I worked for the bad shrimp man. If the tweet below gets 500 retweets, I'll start talking.
https://twitter.com/KNOCKdotLA/status/1374029689359007745?s=20
It got 500 retweets so I'm keeping my word and talking about my time working for the cinnamon shrimp man. It is my duty as a Gemini to harness my power for good so here I am.
I worked Season 2 of Drop the Mic. A show that, in my opinion, he & the other EPs stole. I was told leadership had to be talked into hiring a person of color for the RAP show. 1st season there were 0 writers. My season, I was the only black writer and there was a black WA.
He came into the room max 3 times the whole season. Never greeted us. When he wanted to speak to the head writer, he would yell her name from his office. The only solid memory I have of him in the room was our last day. I was freestyling about how I was happy the job was ending.
The way things worked is we would write couplets, the best of would get assembled into a battle, then he would essentially destroy what we'd written by rewriting lines with the same premise as our jokes, yet worse.
He routinely replaced lines about black celebrities with couplets about how they just looked like other black celebs that they did not at all resemble. I expressed discomfort with this several times but again, he never spoke to us so I had to shuffle this through the head writer.
A black 90s R&B group came on the show and wanted to write their own battle. They initially included an anti-Asian line, a line calling a black man an Uncle Tom, and a line insinuating they would sexually assault the Asian woman in the opposing group on their tour bus.
Since the group worked just with him alone and without the staff writers involved, the first time we saw the battle written down was right before they took the stage for rehearsal. The opposing group had no idea they were about to hear these things.
The anti-Asian line got pulled but the head writer wasn't getting traction with anything else. I was like they can fire me if they want but I'm not about to let a group of dudes rap a line implying sexual assault of this woman to her face on stage in front of an entire production
I found him on the stage to discuss. He told me that's not what the line meant but it was pretty clear I was going to make this a thing if they didn't take it out so they took it out. The Uncle Tom line stayed in.
And for transparency, he emailed me like two years after this happened to tell me I was right and to thank me but there wasn't an apology. Anyway, please read about the LASD deputy gangs series as it's very important. Part 5 came out today. knc.la/tradition
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