“Drop it down and wobble, wobble up, mommy booted up”: if you’re under a certain age you’re probably already humming ‘Gooba’ in full. Tekashi 6ix9ine’s biggest hit already accumulates over 800 million views on YouTube and has made Daniel Hernandez a milestone for an entire generation. Now, after the terrible beating he has received in his gym, we analyze who he is, what he does and, above all, the reason for his controversies. You know that boy!
Haha, don’t care, stay mad
Little could Natividad and Daniel have imagined when they came to the United States from Mexico in 1988 that their son, born in 1996, would become one of the country’s biggest stars. But the rapper’s childhood was tragic: he barely knew his father, a heroin addict who ended up in prison for five years. His stepfather was murdered two steps from his home in 2010, and his mother, as a result, had no way to feed them, which led to the teenager taking all kinds of jobs to get by, dropping out of school.
This is not a story of a kid who rapped and then dressed according to his style, but the opposite: he dressed like a rapper and, as a consequence, the president of the record label Hikari-Ultra asked him if he rapped when he went to serve him in a warehouse in Brooklyn. From August 2014, Daniel Hernandez released different songs, such as ’69’, ‘Pimpin’ or ‘4769’ before defining his name: Tekashi 6ix9ine, mixing anime with sex.
In 2017, ‘Gummo’ marked his first commercial song, and an unparalleled success: he currently marks 429 million views on YouTube. He had not yet released an album (it would arrive in 2018, ‘Dummy boy’) and was already known around the world. And that has its advantages… And its drawbacks.
Since 2018, Hernandez has known the courts better than home. There he has gone as a defendant charged with child molestation, drowning a teenage girl in a mall, ordering the shooting of rapper Chief Keef or domestic violence. But his best known case, and one that will mark him for the rest of his life, is the trial for the street gang he belonged to, the Nine Trey Gangsters, in which he faced 47 years in prison. The rapper was able to get it down to two years… in exchange for ratting out the rest of the gang.
After this decision, his life has been a trail of controversy: he served his time not in jail, but at home, due to his asthma and the slim chance of survival if he got sick with Covid. The consequences of being a police mole have not been long in coming and in 2023, coinciding with the anniversary of his last song, ‘Giné’ (which, moreover, was an advertisement for an energy drink), 6ix9ine has entered the hospital after a beating without the reason still being known. How will the rapper’s career continue? That’s still an unknown…
