Rapper Jin: Headlines Over Shooting ’Frustrating’
Saturday, November 20, 2004 By Alona Wartofsky Special to The Washington Post
NEW YORK — Last November, rapper Jin was with friends at Yello, a Chinatown nightclub, when an argument broke out. One of Jin’s close friends, rapper Christopher “L.S.” Louie, was shot in the back. Police have named a suspect in the shooting — reportedly an aspiring rapper — but no arrests have been made.
While Jin was lucky to escape without injury, he says the headlines were “frustrating.”
“Asian rap war leads to shoot- ing in Chinatown,” he intones. “Sounds like a good story, right? And that’s exactly why they called it that. ... But the only accurate thing about all of that is probably Asian, that’s it. Gang wars? No. Rap wars? No. It had nothing to do with any of that. ... The magazines, newspaper ... they were exploiting it.”
He adds: “These guys that were there that were involved in the shooting, I didn’t know them ... All their motive was, like, ’Yo, that’s Jin and I don’t like him, so I’m gonna try to threaten him, I’m gonna pull a gun at him, I’m gonna try to rob him.’ ”
“But of course if (the media) just wrote it like that, it wouldn’t be exciting,” he says.
For rappers, those kinds of headlines can boost album sales. Several of Jin’s fellow Ruff Ryders have enjoyed the notoriety that accompanies repeated run-ins with the law, but he insists thugging isn’t really his style.
“That’s not the type of mystique I want,” he says. Jin, who made his big-screen debut as an auto mechanic in the street-racing movie ”2 Fast 2 Furious,” hopes to emulate a different kind of hip-hop icon. “I wanna be like Will Smith,” he says. “Just an overall, well-respected entrepreneur. He’s a family man, you know what I’m sayin’?”