When the national music press turned his way, the critics outside the Southwest were unimpressed. The New York Press's Ned Vizzini called Coy's Time Is Money "bad, cheap rap" and added, "there's no excuse for Time Is Money to sound like a setting on my cellphone ringer." Allmusic.com's Jon Azpiri similarly dismissed the CD: "The Texan was hoping to break out of the Lone Star State…but the 16-track effort is unlikely to catch on." He concluded that "South Park Mexican fails to bring anything new to the table that is worthy of national attention."
Like every other Southern independent who takes his stuff to a major, it didn't really make a difference to Coy -- any publicity helped.
As his stardom grew, he edged toward becoming another cultural icon for expanding Hispanic awareness, and started to see his role in quasi-messianic terms. Coy no longer considered himself merely a rapper, but a "street poet" or "street philosopher." In most of his later interviews, he spoke like a Mexican-American liberationist. Blacks had their Malcolm X, and Coy seemed to want to become the Hispanics' Malcolm Equis. He referred to Mexican-Americans as "my people" and as an all-but-enslaved class sorely in need of self-esteem.
Coy believed he was the one to bring them that respectability as his own commercial successes mounted. He bragged about going from $400 a month in album sales to $40,000 monthly. Dope House hit full stride in 2000. Recording giant Universal Music Group signed him to a lucrative deal that brought an advance of more than $500,000.
Texas Monthly magazine weighed in by selecting Coy as one of the "Voices of a New Generation," a breakout star on the rise. Accomplishments only fed on more far-out dreams. Next up, he pledged, would be movie productions that could rival Hollywood.
The year closed out with his headiest coup: a Newsweek article about this dynamic Hispanic leading the previously overlooked youth of the burgeoning Mexican-American culture. "A lot of Mexican American kids have low self-esteem, so I let them know that they can do more than just work like an animal for peanuts," he said in the story. "…Nobody screams, claps, or cheers for that."
But his fans did cheer when he delivered his homilies. Before each show, Coy would give a speech about the virtues of staying in school and away from crack, keeping out of gangs and getting a job. He'd tell his listeners about the glories of families and responsible parenthood.
Then came the music, still heavily laced with violence and drugs and sex and screwing the establishment. Rappers see it only as coating their sermons in street grime to establish that crucial cred with kids who would otherwise tune it out.
However, the contradictions would become obvious within a year. Coy's own rep was racing toward a collision with harsh reality.
On a hot July day two years ago, the deputy constable from Precinct 1 pulled up yet again to the fortresslike Dope House Records headquarters on Center Street. The officer carried court papers that were part of a past returning to haunt the rising music star.
In April of that year, Jill Odom filed a lawsuit seeking to have Coy formally declared the father of her son, Jordan Dominique Odom, and to have him begin paying child support.
While such actions are routine, the basic math involved in this one underscored the severity of the allegations against the then-29-year-old Coy. Odom was 20 years old, and her child's sixth birthday was less than a month away, meaning she'd given birth at age 14.
Odom's later testimony would be even more damning: She'd started dating Coy when she was only 13. It was her first sexual relationship, she testified, and the two hadn't even bothered to discuss birth control.
The Pasadena woman said that when she became pregnant, Coy offered to marry her. That was quickly nixed by her parents, who refused to have anything to do with him. While she praised Coy for his informal support of herself and the child -- "If I needed something, he would get it" -- her lawsuit hardly reflected that Coy had come up with assistance on a steady basis.
Even Coy's response seemed somewhat casual; in fact his lack thereof almost led to a default judgment in the case. After DNA testing to confirm paternity, the settlement called for Coy to pay $28,000 in back child support and $2,000 more for Odom's prenatal and birth expenses. He was to contribute $1,500 to a college fund for the boy, and begin paying $900 monthly in regular child support. Odom received primary custody.
