The chaotic rise and fall of Tekashi 6ix9ine

By Brian Braiker

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Danny Hernandez is a vexing and unsavory figure, a master troll, a flamboyant criminal, a marketing wizard and a cautionary tale. As Tekashi 6ix9ine, he goes from being a lost Brooklyn teen to a viral social media star and rapper to ultimately a Nine Trey gang affiliate who would end up turning on his crew.

“It’s a story about the way we live today and the attention economy and social media and music,” says Shawn Setaro, who has written a podcast series and a forthcoming book on the rapper. “But in a lot of ways it’s also a Brooklyn story. The two neighborhoods that really form Tekashi are Bushwick, where he grows up, and Bed-Stuy which is where he catapults to fame.”

Setaro

Setaro, an editor at Complex, is this week’s guest on “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast.” Together we unpack Tekashi’s story, which is all the more crazy (there really isn’t a better word for it) for how short it is.

Hernandez, born in 1996, grew up in tight-knit Bushwick, which doesn’t exactly resemble the neighborhood that it’s become today. Still, the gentrification is piecemeal—“It hasn’t gone full Williamsburg yet,” says Setaro—and Hernandez is raised by a working mother. There are open-air drug markets in the streets. He’s got an absentee father and the man who was his de facto step-father is murdered, gunned down not far from their house, when Hernandez is just 13.

Hernandez’s run-ins with the law start early, just as his hip hop career does. He’s urged to consider rapping by a label executive named Righteous P who meets him at the bodega where Hernandez is working. After some middling success as a Soundcloud rapper, he shoots to stardom after the release of the chaotic video for his 2017 song “Gummo”—for which he recruits a large number of Trey Nine Gangsta Blood members to appear in it.

The gang affiliation gives him a modicum of street cred as well as protection from retaliation for his endless trolling of other rappers and gang members on Instagram. Tekashi, with his long rainbow-dyed hair and rainbow grills and tattoos all over his face, is very adept at bringing attention to himself. For Trey Nine, he is an instant cash cow.

Other singles follow. But his unraveling comes just as quickly as stardom. There are endless beefs. He suspects his associates are skimming from the top. There are shootings in public, at Barclays Center and in Times Square (where miraculously no one gets hurt). He’s kidnapped by a faction of Nine Trey members, his own gang.

“He’s kidnapped by people he thought were his friends. The gang is stealing from him; there’s all this pressure,” says Setaro, whose book, “Dummy Boy: Tekashi Six Nine and the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods,” is out in December. “He goes rogue and says, ‘Everyone’s fired. I’m breaking from the gang.’ Almost immediately threats start flying towards him from members of the gang.”

During this chaotic period, the gang and Tekashi are also under federal investigation. Fearing their potential star witness may not be long for this world, the Feds unseal charges against him and other gang members that include conspiracy to murder and armed robbery.

“A dead witness is not a good witness,” says Setaro. And Tekashi proves to be a very good witness indeed. He rolls on his entire crew. (Though to this day he maintains he’s no snitch.)

“He was literally on the witness stand for three days telling on people,” says Setaro. “They were long days. And trying to define that as not being snitching for some technicality that no one even said was at issue? Definitely is very Trumpian.”

Today Tekashi has been nearly universally blacklisted by the hip hop community for informing on members of the game, even as he is publicly trying to redefine what it means to be a snitch.

“He’s on an unofficial list of people, to put it bluntly, to be killed,” says Setaro. “There’s a lot of food metaphors in this gang. He’s on the ‘Worldwide Menu,’ it’s called, of people who revenge should be enacted against.”

We discuss it all, and we get into where Tekashi can conceivably go from here.

“He’s still up to his old tricks. Dissing rappers, insulting their dead friends and relatives,” says Setaro. “But it hasn’t really gained as much traction. Like it or not, people know he no longer has the muscle to back up his boasts.”

Check out this episode of “Brooklyn Magazine: The Podcast” for more. Subscribe and listen wherever you get your podcasts.