The Jacka was born Dominick Newton in 1977 in Arizona and raised in Contra Costa County, Calif.—the Bay Area. What drew him to hip-hop initially, he once told me, was its imagery: “These dudes look ill! I wanna look like that, I want my hair like that, I wanna do everything they’re doing. Big Daddy Kane was ill. Before he actually came out, he had like hella posters everywhere. He had these fat dookie ropes on, he was sitting around like he was the king.”
Though the style grabbed him at first, Jacka was also drawn to hip-hop’s musicality. As someone raised deep within the culture, an understanding of its building blocks was baked into his art. His smoky delivery unfurled above the track, suggesting the relaxed cool of behind-the-beat pioneers like Slick Rick. His raps were full of the harrowing, hard-boiled street stories of a life lived illegal, a narrative style similar to Queensbridge MCs like Cormega, with whom he would eventually collaborate. But he was also drawn to California’s tradition of political agitation, his militancy a spiritual descendent of the Black Panthers and rappers like Kam, Paris, and Ice Cube. His distinctly smooth, nonchalant rapping—delivered in the same effervescent voice with which he spoke—seamlessly synthesized these influences into a truly singular style.
The Jacka’s initial attraction to Islam, a spiritual transformation that began when he was 8 or 9 years old, was sparked from a similar place as his attraction to hip-hop. A young Dominick watched as a friend tried to bully a group of Muslim kids and found more than he’d bargained for: “They got in their ranks, formed a lineup, biggest in the front, smallest in the back, and they was not playing, they was about to fuck my boy up,” Jacka said. “And I seen that unity, and I said, you know what, I wanna be a part of that. So ever since that day, I would tell people I was Muslim.” He became more serious about his faith after spending a year behind bars, something he would talk about often in song, as on the last verse of 2009’s “Dopest Forreal”: “Changed my state of mind, read the pages all night long.” He soon changed his name to Shaheed Akbar.
Jacka initially made his name as a member of the Mob Figaz, a five-man group based out of Pittsburg, Calif., a city in the East Bay area. Fed-X, Rydah J. Klyde, Husalah, and the Jacka were childhood friends; AP9, who was from San Francisco’s Fillmore district, joined later. The controversial gangster rapper C-Bo helped put the group on in the late 1990s, releasing C-Bo’s Mob Figaz in 1999. After a stint behind bars, the Jacka’s own solo album followed in 2001. Riding high off street money, Jacka mixed the record at New York’s Hit Factory and traveled the country to promote it, an album that showed a glimmer of the artist he would soon become.