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His lawyer said he was too poor to cover the $205 in court costs by the court-imposed deadline. Scoota was enrolled in drug treatment but offered his probation officer no evidence that he ever attended. City cops took a sandwich bag of drugs and $28 in cash off Scoota one night in December 2011, a bust that led to probation and his entrance in a state 'Violence Prevention Initiative' aimed at keeping the potentially violent criminals from reoffending or getting hurt.

#No turning back lor scoota lyrics crack#

It got some play on 92Q and should've become a semi-official anthem for the city-it certainly made more sense than The White Stripes' 'Seven Nation Army,' and was at least homegrown.īack in 20, Scoota was a low-level crack dealer, dispensing gray-top vials around midnight near the corner of West Lafayette and North Arlington avenues, as one police sergeant described in an arrest report. In the fall of 2014, Scoota also recorded 'a sports remix' of 'Bird Flu' in anticipation of the Ravens' season and the Orioles playoff run. There is also his very public refusal to tote a weapon in any of his videos-an ethical stance he even clung to in his appearance in the recent video for Shy Glizzy's 'Cut It.' In parts of the video, Scoota is one of the few not gripping a gun. to first graders at Samuel Coleridge Elementary. A May Instagram video shows Scoota reading a book about Martin Luther King Jr. While Scoota's big song was a harsh, hilariously bleak track about selling poison and giving no fucks, he had become increasingly engaged with his community, often preaching non-violence. said, 'We need to recognize for the artistry,' rather than the way he was killed.Įchoing that post-uprising sense that we need to engage and meet the youth on their own terms, Derrick Chase, with Stand Up Baltimore, suggested parents sit down and listen to Scoota's music with their kids in an attempt to understand why they loved him so much. 'And whatever he might've been doing in the past, it appears he was doing some things to change his life and use those experiences to help empower other young people in our city.' Smith noted that Scoota was killed after attending an event to promote peace and offered an atypically sympathetic reading of his life: 'A lot of young people knew him and looked up to him,' Smith said at a press conference. For the most part, Scoota has avoided this and instead suffers another troubling indignity: He has been oversimplified and cleaned-up.īaltimore Police Department spokesman T. In Baltimore, victims of gun violence, especially the young black men who make up the majority of the victims, are usually criminalized and blamed for their own death. We go one way or the other way with the dead: We rip them apart or we build the dead up into something they weren't and never even said they were. Diddy posted 'Bird Flu' last year without comment, a sly way of building mystery and buzz a recent Instagram tribute post by rapper The Game suggests Scoota did some behind-the-scenes work on Game's recent record, 'The Documentary 2.' Scoota himself had been courted by the industry, in the oblique ways that the music biz slowly allows new blood in these days: He'd appear on Instagram recording in Los Angeles and New York Meek Mill had given him praise P. rapper Shy Glizzy made an appearance on an official remix of the song. Tate Kobang, Baltimore's most well-known rapper right now, recently recorded a freestyle over the beat to 'Bird Flu.' Even if you're bigger than Baltimore these days, you've got to pay homage. In a Scoota obituary for Vice's music site, Noisey, Baltimore writer Lawrence Burney called it 'the modern-day Electric Slide' of Baltimore.Ī glance at people doing the Bird Flu on YouTube includes an adorable boy in a red, white, and blue polo a tween in his socks sliding across an oh-so-'70s linoleum kitchen floor a girl in what looks like the administrative office of her middle school a particularly limber girl in her school uniform two boys in their front yard in a housing project, singing the lyrics, trailing a bit behind the beat but nailing the dance TSU Terry, the founder of the TSU Dance Crew five kids lit by car headlights in a townhouse parking lot and a girl and her dad doing it in unison on the beach-the name of that video, 'Daddy doing the bird flu dance.' You see it at concerts, cook-outs, weddings, parties-it doesn't matter.

All of Baltimore does the Bird Flu dance. The song came equipped with the Bird Flu dance-an angular, instructional shake that involves rising up and down, bending your elbows, sticking your ass out, turning your wrists in a cooking motion, all in sync with the eerie, lithe production.