable to use a defendant’s lyrics in a trial. There is now the predictable backlash and charges of racism from various sympathizers, though I don’t know of any cases where someone was convicted solely upon rap lyrics.
There are indeed plenty of murder trials in which defendants implicated themselves via written plans or posts about crime-related propensity. James Fields, of Charlottesville infamy, had posted images of cars hitting protestors on Instagram months before the incident, not to mention his habit of swastika sketching.
So rap lyrics seem fair game at establishing a lack of nuance in one’s mindset. There are those who claim it squelches artistic freedom and the ongoing RAP Act legislation seeks to ban their use in trials, including rapper Young Thug (a name less subtle than most porn actors).
Even hip hop magazine, The Root, seems to roll its eyes a bit with all the drama of Mr. Thug, who was caught on camera doing a drug exchange at his own trial. In his new book, Life Sentence, Mark Bowden gives a lot of detail in explaining the ways a rapper was closely entwined with Baltimore’s drug trade and murders in a similar Rico trial.
Yet another reason why Trump was the accelerationist president. So many more hip-hop homicides occurred during the Trump era than perhaps even the crack epidemic, especially after the ‘First Step Act.’ I think he should be pardoned so he can ‘live up to more songs that he wrote.’ So many thugs have taken each other out rather than allowed to live by white taxpayers. It turned the cities into a ghetto Game of Thrones, further hastening white flight.
Yeah, it’s an unpalatable calculus, but I believe the kill ratio of most of these hardcore banger types easily exceeds 10:1 black to white. If I were the South FL jewdge, I’d make him taunt the families in court then sentence him to time served.
Perhaps that’s what they mean by black history – listing blacks killed by other blacks trying to be the ‘baddest nigga’
Likewise black life as a stinking shit hopeless cesspit of constant violence propped up by white money, white apathy and white politeness is the one legit black invention..
Well done blacks, really well done. And extra points for this jogger who had a calculated plan not just a chimpout. But maybe it was just a chimpout.
I don’t care what blacks do to each other, I have very little feeling about it. But it’s something that shouldn’t exist around us.
If blacks want to live like this then they can go ahead in their own territory. See who the baddest nigga really is once and for all. We can build a wall round it so they never have to experience any racism. No police. We’ll throw some gibs over the wall from time to time.
People look at this topic in different ways – that there’s something particularly toxic about rap and hip hop that’s made blacks worse, or it’s just blackness finding its natural path. Count me in the latter category.
Violence around rap music was conspicuous enough years ago. Now no one can actually keep up with it. Wikipedia has a list of rappers who’ve been killed. But that’s not the real list. The real list is at least 10 times that number – it’s on another website. The wikipedia list is just the famous ones.
It’s probably accelerated due to social media and a different terrain now where any jogger can be on twitter, tik tok and instagram and put on chimp displays posing with guns and gold chains, calling out other joggers.
Again I don’t give a crap about blacks, but social media has in many ways, been a disaster. It has a bad enough effect on whites.
And Youtube is awash with videos essentially providing supporting platforms for this stuff which I really wasn’t that aware of until this year. And the bigger black media channels are not run by blacks, but by Jews – like this Ukranian Jewish wigger (jigger ?), djvlad.
Do these things become part of ONW if they reach the grand old age of 29? If only more negroids would act in this manner: removing both themselves and a few chums from the society but then reality also rears its nasty head and I’m reminded that 94% of white people approve of whites marrying the low IQ beasts.
Thanks to the jooze at Disney for turning the Little Mermaid negroid. As the summer unfolds I predict a number of the low IQ non-swimmers will be encouraged to think they can swim too only to quickly become rockfish.
God made catfish so that negresses could see what they would look like as mermaids.
“A scene a couple of years ago, almost transcendental in its cinematic load. I’m at a restaurant where DJ night begins and I’m stuck listening to the n****** noise that’s played. The patrons are mostly White, early-20s crowd. They appear to neither like or dislike the product. They swim in it like fish in polluted water. Then, Journey’s “Faithfully” comes on and this is palpable–everyone’s eyes, male and female, light up. It was as though an invisible flame of life touched every one of them. I am not exaggerating.” – Alex Linder
Just imagine the horrible long-term consequences of the structural oppression and discrimination of unsuspecting black people by insidious white racists, which has been going on for thousands of years!
This helpless act of desperation e.g. as a “typical trauma consequence of postcolonial stress” could have been prevented at an early stage by a generous reparation through payment of a few trillion dollars!
https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/us-news/mum-daughter-accused-killing-gran-30163894
Have you noticed that *every single* ‘rap video’ is *exactly the same*?
– The same stereotyped arm waving and hand flinging, the same wads of cash, the same dance moves by the chorus, the same gold chains.
That one rap record differs slightly from all the others goes without saying.
Just how pathetic, untalented, unoriginal, uninnovative, repetitive, boring and imitative these people are.
This garbage has been going on for 40 odd years, at least.
What other genre of popular audio entertainment has lasted that long with no progress and complete stagnation.
What does that tell you about its originators?
Well we don’t want it getting any worse, so let’s be careful what we wish for. Pop music in general is quite static and the only new acts which really seem to make it big are solo singers. People enjoy listening to a catchy melody and a great voice and pretty much always have. My impression is that many young people spend more time listening to popular music from the last third of last century anyway. I wonder why?
A very brave ***tuber by the name of Charlie Bo 313 travels to the most violent ghettos and interviews active gang members. This video is typical, so typical in fact that I doubt you would be able to distinguish this location and crew from any of the dozens of others appearing on his channel. The speech, mannerisms, cacophony of simultaneous talking, multiple repeating of phrases with felony firearms gesticulations, is almost carbon copied from one jogged out corner to any other.
The discerning rap connoisseur will immediately recognize it as a scene from the aforementioned sole rap video.
Obviously this negro has at best an IQ of 75.
May he enjoy his life in prison.
LOL, literally. It never ceases to amaze me how many of these dipshits think they can fool crime scene investigators and homicide detectives.
Some might say that songs about murderin and killin have been with us for ages, from ancient poetry to opera. But modern rappers make no bones about glorifying this lifestyle and showing off the bling and cash reaped from playing grim reaper. Even Jelly Roll Morton’s uber profane Murder Ballad, likely performed in some form prior to recorded sound, has a jealous murderess dispatching a competitor (“I’ll teach you some lessons ‘bout fucking a man of mine…. open your legs, you dirty bitch, I’m gonna shoot you between your thighs”). Going even more over the top, she ends up in the can getting it in the can from another chick, and sobs she has given up her life for a fit of rage.
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