Christopher Murphy became Big Dank one morning in the mid-'90s when he was stopped by a police officer near a corner in Southwest Little Rock where he regularly sold crack.

Murphy was an aloof, soft-spoken teenager, raised by a single mother and his uncles, who when he was a toddler used to calm him down by playing Run-DMC tapes. "That was my shit then," Murphy told me recently. "They'd literally put the headphones on me so I'd lay down and go to sleep." Everyone he knew was affiliated with a gang, to some degree or another, and since he was 12, Murphy had identified with the Tree Top Pirus, a West Coast gang that had improbably migrated to Little Rock in the late '80s. He was a student at J.A. Fair, though his heart wasn't in it. "I was a teenager then," he explained, "wildin' and on the prowl."

Walking down the block toward his corner one morning, with his back to the street, Murphy freestyled to an instrumental on his Walkman. At the time, he wrote about what he knew: poverty mostly, and black market economics. He noticed a car driving slowly behind him, but didn't bother looking back. "I'm thinking it's just an ordinary motorist trying to pass me," he said. When he finally did turn around, he saw it was an idling police cruiser with its window rolled down. His face fell. "He heard everything," Murphy said. "The whole time he'd been right behind me listening to me rap."

The officer stepped out of his car and searched Murphy on the sidewalk, patting him down and feeling the pockets of his jacket. Murphy knew the cop must have felt the rocks he'd stashed there, but he left them alone. This was peculiar in itself. Rather than throw him up against the side of his vehicle — standard operating procedure in these situations — the cop seemed to want to talk to him. You want to keep on doing this 'til something happen to you? he remembers the man asking him. There's only two places you're gonna go with this here.