When Lydia Harris has been included in the hip-hop history books, it has mostly been as a wife. Her husband, Michael “Harry-O” Harris, claims he was one of the first to bankroll Death Row Records, the legendary—and legendarily doomed—West Coast label that launched the careers of greats like Snoop Dogg and Tupac Shakur. But if it were up to an industry that has hosted more than its fair share of violence, exploitation, and disrespect of female artists and entrepreneurs over the years, Lydia would have been forgotten altogether.
But times have changed. Battling decades of marginalization, women have begun demanding recognition for their behind-the-scenes contributions, from Dee Barnes’s story coming to the forefront around Straight Outta Compton to the rise of D.J.s and beatmakers such as Speakerfoxxx and Wondagurl. It’s a shift that has also made way for a new pop-culture icon: Cookie Lyon, the ruthless underdog of Empire, Lee Daniels’s music-industry soap. Cookie, played by the formidable Taraji P. Henson, is arguably what made the show such a hit: a former drug dealer, the well-dressed, loudmouthed firebrand co-founded Empire Records with her husband, Lucious, and, following a 17-year prison sentence, has now dedicated her life to regaining control of what’s hers, by whatever means necessary.
Just 10 years ago, though, a character like Cookie might have been ignored by pop culture, the same way Lydia Harris has been ignored.
“I really see my own life [in Cookie’s],” Lydia tells me over the phone. She’s just returned to Houston, her hometown, after dropping her daughter LyDasia off at college in Louisiana, where the 20-year-old studies business. “Her going in the studio, dealing with the day-to-day things, making decisions. The fashion! And the leadership. A lot of the things that she do, I laugh, I’m like, Wow, that I thought would never be explored [on TV].”
Until now, history has painted her as a footnote—“that woman who sued Suge Knight,” at best. But now Lydia wants to be better remembered. Lydia Harris, the Death Row co-investor and shrewd businesswoman. Lydia Harris, the 24/7 business proxy between a jailed drug kingpin and a volatile gangster-rap boss. Lydia Harris, the hip-hop den mother. Lydia Harris, the plaintiff who got hers and helped sink an infamous label boss. Lydia Harris, the all-but-forgotten architect—and casualty—of one of the hardest downfalls in pop-music history.
The story usually goes like this. Death Row Records was founded on two sources of income: court-ordered payments from Vanilla Ice to Mario “Chocolate” Johnson, a friend of Suge Knight who helped ghostwrite “Ice, Ice Baby,” and a $1.5 million investment from a man named Michael Harris, also known as Harry-O.
Michael was a major cocaine kingpin in South Central L.A. looking to legitimize his large fortune through the real-estate and entertainment businesses. Trouble was, he was in jail at the time, serving a 28-year sentence on charges of kidnapping and the attempted shoot-him-and-leave-him-in-the-desert murder of a crew member he suspected of stealing from the business. So he enlisted his lawyer David Kenner (basically rap-game Robert Kardashian) in helping arrange the deal. Michael’s 1991 contribution established Godfather Entertainment, a Death Row parent company to be co-managed by Michael Harris and Knight. That money bankrolled Death Row’s early hits like Dr. Dre’s The Chronic (1992) and Snoop Dogg’s Doggystyle (1993).
All of this is true enough, but leaves out a key element. Who represented Michael in his own company after the initial investment, if he was locked up the whole time? Kenner handled the legal upkeep, certainly, but what about the day to day? The answer, of course, is Lydia Harris.
“There wouldn’t have even been a Death Row Records [without me],” Lydia says. “That’s what everybody’s missing.”
By the time Knight and Dre came along, Michael and Lydia Harris had already been married for about six years. The pair met in 1985 at a nightclub in Houston; before he went to prison two years later, the pair enjoyed fancy cars, expensive dinners, V.I.P. sections—what’s now familiar as a rap-mogul lifestyle. The relationship was considerably more urgent for one of them than the other: according to her book and a Monterey County Weekly feature published on the occasion of their divorce, Michael once offered Lydia $100,000 to have his child, presumably in light of his likely incarceration. He did go to prison, but she married him—the judge who sentenced him did the honors—and they had LyDasia as (imprisoned) husband and wife. From then on, she was his proxy with the outside world.
“When you care about someone in the way that I cared, it wasn’t—I didn’t look at it that way,” she says now. “The dream, really, was pursuing his goals, knowing one day that he would be out. We always talked about working together. We didn’t know what it was gonna be, but we knew it was gonna be music.”
“He was really blessed to have had Lydia on the outside,” says Mark Friedman, a businessman and longtime friend of the Harrises. Friedman says he and Michael became close when they were both incarcerated in Los Angeles in the late 1980s; Michael introduced Friedman to Lydia when Friedman was released, and the two began a business relationship, Friedman offering Lydia “whatever direction [he] could” and “helping her out [financially] quite a bit.” “We hit it off like Batman and Robin,” Friedman remembers. “She’s more than the real Cookie Lyon.”
She’s right that Death Row wouldn’t have been founded without her, too—or at least that she played a pivotal role in its birth. In love with his wife’s voice, Lydia says Harry-O asked his friend Dr. Dre to produce a song for her. At the time, Dre was (famously) trying to get out of his contract with Eazy-E and Ruthless Records; to sweeten the deal, according to Lydia, Harry-O offered to help with that and introduced Dre (and Knight, who was encouraging the breakup for business reasons) to his lawyer David Kenner (who would go on to represent Knight for years). In other words, Michael Harris’s desire to get his wife in the studio with Dre essentially freed the now mogul and facilitated the founding of Death Row. (Dr. Dre could not be reached for comment for this story.)
In the years that followed, Lydia represented her and her incarcerated husband’s investment with Knight, Dre, and the artists they signed.
According to her, her responsibilities were about as varied as Cookie Lyon’s.
“There was a lot of babysitting!” she says over the phone, a smile coming into her voice. “Everybody and everything was a problem. It wasn’t easy. But it was about respect, and nobody disrespects me.”
That included her input on artists who would eventually create some of Death Row’s biggest hits.
“If I never would’ve walked into the studio, nobody would know who Snoop Dogg was,” she claims. “Me and Snoop had a good relationship [before Knight and Dre signed him], because he would walk around the studio rhyming, and he would always make raps about me. I told [Michael], ‘Hey, I like that guy, I like his style. . . . There’s something about that guy.’ And I didn’t know anything about rap then—I didn’t even like rap music. But Mike had a conversation with Suge and David, and they were saying, ‘You know, the way he looks, we don’t think he could be a rapper.’ I’m like, ‘What do looks got to do with it?’”
According to Lydia, they agreed to compromise and throw a party to showcase Death Row artists. During Dre’s set, he invited Snoop onstage to duet with him on a song; the performance, Lydia says, helped sell Snoop as a solo artist. (Snoop’s appearance on the Empire finale may have felt like a flashback to that party.)
“[The artists] looked up to me and they was looking for me to save them—that’s the feeling that I got with everybody,” she says. “And they loved me. When they seen me coming, they was happy, ’cause they knew things was gonna get done. And they did. Sometimes in business, people fall off, they don’t take it to where it needs to be taken to. I hung in there. I put in all the legwork. ‘Cause it ain’t just about the money, it’s about putting in the work.”
Death Row made a fortune by signing now-legendary icons like Snoop, Tupac Shakur, MC Hammer, and Nate Dogg, but by 2002, its financial outlook was grim. Tupac had been shot and killed in 1996, at which point Death Row’s biggest artists, including Snoop and Dre, abandoned the volatile label; the same year, Suge Knight was thrown in jail for parole violation.
To make matters worse, the Harrises had seen few, if any, returns on their $1.5 million investment. In 1996, Michael threatened to sue Death Row and its now-parent company, Interscope, for the first time publicly acknowledging Michael Harris had built the company while in jail; his threat reportedly resulted in a paltry $300,000 settlement. In 2002, Lydia took matters into her own hands and sued Suge Knight for her half of the company, which she claimed was separate from whatever payout her husband received.
“She just did what she thought she could do,” says Friedman, who also tells me he’s bailed Knight out of jail twice and told the Los Angeles Times in 2009 that he, too, was owed $1 million after investing in Death Row. “Mike’s in jail; she thought she could handle it. She had told me when it all went down, ‘I met with Suge, and I think I can get a deal done here.’ I said, ‘Do what do got to do.’”
The lawsuit never reached trial, but, according to a 2008 Los Angeles Times report, Knight’s lawyers so botched the discovery process that, in 2005, the judge awarded Lydia $107 million anyway. That same year, Lydia and a still-imprisoned Michael divorced in a Monterey County civil court, and the pair agreed to split their won money, according to the Monterey County Weekly. The next year, unable to pay up, Suge Knight filed for chapter 11 bankruptcy on behalf of Death Row Records. Says Lydia, “As far as the rest of the judgment, I am presently waiting for those funds to be released.
Today, Lydia is back in Houston, where she owns a soul-food restaurant turned catering company.
“When I came back home, I re-invented myself,” she says. “My passion was cooking, and I went back to school to be a certified chef because I knew I was going to always get back into the entertainment world. And being a chef, I knew I could cater all over.”
Suge Knight is currently standing trial for murder and attempted murder in Los Angeles. Michael is still serving his federal time in the Lompoc correctional facility, just a few hours up the coast. After an initial mandatory “good faith” payment of $1 million from Knight, the Harrises haven’t seen a penny more of the remaining Death Row money. (According to Mark Friedman, after paying taxes and legal fees, “the money went in one day.”) Knight attempted to countersue Lydia, in 2008, by contesting her ownership, but a year later, the label’s remaining assets were liquidated and auctioned off as part of Knight’s now nine-year bankruptcy status for a measly $18 million. He’s expected to come out of bankruptcy soon, at which point he’d have to start settlement payments, but considering his myriad other legal troubles, Lydia isn’t holding her breath.
“I’m not upset,” she says. “If [the money] is meant for me to have, I’ll have it. I don’t dwell on that, though.”
In fact, she sounds almost pleased with how things have gone. Now, she says, she’s able to “execute the plan”: long-brewing projects like her own record label and a compilation album called Judgment Day and a complementary singing-competition reality show, for which her team has already hosted two audition days in Houston, are gaining traction.
“I [actually] look at it as a plus for me,” she says. “Now [we’re] able to just ride off the hype. We can do it the right way. [Women’s roles in these rap dynasties] never get talked about, so we need somebody to really put it out there. I’m stepping up now, but we really don’t have a lot of powerful women [doing the same]; I just don’t know what they’re hiding behind. What’s the fear factor? I don’t know, [but] I think that young ladies, young women, mothers need to step up to the table.”
And if Empire helps make that possible, she says, she’s more than happy to oblige.
“Now you’ve got everybody saying, ‘Hey, I’m the real Cookie.’ Even I say that: you know, I am the real-life Cookie,” she says. “But [then again], I think everybody feels that they are a real, live Cookie [in some way], in their day-to-day life.”
