He spent six months in jail (he’d already served 13 months while on trial) and announced his comeback with lyrics barked to the camera with bug-eyed defiance in the ‘GOOBA’ video: “ You’re mad – I’m back.” Anyone expecting 6ix9ine to lay low, fearing potential repercussions of turning on a violent gang (“I come from old-school hip-hop culture,” says Iandoli, “so I’m nervous to see the outcome”), was clearly wide of the mark.
He traded the information to avoid 47 years behind bars, instead receiving a two-year sentence. Hernandez claimed that his role had been to “keep making hits and be the financial support for the gang … so they could buy guns and stuff like that.” In return, he explained, “I got the street credibility – the videos, the music, the protection.” Last November, he was arrested in his native New York on firearms and racketeering charges and accused of involvement with the Nine Trey Gangsta Bloods gang, an affiliation that reportedly encompassed armed robbery, drug trafficking and conspiracy to commit murder. The rapper admitted to appearing in – and posting to Instagram – a video of a sexual nature with a 13-year-old girl, claiming he believed her to be older. Tekashi 6ix9ine is an artist so steeped in controversy and transgression – without the positive connotations that those words usually carry in music – that, strictly in terms of the news cycle, his more recent activity has eclipsed the child sex charge he faced in 2015. Tekashi 6ix9ine’s ‘GOOBA’ became the most-watched hip-hop video on YouTube in a 24hour period. You’ve gotta respect it – obviously I don’t respect him… actually, I don’t want to get into that, but I respect when it comes to what he’s done with the music.” “He has so much hype around him that it makes sense he would be getting 200 million-plus views on YouTube. “Everything he does is attention-grabbing,” says KSI, a YouTube star with more than 30 million subscribers across two accounts on the platform, who recently reached Number Two in the UK charts with his hip-hop album ‘Dissimulation’. The rapper later told his 21 million followers, in extreme close-up, that it was delayed until this Friday (June 5). Two weeks after ‘GOOBA’ was released, 6ix9ine shared an Instagram post in which he promised, a kitten in each hand, that his next single and video would “break the internet”. Because social media plays into that so much, the entire scenario reads like a continuous Twitter thread – you’re always tuned in even when the music isn’t there.” “So much of that is the story element around him. “6ix9ine had been building momentum for what that moment would be,” says Kathy Iandoli, a New Jersey-based hip-hop writer whose book God Save The Queens: The Essential History of Women in Hip-hopwas published by Harper Collins last year. At the time of writing, the YouTube views of ‘GOOBA’ stand at more than 279 million. In a brief but telling jump cut, acknowledging that he outraged members of the hip-hop community by ‘ratting’, he transforms into a cartoon rodent.
On May 8, 43 million people tuned in to see the face-tatted social media celebrity, on house arrest and fresh from prison after an astonishing and highly publicized legal case that saw him offer authorities information on a New York gang, flash his ankle bracelet and give an obnoxious grin. The typically nonsensical track is one-part generic trap song and three-parts Fatman Scoop, and its video – 6ix9ine leering at paint-splattered women in a bland studio somewhere – duly became the most-watched hip-hop video on YouTube in a 24-hour period. Last month saw the rapper, whose criminal record makes for truly depressing reading and who is better known as Tekashi 6ix9ine, release the gaudy comeback single ‘GOOBA’. At just 24 years old, Daniel Hernandez is most hate-watched man in the world.
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