“69: The Saga of Danny Hernandez” is not about a star, then, but a black hole. There’s so much to this story—so many crimes, so many in-your-face rap singles—yet it’s all for the vacuous goal of attention. Director Vikram Gandhi avoids getting lost in this mess by focusing on the people who witnessed Hernandez’s transformation into a rapper named Tekashi 6ix9ine, but it’s fascinating to see how Gandhi’s feelings about the artist change from the beginning (he initially thought he was making a cautionary tale) to the end. Ever since seeing this Fat Joe interview, in which the legendary rapper tries to get through to Hernandez, I’ve wondered if there was something more to Tekashi 6ix9ine. But with his damning journalism and thorough documentation of Hernandez’s real-life gangster activity, Gandhi chips away at such sympathy and alters how to look at someone who wants to always be seen.
Gandhi tells this story chronologically, breaking it up into different sections: “The SoundCloud Rapper,” “The King of New York,” “The Troll.” Before all of that, there’s “Daniel the Bodega Boy,” which paints a picture of a Hispanic kid growing up in poverty in Brooklyn, living with multiple family members in a tiny apartment. When he was a teenager, he was traumatized by his stepfather’s murder, which fueled his desire to get out of the neighborhood, and to be famous. He got a taste of that fame by wearing shirts and hats that caught people’s attention, with words like “HIV” printed on them in big letters. Music became an extension of that, especially after he saw how his friends gained popularity through rap videos. Through a complicated history of working with one artist after the next, Hernandez launched a rap career as Tekashi 6ix9ine through over-the-top videos, involving him renting out Lamborghinis and showing himself in sexual acts, realizing the viral audience that came with bizarre visuals. At one point he was charged with a sexual offense involving a video with a 13-year-old girl and served time for it, but being labeled a “pedophile” by his haters didn’t exactly slow down his career.
Hernandez ascended in a changing music business that seems to encourage using collaborators and haters for clout, and mixed that knowledge with his growing awareness of what gets eyeballs on social media. It’s a tactic that goes back to Elvis and Ozzy Osbourne, as Gandhi’s guiding voiceover instructs us at one point, but has become even more viable in the era of social media, though the landscape is far more crowded. For such a visual musician, with his long rainbow hair and all those tattoos, the young rapper found his best medium on Instagram, and screaming YouTube videos like “Billy” and “Fefe” are two-minute bursts of aggression that sell Hernandez as a real-life Joker. There’s a realization in listening to his music that the songs are primarily designed to give him something to do on stage, or in a music video, or to simply promote. To quote Tekashi 6ix9ine: “My music is trash but my videos are fire.”
