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fromrap

@fromrap

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there is a verse that goes through the entire alphabet, one letter per bar, faster than most people can read out loud. it has been a party trick for twenty five years. daniel radcliffe did it on late night tv and the clip has been passed around ever since. the man who wrote it was timothy jerome parker. he called himself gift of gab. he was born in pacoima, los angeles on october 7, 1970 and met a dj named xavier mosley in high school in sacramento. mosley became chief xcel. together they were blackalicious, and for a stretch in the late 90s and early 2000s they made some of the most technically absurd rap anyone was making. "alphabet aerobics" came out in 1999. it was never a hit single in the normal sense. it just refused to go away, resurfacing every few years on a new platform with a new generation trying and failing to keep up with it. he kept working. four blackalicious albums. solo records in 2004, 2009 and 2012. a discography that runs from 1993 to the year he died. what most people listening did not know was what it cost. in the years before 2020 his kidneys failed. he was on dialysis multiple times a week, the kind of schedule that structures your entire life around a machine. he kept recording through it. he got a transplant in january 2020. he died on june 18, 2021 of natural causes. he was 50. the strange thing about his legacy is how impersonal it became. the verse travels on its own. people learn it as a challenge, a thing to attempt, without ever meeting the person who built it. he was not a novelty. he was one of the most gifted technical rappers of his generation, and he spent his last years making records between hospital visits. next time it comes up on your feed, look up who wrote it. @fromrap #giftofgab #blackalicious #alphabetaerobics #undergroundhiphop #hiphophistory #fromrap by @fromrap
10
24 days ago
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in 1992 he was sitting in a fresno jail cell and he recorded an entire album over the phone. it came out. people bought it. andre louis hicks was born in oakland on july 5, 1970 and raised in vallejo. he called himself mac dre and by his early twenties he was the most magnetic voice in northern california rap. then the case. in march 1992 he was arrested in connection with a string of bank robberies. he was not at the scene. the evidence against him was a gun found in his apartment months earlier and a recording in which he said "shoot out the surveillance cameras." he was convicted of conspiracy to commit robbery and given five years. most artists disappear at that point. he called a friend from the jail phone, rapped into the receiver, and they built "back n da hood" out of those calls. a full release, recorded through a payphone, while he was inside. he was let out early for good behavior on august 2, 1996, after four years. what he did next reshaped a region. he started thizz entertainment in 1998 and pushed a sound that was faster, funnier and more unhinged than anything else coming out of california. the beats sped up. the dancing changed. by the early 2000s it had a name, hyphy, and it belonged to the bay in a way nothing had since the late 80s. he toured constantly because the money was in shows. on october 31, 2004 he performed in kansas city, missouri. early the next morning, someone fired on the van carrying him and other thizz artists on the highway. he was 34. nobody was ever charged. the case is still open. his mother has run his label ever since. every hyphy record made after 2004 sits on top of something he built, and most of the artists who borrowed it were children when he was calling in verses from a jail phone. @fromrap #macdre #hyphy #thizz #vallejo #bayarea #hiphophistory #fromrap by @fromrap
92
25 days ago
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he was 17 the first time. he survived it, and the patch he wore afterward became the first thing anyone noticed about him. glenn thomas grew up in montgomery, alabama. he called himself doe b. in 2009, as a teenager, he was shot during an altercation at a club and lived. he lost the use of one eye and started wearing a black patch over it, and within a few years that patch was on every cover, every video, every photo. montgomery was not a rap city. there was no scene to come up through, no label infrastructure, no local star to follow. he built an audience anyway, mixtape by mixtape, until people two states over knew who he was. t.i. noticed. grand hustle signed him. "let me find out" turned into a regional hit and then a remix with t.i. and juicy j, which is the point where an artist from a city with no industry suddenly has one. he was on the grand hustle compilations. he was 21 years old and about to have a real career. on december 28, 2013, he was at the centennial hill bar and grill in montgomery when someone opened fire inside. he was killed. so was kimberle johnson, a 21 year old student at troy university who was out celebrating her birthday. two men were later charged with capital murder in the case. he was 22. t.i. put him on a posthumous record with raekwon in february 2014. there were tributes, there was a wave of attention, and then the industry did what it does. the detail that sticks is the arithmetic of it. he got shot at 17 and lived, spent five years turning that into an identity and a career, got signed, got a hit, and then it happened again and this time it did not stop. montgomery still claims him. it never got another one. @fromrap #doeb #montgomery #alabama #grandhustle #ti #hiphophistory #fromrap by @fromrap
177
a month ago
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in 2020 a video went around of a rapper lying in a bed that was not his own, thin, barely able to speak. people who grew up on his record did not recognize him. robert ross was born in new york city on june 8, 1968. bad boy signed him in 1996, back when being on that label meant you were about to be enormous. his debut "life story" came out in 2000 and went past platinum. "whoa!" was the single, and if you were anywhere near a radio that year you heard it constantly. it hit the top ten on the rap and r&b charts and number 43 on the hot 100, which turned out to be the only time a solo record of his ever charted there. that is the part people forget. one album, one huge moment, and then the machine moved on. the second album in 2005 did not land the same way. in 2006 he was sentenced for a 2004 case, jewelry taken from a hotel, and he served more than seven years. he came home in may 2010 to an industry that had rearranged itself without him. he kept recording. the 2011 album charted at 44. he did shows. he was working. then his health went. four strokes in five years. by 2020 he had no permanent place to live and needed care he could not pay for. a gofundme was set up to help him find housing and cover medical bills, and the rap world responded, but it was late and everyone knew it was late. he died on april 17, 2021 in atlanta. cardiac arrest. he was 52. there is a version of this story where the moral is about the industry, and that version is true. but the thing that stays with you is smaller. a man who made a record that an entire country sang along to, and twenty years later there was a fundraiser so he could have a bed. play "whoa!" today. loud. @fromrap #blackrob #badboyrecords #whoa #harlem #2000s #hiphophistory #fromrap by @fromrap
16
a month ago
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in 1991 a rapper nobody had heard of showed up on a digital underground record called "same song." he was a roadie and a backup dancer for the group. his name was tupac shakur. the man who put him on that record was gregory edward jacobs. everyone called him shock g. he was born in queens on august 25, 1963 and built digital underground in oakland with chopmaster j and kenny-k. the group's 1990 album "sex packets" was funk-soaked, ridiculous, and completely unlike anything else in rap that year. then he did the strangest thing anyone in hip-hop has done with a hit. he invented a second rapper. glasses, a huge fake nose, garish clothes, a nasal voice. he called him humpty hump and let people believe humpty was a different person. "the humpty dance" went platinum and became the biggest song of shock g's career. it charted higher than anything he ever released as himself. a man in a costume outsold the man wearing it. meanwhile he kept building tupac. he co-produced "2pacalypse now" in 1991. he produced "i get around" in 1993, the platinum single that made tupac a star, and he is on the record too. he produced "so many tears" for "me against the world" in 1995. he worked with george clinton and p-funk through the 90s and 2000s. he produced for murs. he stayed prolific and mostly out of the spotlight. on april 22, 2021 he was found dead in tampa, florida. he was 57. the county medical examiner ruled it an accidental overdose of f********, m*** and alcohol. there is a whole generation that knows every word of "the humpty dance" and could not pick him out of a photograph. that was more or less the point. he built a character so people would look at the character instead. he gave the biggest rapper of all time his first verse on wax, and most people never learned his name. @fromrap #shockg #digitalunderground #humptydance #tupac #oakland #hiphophistory #fromrap by @fromrap
85
a month ago
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he was walking out of his best friend's birthday party when it happened. the man who did it had never met him and had come for somebody else entirely. raymond rogers was the hype man of the lost boyz, and if you grew up on 90s new york rap you know exactly what that voice sounded like. he called himself freaky tah. the lost boyz were four kids from south jamaica, queens. mr. cheeks wrote and rapped, pretty lou and spigg nice held down the rest, and tah was the energy, the ad libs, the guy whose voice came in over the hook and made the record feel like a block party. "lifestyles of the rich and shameless" in 1995. "renee" in 1996, a story song about a girl who gets killed, which people still play at cookouts thirty years later. "music makes me high." "jeeps, lex coups, bimaz and benz." two gold albums in two years. on march 28, 1999, tah went to mr. cheeks' birthday party at a hotel in queens. he was leaving in the early morning when he was shot outside. here is the part that never stops being awful. it started with a robbery the previous november. someone connected to the lost boyz camp tried to retaliate and killed a man who had nothing to do with the robbery. that man's brother went looking for payback and decided tah was related to the person responsible. he was not. tah had no part in any of it. kelvin jones pleaded guilty to second degree murder and got at least fifteen years. the man who drove him got seven for manslaughter. three people died in that chain and not one of them was the person anyone was actually looking for. the group finished their third album without him. mr. cheeks went solo and has spent twenty five years mentioning tah in interviews. he was 27. he was the loudest voice on records about being young in queens, and he was killed leaving a birthday party for a friend. @fromrap #freakytah #lostboyz #renee #queens #90shiphop #hiphophistory #fromrap by @fromrap
17
a month ago
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in 2018 drake put out "in my feelings" and it went to number one. the voice you hear on it belonged to a woman who had been dead for eight years. renetta yemika lowe-bridgewater was born september 30, 1982 and grew up in the magnolia projects in new orleans. soulja slim, who came up in the same projects, started calling her magnolia shorty. the name stuck for the rest of her life. birdman found her while she was still a teenager. she and ms. tee became the first two women ever signed to cash money records, back when cash money was a local label and nobody outside louisiana had heard of it. her debut came out in 1997 and it is still treated as a bounce classic. she was on juvenile's "3rd ward solja" the same year. bounce was a new orleans thing then, fast, loud, funny, built for block parties and second lines, and she was the woman at the center of it. people called her the queen of bounce and meant it literally. she kept performing through the 2000s. crowds, stages, block parties. she was doing shows right up to the end. on december 20, 2010, she was killed in new orleans east. she was 28 years old. it took more than six years to get answers. in february 2017 a federal jury convicted ten people on racketeering charges, and two of them were found guilty of her killing. by then her voice had started showing up in places she never lived to see. drake sampled her for "in my feelings," the biggest song of that summer. chris brown used her on "wobble up." a generation heard her without ever learning who she was. that is the part that sits wrong. bounce went global. new orleans became a sound the whole industry borrowed from. and the woman who helped build it was already gone, credited in liner notes most people never read. queen of bounce. say her name. @fromrap #magnoliashorty #bounce #neworleans #cashmoney #hiphophistory #queenofbounce #fromrap by @fromrap
17
a month ago
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he turned 18 on a thursday. by the next thursday he was gone. addarren la keith ross was born in jonesboro, louisiana on june 13, 1995. small town, north louisiana, the kind of place rap scouts do not drive through. he called himself lil snupe. in 2012 he put out a mixtape called "16 & runnin" and it did what those tapes almost never do. it traveled. by the next year he was performing at grambling and meek mill was in the building. meek signed him to dream chasers on the spot. what made people stop was the freestyling. no writing, no phone, no pauses. he would go for ten minutes straight and the bars kept landing. rappers twice his age watched him do it and looked genuinely unsettled. "nobody does it better" with meek came out in march 2013. the mixtape "r.n.i.c." landed in april. he was 17 for both of them. he turned 18 on june 13, 2013. seven days later, in the early hours of june 20, he was killed at an apartment complex in winnfield, louisiana. the argument that led to it was about a video game. a man was later charged with first degree murder, another with manslaughter. he had been signed for less than a year. rick ross put his voice on "self made vol. 3." meek has talked about him in interviews for a decade and still gets quiet doing it. there are posthumous tracks, but they are pieces, verses recorded for something that was never finished. what stays with people who saw him is the ordinariness of how it ended. not a feud, not a career, not anything to do with rap at all. a room, a game, an argument, and a kid who was 18 years old for one week. he never got to make an album. he never got a real tour. he got a mixtape, a co-sign, and seven days of being 18. @fromrap #lilsnupe #meekmill #dreamchasers #louisiana #hiphophistory #freestyle #fromrap by @fromrap
35
a month ago
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he was 19 years old and he had already produced records for gucci mane and french montana. derek mcallister jr. was born in the bronx on november 6, 1994 and grew up in columbia, south carolina. he was 13 when he watched a soulja boy video, downloaded fruity loops, and started making beats in his bedroom. by his late teens he was selling them. real placements, real artists. young scooter. shy glizzy. the rapping was an accident. in the spring of 2012 he started recording his own vocals over his own instrumentals, mostly as a way to demo the beats so buyers could hear what they sounded like finished. people wanted the demos. "rico story" came out in september 2013 and spread through the internet on its own. then "lonely" landed in december and vine picked it up, and suddenly a kid from columbia had a platinum single. "freak hoe" went platinum too. by early 2014 he had 49 songs on itunes and he had done all of it himself, the beats, the writing, the hooks, the mixing. he was building a label. he was 19. on march 6, 2014, he was found at his home in columbia. the county coroner said there was no sign of foul play, and for years the story was that his heart had simply stopped. that never sat right with people who knew him. he was a teenager with no history of illness. in 2023, nine years later, his mother said publicly what the family had come to understand: it was not his heart. it was carbon monoxide, and it was an accident. nine years of the wrong story. he never got to see what he built. the beats he made in a bedroom in south carolina still get flipped and sampled by producers who were in middle school when he died. "erica kane" came out two months after his funeral and it is still one of the most played songs he ever made. he taught himself everything at 13 and he was gone at 19. @fromrap #speakerknockerz #ricostory #lonely #southcarolina #hiphophistory #producers #fromrap by @fromrap
393
a month ago
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he was 19 and he was sitting in the car behind tupac the night tupac was shot. hundreds of people were out on las vegas boulevard on september 7, 1996. only one of them came forward afterward and told police he could pick the shooter out of a photo lineup. his name was yafeu akiyele fula. everyone in hip-hop knew him as yaki kadafi. he was tupac's godbrother, and inside the crew he was known as the prince. in 1992, still a teenager, he formed a trio with two other kids, kastro and e.d.i. mean. three years later he and tupac turned that into the outlawz, the group that stood behind tupac through the last and loudest year of his life. then came vegas. kadafi was in the vehicle traveling behind tupac's when the shooting happened. in the days after, he was the one witness who spoke up. he said he had seen enough to identify the person who fired. police interviewed him briefly and sent him home. las vegas detectives later said they still needed to sit down with him properly. they never got the chance. on november 10, 1996, two months after tupac died, kadafi was killed in an apartment building in orange, new jersey. he was 19. for years people assumed the two deaths were connected. they were not. investigators found kadafi's death was an accident, caused by a relative of one of his closest childhood friends. someone served seven years for it. no link to the tupac case was ever established. that is harder to carry than a conspiracy would be. no message, no cover-up. just a teenager who happened to be the one person willing to talk, gone for reasons that had nothing to do with any of it. he never gave a full statement. the tupac case stayed open for 27 years before anyone was charged. kadafi's voice is still on the outlawz records tupac made in that final year. a kid who named himself after a head of state, who should have had decades. he got two more months after vegas. @fromrap #yakikadafi #outlawz #tupac #hiphophistory #90shiphop #90srap #fromrap by @fromrap
23
a month ago
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february 7, 2000. crowne plaza hotel, white plains, new york. he's 28 years old. sitting in a hotel room with his family. his heart gives out. respiratory failure. by the time paramedics get him to white plains hospital, it's already over. two years earlier he'd made history. "capital punishment," his debut, went platinum in 69 days, the first hip-hop album by a latino solo artist to ever cross that line. before him, the industry said it couldn't happen. after him, doors that had been shut for decades swung open. his name was christopher lee rios. everyone called him big pun. south bronx. soundview projects. fat joe found him rhyming on a corner and never let go. terror squad. "still not a player." "you came up." "twinz." the flow was something the game hadn't heard before, internal rhymes stacked so dense you needed a rewind button just to catch what he'd already done three bars back. "capital punishment" picked up a grammy nomination for best rap album. one of the greatest to ever hold a mic, and everyone in the game knew it. there was a shadow he couldn't outrun. in the summer of 1999 he checked into a weight program at duke, struggling publicly and painfully with his health. he left early. but he kept writing. kept recording. "yeeeah baby," his second album, was almost finished when he died, it dropped two months later and debuted at number 3 on the billboard 200. his wife liza remembers him working on new music the week before. three kids at home. so many plans for what came next. in 2021 the bronx renamed a street "big pun plaza." fat joe still says his name every chance he gets. a whole generation of latino artists, from n.o.r.e. to bad bunny, walk through a door pun kicked open at 26. he was 28. it wasn't a joke. it was a health crisis that outran him, and we lost him before he ever got to show us the second half. what would he sound like right now. @fromrap #bigpun #hiphophistory #90shiphop #latinohiphop #terrorsquad #fromrap by @fromrap
3
a month ago
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he flew home from a concert in the uk. one month later he was dead. he was 44. dwight arrington myers was born in mandeville, jamaica in 1967 and grew up in mount vernon, new york. he was heavy. he was smiling. he was fast on the mic in a way no one had heard before, light on his feet, playful, romantic, dangerous when he wanted to be. in 1986 he formed heavy d & the boyz with three friends. they were the first group ever signed to andre harrell's brand-new label, uptown records. that decision would build an era. uptown became the launching pad for teddy riley's new jack swing, for a young a&r named sean combs, for mary j blige, jodeci, guy, the whole sound of black music between 88 and 95 ran through that door. and heavy d walked through it first. "now that we found love" dropped in 1991. it was everywhere, weddings, cookouts, block parties, radio, mtv. after the boyz he became president of uptown records. then he acted. he sang reggae. he took years off to be present as a father. in october 2011 he performed with eddie f at the bet hip hop awards, his first live tv performance in 15 years. the crowd lost it. it looked like a beginning. less than a month later, on the morning of november 8, 2011, he collapsed on the walkway outside his beverly hills home. he was taken to cedars-sinai. he never woke up. the coroner ruled it a pulmonary embolism, a blood clot that formed in his leg during the long flight home from cardiff, where he had just performed at a michael jackson tribute. deep vein thrombosis. it hit him quietly. he was 44. what makes it hurt is how ordinary it was. no beef. no bullet. just a man who got on a plane, came home, and never got another chance to say goodbye. heavy d rapped joy in a genre that too often had to rap survival. he made the biggest guy in the room the softest one on the record. we love you, heavy. thank you for the smile. @fromrap #heavyd #nowthatwefoundlove #uptownrecords #hiphophistory #90shiphop #newjackswing #fromrap by @fromrap
1
a month ago
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