Remembering the Rappers We Lost

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.