Hustling has become a way of life for Detroit King Tape. Whether as an independent rap artist promoting his King of Detroit 2006 CD on local billboards, or temporarily working at Thorn Apple Valley’s slaughterhouse on the east side, adapt-and-thrive has been his blueprint. Now in his 40s, he’s a serial entrepreneur who owns and distributes Health n Hustle Nature’s Flex detox supplements, contributes music and acting to films like the 2024 indie movie The Port, and plans to launch the Ceenverde tequila line in 2025.
Reflecting on years committing burglaries, selling drugs, and drifting back and forth to prison — in between producing for his downtown-based Industry Sound Studio’s Deal Witt It Records — Detroit King Tape self-published a book, The Hustle Code, this fall. A sort of abbreviated memoir dipped into the inspirational genre, The Hustle Code offers life tips from the perspective of a street-trained philosopher. Although today Tape, who says he always felt a “calling” beyond his challenging childhood circumstances, spends most of his time in the Los Angeles area, he tells Metro Times that The Hustle Code was developed from uniquely Detroit experiences.
Metro Times: What motivated you early on to move beyond illegal hustling into hustling as a positive lifestyle for success?
Detroit King Tape: I have a very vivid memory of being at Terre Haute [an Indiana federal prison]. The guards were racist as a hell, and I remember refusing a job to help build a unit where they’d kill inmates on death row. So they wrote me a “ticket” and put me in the “hole.” It was Christmas time, and I remember them playing Stevie Wonder and “This Christmas” by Donnie Hathaway on the speakers, just to fuck with us. I sat back and realized, “I gotta switch this shit up.” Every cell that I went to, from then on, I would find a piece of paper and I would write, “This, too, shall pass,” and put it on the wall.
MT: How did all that experience crystallize into The Hustle Code?
DKT: During the time that I was on the run [at 18, after shooting a man in Saginaw, which was eventually deemed a justifiable homicide], I was at a friend’s house and his mom saw the stress on me. This was a childhood friend who I knew well, so his mom knew me. She said, “Let me read your tarot cards.” I said, “I’m not really into that,” but she said, “It might help you,” so I said, “OK.” Everything she read in the cards, it was resonating in a positive way. She told me all that I was dealing with was going to be resolved, and she didn’t even know I was on the run at the time. So I called my mom and I was telling her I wasn’t turning myself in, but the police had been calling her and telling her they just wanted to talk to me. She said, “Hell naw, you’re not going in. Fuck that!” That’s my mom, because she’s from the streets. She didn’t want her baby turning himself in to the police on a murder charge. It turned out that they had already talked to everybody in the case, and the woman who was being choked by the man I shot, she told the story that I saved her. The reading that my friend’s mom gave me, she stated that I would be “cleared,” so I felt like I was being guided through the whole thing. It was confirmation, because it was telling me that I had a higher calling.
MT: Where did you learn about hustling?
DKT: When I was in school on the east side I would make ninja stars out of paper and sell them for a quarter a piece to the students. That’s where the hustle started. It was just embedded in me. I wasn’t even the type of young guy that wanted to be under anybody’s wing. That’s all my mother dated, hustlers, and my sister, when she grew up, that’s all she dated. I would just pick up “game” from watching them. I learned about guns after stealing my mother’s boyfriend’s gun. I got into shootouts and everything, and I would just replace the bullets and put the gun back. Like I say in the book, there’s a negative connotation, but your hustle can be applied to your way of life. It’s a way of maneuvering. When we’re talking about the mindset of a person, we have to be able to maneuver in a certain way.
MT: You mention fear several times in The Hustle Code. How does fear factor into a “hustle” mentality?
DKT: I first experienced fear as a young African American. It’s like going down in that dark, spooky basement, just encountering things you have to conquer. I had a fear of going to visit my father in prison. He spent 33 years, only to come home and die in a house fire within two years. Seeing how smart he was, how much potential he had, they still denied his freedom. I had to develop my peace and make up my mind that I wasn’t going down like him. A lot of people have the fear of actually learning a new way. A lot of people don’t want to try something different. They want to, but it’s hard. It’s not easy to flip that switch. Even in the streets, if you have to convert, if you have to get a job, you can say, “It’s temporary. Let me see it as something for the longevity of what I’m doing that’s going to get me through this period.”
MT: How does the health principle play into The Hustle Code?
DKT: It’s what I learned about balance. Two things in life you gotta have – your health and your hustle. All the ailments I saw in the people around me through the years, we weren’t just dying of murder. I saw people with diabetes, people on dialysis. I was talking to a lady the other day and telling her there are two things your kids are going to look up to you for: being cool and rich. But it’s hard to have one without the other. There’s a lot of parents and their kids don’t give a fuck about ‘em, because they’re not cool. Health is the cool part now, because people are more into being healthy. You have to have health to sustain your hustle.
I just want to leave the people with this message right here: You can’t be short-sighted and still want longevity. That’s the overall message of The Hustle Code – in order to apply all of this, you have to be thinking with a mindset of moving ahead.
The book is available for purchase for $19.99 from detroitkingtape.com.
