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Which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? — Luke 14:28
Which of you, intending to build a tower, sitteth not down first, and counteth the cost, whether he have sufficient to finish it? — Luke 14:28
It’s time to count up the cost.
It’s time to count up the cost.
So I made a spreadsheet of people in hip-hop who died before their time. Almost all of them are Black men. With hesitation, I stopped at 63.
So I made a spreadsheet of people in hip-hop who died before their time. Almost all of them are Black men. With hesitation, I stopped at 63.
Stare at the spreadsheet long enough, and names push limblike through Excel’s cells. The stacks of narrow boxes are like coffins in a queue. No list could include all who are gone. Already I’m guilty about the absence of neighborhood superstars and the critically unacclaimed. I also have not listed the men in rap who walk among us but who are dead inside.
Stare at the spreadsheet long enough, and names push limblike through Excel’s cells. The stacks of narrow boxes are like coffins in a queue. No list could include all who are gone. Already I’m guilty about the absence of neighborhood superstars and the critically unacclaimed. I also have not listed the men in rap who walk among us but who are dead inside.
Chronologically, this grim data set begins with Scott Sterling of the Bronx, better known as DJ Scott La Rock, who was shot to death in 1987 at age 25, and stops with De La Soul’s David Jolicoeur of Brooklyn, a.k.a. Trugoy the Dove, who died in February of heart failure at 54. Near the midpoint is Lord Infamous — Ricky Dunigan — who in 2013 had a heart attack in his sleep. His half brother and fellow Three 6 Mafia founder, DJ Paul, born Paul Beauregard, painted a desolate picture. “He laid his head in his arms at the kitchen table,” Beauregard told the website Hip Hop DX the day after Dunigan died. “When his momma came home, he was sitting at the kitchen table, passed away.”
Chronologically, this grim data set begins with Scott Sterling of the Bronx, better known as DJ Scott La Rock, who was shot to death in 1987 at age 25, and stops with De La Soul’s David Jolicoeur of Brooklyn, a.k.a. Trugoy the Dove, who died in February of heart failure at 54. Near the midpoint is Lord Infamous — Ricky Dunigan — who in 2013 had a heart attack in his sleep. His half brother and fellow Three 6 Mafia founder, DJ Paul, born Paul Beauregard, painted a desolate picture. “He laid his head in his arms at the kitchen table,” Beauregard told the website Hip Hop DX the day after Dunigan died. “When his momma came home, he was sitting at the kitchen table, passed away.”
It was 2021 when moans of woe about Black men in rap music dying young erupted into a panic of calls to action. In that year alone, we lost eight artists, ranging in age from 28 to 57. Twenty of the 57 Black men here died in their 20s. The oldest two died at 59. Twenty-seven were born in the state of New York, and most of those in the five boroughs. A dozen of Brooklyn’s sons went to early graves.
There are white men on the spreadsheet: Adam Yauch of Beastie Boys, whose stage name was MCA, died in 2012 at 47 of salivary gland cancer; and Malcolm McCormick, known as Mac Miller, died in 2018 at 26 from an accidental overdose of fentanyl, cocaine and alcohol. Black women are part of this accounting as well. We have never not been leaders in the hip-hop world, and the crimes committed against us, physically and professionally, are nefarious and clump like keloid. Four Black women are on this list. In 1991, at age 20, MC Trouble, LaTasha Rogers of California, died in her sleep of an epileptic seizure. In 2002, while on a retreat in Honduras, Lisa Lopes — Left Eye, the hip-hop heart of the multiplatinum R.&B. recording group TLC — died in a car accident at 30. In 2017, Pam Warren of the Coup, known as DJ Pam the Funkstress (the director Boots Riley’s early creative partner), died at 51 of organ failure after a transplant. And on the first day of this year, Lola Mitchell of Three 6 Mafia, who performed as Gangsta Boo, was found unresponsive on her mother’s South Memphis porch. Within her were the same substances that brought down McCormick. Boo was 43.
This is a tally I’ve been keeping and a story I’ve been telling — conversationally, journalistically, eulogistically, bitterly, in novel form — since the late 1980s. My journey includes having twice been editor in chief of Vibe, a magazine started in 1992 by Quincy Jones because he felt hip-hop and R.&B. were not being covered with enough quality or in enough quantity. Whether at Vibe or Billboard or ESPN, for three decades I’ve covered everything from secret shows to Super Bowls — which means that I’ve also been counting up the human cost of hip-hop and R.&B.’s becoming the genre with the highest market share in the recording industry.
So much of Black journalism is obituary. Early deaths — literal, artistic, carceral — are commonplace. And Black men in hip-hop exist in an endless loop of roller-coaster success, hazy self-worth, bullets, fame and its cousin, paranoia. There’s earned distrust of white people in white medical coats and of the so-called thin blue line. In this loop, the death of Black male potential is a recurring theme.
There should be more soft-focus memorial in this brief alternative history of rap, told through the deaths of artists as opposed to their benchmark albums. But Black men who die as they come of age, or in their prime, are high-def, even in afterlife: livid yet unsurprised to still be doing the backbreaking work of fueling a cultural imagination. On Jay-Z’s 1996 track “Can I Live,” he was premonitory. “We feel we have nothing to lose,” he said, “So we offer you/Well, we offer our lives.”
This is the part where guys are shot and stabbed to death in horrifyingly intentional ways. This is the suicide section. Here, rap is as violent as the country it emerged from. There are all kinds of violent experiences — including living on the street. One of hip-hop’s earliest casualties was working to change things. Degree in hand from Vermont’s Castleton State College, Scott Sterling was a social worker in the mid-1980s at a men’s shelter in the Bronx. There he met the lodger Lawrence Parker and Derrick Jones, who was a cousin of one of the shelter’s security guards. They bonded at Manhattan nightclubs and diners, formed the group Boogie Down Productions and went to work on the group’s first album. In March 1987, their debut, “Criminal Minded,” was released and on its way to being considered, by Rolling Stone, one of the best albums ever.
On the eve of B.D.P.’s announcing a lucrative new contract with Warner Bros. Records, Jones, who was 16 and by then known as D-Nice, was found to have been canoodling with a local girl. When friends of her jealous ex threatened D-Nice, Sterling, who was going by DJ Scott La Rock, and three friends rushed in a Jeep from Manhattan to the Bronx to mediate. Conversation devolved to altercation. Soon bullets tore through the car’s rag top. Sterling was shot and died a day and a half later. Hip-hop, by then a dynamic subculture, was walloped but would not be set back. Parker, whose graffiti tag evolved into the stage name KRS-One, founded a lateral group called the Stop the Violence Movement. Artists released acclaimed music, including B.D.P.’s 1988 “By All Means Necessary” and records by MC Lyte, Public Enemy, EPMD and many more. Not only that, hip-hop, the so-called fad, was standing up for itself.
In 1989, many people rallied behind 2 Live Crew’s right to free speech — they were censored in Florida and won an obscenity case that rocked the nation. That same year, the Recording Academy finally included a rap category in the Grammy Awards, and Will Smith, a.k.a. the Fresh Prince, and DJ Jazzy Jeff won for “Parents Just Don’t Understand.” “Yo! MTV Raps” was must-see TV. Tupac Shakur, a.k.a. 2Pac, wowed the world as Roland Bishop in Ernest Dickerson’s “Juice” (1992), and Christopher Wallace, the artist known as the Notorious B.I.G., went from corner boy to poolside partyer on his 1994 debut.
Our midnight stars were brighter. Even as mainstream, rock-centered music culture refused us and colluded against hip-hop — by misrepresenting record sales, segregating clubs and implementing de facto bans on booking rap acts — there was no stopping us. Our gathering spaces when they existed were so dress-coded we often looked more on our way to fellowship Sunday than to a club where we danced until dawn and then walked sweaty and loud into a Denny’s that made us pay for our disco breakfast before we ate it. But the music was immaculate: Salt-N-Pepa, Digital Underground, A Tribe Called Quest, DJ Quik, De La Soul. In 1991, when Billboard began counting album and song sales via the tracking system Soundscan, trad rock’s dominance gave way to rap, country and metal. Hip-hop was vindicated. We flipped and popped like power lines finally free of our parents’ Motown grid. We weren’t calling ourselves Gen X back then; we were the Hip-Hop Generation.
And then, in September 1996, Tupac Shakur died at 25 in Las Vegas, having been shot four times. Six months after that, in March 1997, the Notorious B.I.G., a.k.a. Biggie Smalls, also died after being shot four times. He was 24. Our two biggest stars, gone. Shakur had wondered, “How Long Will They Mourn Me?” in 1994. Biggie had named his debut “Ready to Die,” and the record on deck when he was killed was titled “Life After Death.” It was easy to feel as if they had called their shot. That they were so confident in the shortness of their lives, they in effect got ahead of it. By the time the Lost Boyz’ Raymond Rodgers, known as Freaky Tah, was shot to death in March 1999 at age 27, we were still humming Puff Daddy and Faith Evans’s “I’ll Be Missing You,” their Biggie tribute song. Still red-eyed from weeping over Biggie’s coffin. Still wading through theories about Shakur’s having faked his death.
It was a mass grieving event. Many of us thought rap was over, and we weren’t shaken from our bereavement until May 1997, by the funky “Stomp” from Kirk Franklin and God’s Property, featuring Cheryl James (Salt) of Salt-N-Pepa. It went to the top of the hip-hop and R.&B. chart, ringing off like a second line. Then, in August and September 1998, “The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill” and Jay-Z’s “Vol. 2 ... Hard Knock Life” were released. Hill’s was the first hip-hop album to win album of the year (along with four other Grammys). “Hard Knock” was Jay-Z’s multiplatinum, No. 1, Grammy-winning breakthrough. These artists pulled us from the brink. We were revived. But only for a little while.
In 1999, Big L of Harlem (Lamont Coleman) was shot nine times in the face and chest on West 139th Street near his Harlem home. On Oct. 30, 2002, Run-DMC’s D.J., Jason Mizell, known as Jam Master Jay, was killed in his Queens recording studio at age 37. Mizell was the most charismatic member of the revolutionary trio, its glue and ambassador. Rap was still under attack. And the calls — spurred by, among other things, territorialism, jealousies and poverty-driven scarcities — were coming from inside the house.
The killings left little if any time to mourn or commemorate. Louisiana’s James Tapp Jr., a.k.a. Soulja Slim, who appeared with Juvenile on his 2004 hit “Slow Motion,” was dead before the song went to No. 1 on Billboard’s pop chart; in November 2003, he was shot three times on the lawn of the New Orleans duplex he purchased for his mother. Andre Hicks of Northern California, known to the public as Mac Dre, was shot to death in 2004 on a Kansas City highway. He was 34. In 2006, after a brawl, 32-year-old DeShaun Holton, who performed as Proof, was killed in response for shooting a patron at a club on Detroit’s Eight Mile Road. “Without Proof,” Eminem said at his best friend and collaborator’s funeral, “there would be no Eminem.”
In 2018, Jahseh Onfroy, known as XXXtentacion, was fatally shot at a Deerfield Beach, Fla., motorcycle dealership. In 2019, Nipsey Hussle, real name Ermias Asghedom, died as a result of 11 gunshots at his Los Angeles retail store. In 2020, Pop Smoke (Bashar Jackson) was showering in a Hollywood Hills Airbnb when it was invaded by three teenagers who shot and killed him as he was robbed for a Rolex. Adolph Thornton Jr. of Memphis, whose stage name was Young Dolph, released his fifth album, “Rich Slave,” in August 2020. Debuting at No. 4 on Billboard’s pop album chart, it became his most successful album and the last released in his lifetime. On Nov. 17, 2021, Dolph was on a noon errand at Makeda’s Cookies in South Memphis when two masked gunmen jumped from a white Mercedes-Benz. Dolph died as a result of gunshots to the forehead, temple, chest, abdomen, chin, wrist, shoulder, face, back and arms. Just a month later, the rapper and former dancer Darrell Caldwell of Los Angeles, known as Drakeo the Ruler, was killed backstage at the Once Upon a Time in L.A. music festival as he walked toward a stage where he was scheduled to perform. A group of at least 100 people, many masked, swarmed him. He died of a stab wound to the neck.
On Sept. 12, 2022, the Philadelphia native and platinum recording artist Rakim Allen, who performed as PnB Rock, was killed in South Los Angeles at a Roscoe’s House of Chicken and Waffles. No one else in Roscoe’s was harmed, not even Allen’s girlfriend. They were on a lunch date. We couldn’t get through the holidays without Kirsnick Ball, a.k.a. Takeoff, of the beloved Grammy-nominated rap group Migos, being killed outside a Houston bowling alley, where Ball was attending a private party. He was 28. Takeoff has been classified as an innocent bystander in the shooting.
A nurse who lived near the scene at first feared there was an active mass shooter on the premises, but she grabbed equipment from her car’s trunk and rushed to help. She had heard a scream. “I’m thinking that’s the victim, the person who’s shot,” she told KHOU, a Houston news station. “It was a cry of agony — but emotional not physical.” The cry came from Quavo, Takeoff’s group mate and uncle.
The suicides were friends of mine. In 2008 and 2012, Shakir Stewart of Oakland and Chris Lighty of the Bronx each died of a self-inflicted gunshot wound. Stewart, who signed Rick Ross and Jeezy, was executive vice president of Def Jam Recordings. Lighty, at the time of his death, managed the careers of 50 Cent, Missy Elliott, LL Cool J, Mariah Carey and Busta Rhymes. I wrote Lighty’s obituary. He was 44. Stewart was 34.
There are of course countless survivors — those whose lives illuminate the constant rebirths within hip-hop’s own life. D-Nice of Boogie Down Productions is today the international D.J. to the stars who, throughout Covid lockdowns, broadcast his Club Quarantine dance party via Instagram Live for hundreds of thousands of anxious shut-ins. Rihanna checked in. As did Oprah and Joseph R. Biden Jr. and Bernie Sanders. D-Nice has played the White House and Carnegie Hall. During the 1990s, battling depression, he experienced the homelessness he witnessed back at the men’s shelter. D-Nice’s survival, subsequent triumph and service to the multitudes who tuned in to his D.J. sets during a profoundly harrowing time are bound to the memory of DJ Scott La Rock. As is hip-hop itself.
This is your reminder that Black men in hip-hop die of things other than gunshots and knife wounds. They die of physical illness, of course. They also die of passive suicide, enacted by a lack of self-protection or self-care. They also die slowly from the trauma of loss or abuse or longing that they stubbornly, habitually and tragically refuse to name. The stress of being Black leads to chronic and deadly disease. Black men die reaching for self-medications. All too often, Black men in hip-hop die alone. All of this could be considered the fallout of a genre born under extreme duress. It was the Bronx in the 1970s: Fire stations were closing, and landlords were paying arsonists to burn buildings to the ground.
People burned, too. Robert Wiggins, the youngster who was known as Keef Cowboy and first articulated and popularized the word “hip-hop,” came of age in collapsing ruins often compared to a war zone. “I heard sirens,” Cowboy’s longtime friend Dynamite told the music writer Jay Quan in an interview. “I got to the lot where we used to play ball, and kids were running around on fire all over. I remember people trying to put the fires out, and Cowboy rollin’ around on the ground, trying to put himself out.”
Cowboy was a member of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five. They were inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2007 — the first hip-hop group to be so honored. “The sight of my friends on fire,” Dynamite continued, “stayed with me for the rest of my life.” He added, “Those scars stayed with him for the rest of his life.” The apparent causes of Cowboy’s death, in 1989 at 28, were the defining scourges of that era: complications from crack addiction and H.I.V./AIDS. Six years later, reporters wept at the news conference in which a lawyer for the N.W.A co-founder Eric Wright, known as Eazy-E, announced his client’s terminal diagnosis. Famous for his vile, reedy vocals, Wright, at 30, died of AIDS-induced pneumonia on March 26, 1995.
The dancer Troy Dixon of Heavy D & the Boyz, who went by Trouble T-Roy, died in July 1990 at 22. The group, from Mount Vernon, N.Y., was on a Public Enemy tour stop at Indianapolis’s old Market Square Arena. People on the tour phoned me in the immediate aftermath, and from more than one, there was mention of someone’s tossing a Nerf football and Dixon’s going back for it. Per The Associated Press: “Another group member, while fooling around, rolled a trash barrel down the ramp toward him. Dixon jumped on a four-foot retaining wall to avoid the barrel.” He lost his balance and fell backward to his death from a third-level ramp. “Everybody was just jumping around and just yelling,” the producer Eddie F (Edward Ferrell) told XXL magazine in 2010, “and everything just turned blurry.”
In honor of their friend, CL Smooth and the illustrious Pete Rock, who was then a rising producer/remixer from Mount Vernon, created “They Reminisce Over You (T.R.O.Y.)” (1992), one of the most melancholy in rap’s library of tributes. With freak accidents, there’s no one to blame, so people blame themselves. I knew Dwight Myers — the group’s eponymous Heavy D — and after Dixon died, he went into a “Blue Funk” referenced in his titular 1993 song and was never quite the same. A pulmonary embolism killed Myers in November 2011, when he was 44. A rapper, dancer, former Uptown Records president and actor who was born in Mandeville, Jamaica, he died on an outdoor walkway of his Beverly Hills home.
Death seems to stalk hip-hop. James Yancey, who went by J Dilla and was the man behind the scenes of Q-Tip’s perfect 1999 “Vivrant Thing,” died in 2006 of cardiac arrest instigated by the rare blood disorder thrombotic thrombocytopenic purpura. He was 32. Sean Price, a part of Boot Camp Clik and Heltah Skeltah, died in his sleep in 2015. Keith Elam, known as Guru, was 48 when multiple myeloma took him from this world in 2010. A Tribe Called Quest’s Phife (Malik Taylor) died of diabetes complications in 2016. New York City’s DJ Kay Slay, born Keith Grayson, a dramatic mixtape pioneer and radio host, is the only person on this list whose cause of death has been reported as complications of Covid-19; he died at 55 in New York in April of 2022. Substance abuse continues to kill creatives. Texas’ DJ Screw (Robert Davis Jr.) died in 2000 at 29. Born Russell Jones, the solo hitmaker and Wu-Tang Clan standout Ol’ Dirty Bastard died in 2004 at 35. In December 2007, Chad Butler, or Pimp C, was found dead on the sixth floor of Hollywood’s Mondrian hotel. The platinum recording artist Mac Daddy (born Chris Kelly) of Kris Kross was 34 when he died in 2013. Steven Rodriguez, the influential co-founder of the A$AP Mob Collective known as A$AP Yams, died in 2015 at 26. Juice WRLD (Jarad Higgins) had just turned 21 when he died in 2019. DMX, born Earl Simmons in 1970, died of a cocaine-induced heart attack in 2021. Greg Jacobs — better known as both Humpty Hump and Shock G of Digital Underground — died in 2021 at 57. In 2022, Artis Ivey Jr., a.k.a. Coolio (“Gangsta’s Paradise,” “Fantastic Voyage”), died at 59 of an accidental fentanyl/heroin/methamphetamine overdose.
UTFO’s Educated Rapper (Jeffrey Campbell) and Kangol Kid (Shaun Fequiere) each died of cancer, as did the entertainment lawyer and podcast host Combat Jack (Reginald Ossé) and Bushwick Bill (Richard Shaw) of the Geto Boys. In 2008, Eric Tyrone Breed, a.k.a. MC Breed (“Ain’t No Future in Yo’ Frontin’”), of Flint, Mich., died at 37 of kidney failure. Prodigy (Albert Johnson) of Mobb Deep, who was hospitalized for sickle-cell anemia, died in 2017 at 42 from asphyxiation. Craig Mack (“Flava in Ya Ear”) died in 2018 at 46 of heart failure. On Halloween 2020, MF Doom (Daniel Dumile) died suddenly in Leeds, Britain, and there is an ongoing inquiry into the cause of death. John Fletcher, who performed as Ecstasy in the foundational hip-hop trio Whodini, died on Dec. 23, 2020, at 56, and the cause of his death is still unknown. It took eight months for the Los Angeles County coroner to determine that the high-pitched Georgia rapper Raqhid Render, known as Lil Keed, died of eosinophilia, on May 13, 2022. Admitted to the hospital just two hours before his death with stomach and back pain, Keed was 24. The Mississippi pastor’s son Nathaniel Dwayne Hale — also known as Nate Dogg — died in 2011 at age 41 from complications of multiple strokes. Harlem’s Black Rob (born Robert Ross in Buffalo) died of cardiac arrest and kidney failure in the spring of 2021.
“Fat” and “Big” honorifics indicate a fake comfort with heaviness. They’re a shorthand for traits like satiation and literally throwing your weight around. It was from heart attack and lymphedema that Darren Robinson, a.k.a. Buffy the Human Beatbox of the Fat Boys, died in December 1995 at age 28. “He was doing one of his songs,” Buffy’s brother, Curt Robinson, told reporters at the time. “He was climbing a studio chair when he fell and lost his wind. I tried to give him mouth to mouth, but he just couldn’t make it.” Buffy weighed 450 pounds. The M.C., radio host and music producer Mark Morales, another Fat Boy, who went by Prince Markie Dee, lost 175 of his then 450 pounds in 2011. He died of heart failure in 2021 at 52.
Big Pun weighed nearly 700 pounds at the time of his death in 2000. Jonathan Hylton, who was known as Hovain and managed such artists as Cam’ron, Lloyd Banks and T-Pain, died at 34 of unreleased causes in November 2022. Hylton was open about his desire to lose weight and was often seen working out in his Instagram feed.
In July 2021, Harlem’s Biz Markie died at 57 from complications of the diabetes he had been battling for years. Born Marcel Hall, Markie, after losing 140 pounds, told ABC News in 2014 that he knew he could lose his feet, “or other body parts,” if he didn’t make changes. “I wanted to live,” he said. P.M. Dawn’s frontman, Attrell Cordes, also known as Prince Be, also died of complications from diabetes. He had struggled with his weight since adolescence.
As had Andre Harrell. He is enduringly known as the founder and chief executive of Uptown Records, the label that in the 1990s set in motion the careers of, among others, Mary J. Blige, Jodeci, Guy and Heavy D & the Boys. Without Harrell there might not be Diddy, who started out as Harrell’s favored and disruptive intern at Uptown.
In 2020, Wendy Credle, Harrell’s partner, was at her home in New Jersey with her and Harrell’s son, Gianni. They realized that Harrell had stopped returning texts and calls. They phoned a doorman at Harrell’s West Hollywood apartment complex, as well as O’Neal McKnight, a cousin of Harrell’s who lived in the Los Angeles area. “O’Neal goes in with the doorman,” Credle told me in June. “And calls me back, and he’s crying. O’Neal’s like: ‘He’s here. He’s dead. He’s on the floor. He’s dead.’” Andre Harrell was 59.
Onstage is where rap lives its best life. No matter what’s going on at the recording studio, or outside the club or the concert, rap’s impulse to extend the moment — beat scratched into beat, song rolled in song — is its cardiovascular system. When it moves, we move.
One of the most divine concerts in a lifetime of seeing live shows took place in France on June 1, 2012. Having been invited and further approved and detected for metals and draped in color-coded wristbands and lanyards, I walked in a group of 15 or 20 through the byzantine halls of the Palais Omnisports de Paris-Bercy with Jay-Z as he made his way to the stage for a night of his and Kanye West’s Watch the Throne world tour.
Most of us were loopy off the lack of cynicism in the air. We were what Jay-Z and West and the producer Hit-Boy’s “Ni**as in Paris” song crystalized — being rowdy and dark in a world that loves light and white.
“Ni**as in Paris” — on its way to being one of only 120 songs in history to be certified diamond, or 10 times platinum — had bogarted the Throne Tour. And by late spring, Jay-Z and West performed the frenetic, churning “Ni**as in Paris” 11 times in a row — for over 45 minutes. Bercy had no air conditioning. We sweated through our hairdos and briefs and bras. This is the labor, by artist and fan, of creating culture. This is where dreams are not deferred. “If you escaped,” Jay-Z rapped, “What I escaped/You’d be in Paris gettin’ [expletive] up, too.” It was mantra, benediction, a prayer. The music would drop out, and Jay- Z would shout, “Again!” and they would go: “Ball so hard” (take up space) “[expletive] wanna fine me” (unfairly tax me).
Picture me at floor level, on an elevated riser, screaming with 17,000 people: “BUT FIRST [EXPLETIVE] GOTTA FIND ME!” Instead of the cells of a spreadsheet, we were joyfully unaccounted for. Even our dead were among us, living and free.
In Paris — the mythical safe room for Black veterans of World Wars I and II, for artists like Josephine Baker, Nina Simone and James Baldwin and for future Black travel influencers posing at cafes — Jay-Z rapped, “This [expletive] weird/We ain’t even ’posed to be here.” The Throne stretched that song out like DJ Kool Herc and Grand Wizzard Theodore. Like D-Nice, DJ Jazzy Jeff and Jam Master Jay. Like Spinderella, Kid Capri and DJ Drama, Mister Cee. DJ Jazzy Joyce. Terminator X. Like DJ Clark Kent, DJ Scratch, DJ Khaled, DJ Green Lantern, DJ King Tech and DJ Whoo Kid. Like DJ Red Alert. And the Awesome Two. Again!
Why would any of us want it to end? Why do you think folks go, literally, until the break of dawn? We, on that night (at the after-party) and on so many nights in rap — whether at your neighbors’ barbecue or the front row at Cardi B — we were and are free of the world’s narrow definitions of Blackness and Black music. We were living so big it felt, for long moments, things were as they should be.
Source photographs for above: Getty Images: Raymond Boyd; Scott Gries; Hiroyuki Ito; Dimitrios Kambouris; Jeff Kravitz; Claudio Lavenia; Jamie McCarthy; Estevan Oriol; Al Pereira/Michael Ochs Archives; Gene Shaw. Via Getty Images: Shahar Azran/WireImage; Toni Anne Barson Archive/WireImage; Gilbert Carrasquillo/GC Images; FilmMagic; Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage; Jeff Kravitz/FilmMagic; Kevin Mazur/WireImage; Johnny Nunez/WireImage; Ben Rose/WireImage; Prince Williams/WireImage. Getty Images: Bob Berg; Gregory Bojorquez; Raymond Boyd; Scott Dudelson; Steven Ferdman; Jason Mendez; Bill Olive; Andrew H. Walker. Via Getty Images: Jim Dyson/Redferns; Johnny Nunez/WireImage. Getty Images: Anthony Barboza; Raymond Boyd; Michael Loccisano; Michael Ochs Archives; Ebet Roberts; Prince Williams. Via Getty Images: Janette Beckman/Redferns; Leon Bennett/WireImage; Rob Verhorst/Redferns.
Danyel Smith is a contributing writer for the magazine and the author of “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop,” which was chosen by Pitchfork as the best music book of 2022. Smith, who lives in Los Angeles, is also the host of the “Black Girl Songbook” podcast.
