The Mystical Dance of Death and Rebirth in 50 Years of Hip-Hop

Everybody dies, but in rap, death comes differently and at different times. Phife Dawg went on and off dialysis but it didn’t help: dead at 45 of a disease that kept him funky but left him with excess glucose. Biz Markie embodied Harlem but was last seen in Baltimore, hospitalized, holding hands with his wife: gone at 57, too little blood in his brain, too few seconds on his side. Gangsta Boo entered an apartment and left on a stretcher 12 hours later: lost at 43 from an overdose just as her protégés began to fly.

Rappers are killed sometimes by bullets and sometimes by knives. This is not new, though that doesn’t dull the hurt much. Violent death in hip-hop is nearly as old as the genre. Big’s and Pac’s killings hung over an entire decade. The murder of Scott La Rock shook a borough and a burgeoning movement to their cores. Yet today, death stalks MCs just as often in different cloaks, striking not only with bloodshed, but with illness or accident, a batch of untimely terminations.

Every few months, we receive news of another death, of the passing of someone who, just by the sound of their voice on a kick and a snare, can lift us, distract us, counsel us like clergy. It is a cruel track on repeat, a succession of treasures lost. We play the songs of the dead as if they were still here. In doing so, we hail them, grieve them. There is a singular exhaustion that accompanies the deaths of people who are your peers, who look like your parents, who serve as your balm, especially when they die of increasingly mundane and avoidable causes. There is a singular tragedy in it, too, one that’s at the root of hip-hop, and it looks destined to only get worse.

Friday marks half a century since DJ Kool Herc and his sister hosted a back-to-school party in the rec room of a Bronx apartment building: as close to a birthday as the genre has. In the years that have followed, grief has been stitched into the fabric of hip-hop just as it is stitched into the fabric of its adherents’ lives. But how rap mourns, how it remembers, is as intricate and nuanced as the people who created it—the folks who, in the face of so much death, have never stopped sustaining the art form.

There are only three verified pictures of the bluesman Robert Johnson. All of them are portraits. In one, he smiles, hat cocked, pin-stripe suit wrinkling around his arms. In another, he wears suspenders and a white button-down while his skin glistens and reflects the light. In the last, he mouths a cigarette with his spindly hands wrapped around a guitar.

Johnson doesn’t look accustomed to making deals with the devil, as popular legend claimed he did. He does look, as folks said, like he could make his instrument talk. You could imagine him conjuring an extra string. Picking a tune by hearing it alone. He was said to have met Satan at the crossroads of Route 49 and 61 in Clarksdale, Mississippi, before cotton was replaced with soybean and the highway cracked like a salt flat.

In life, Johnson did not rectify this lore. That he’d sold his soul for his skills was part and parcel of the gag, what propped him up and what kept him fed. Johnson practiced on the grounds of cemeteries. He vanished from the Delta for years, only to return cloaked in mystery, reinvigorated and reborn. As much Faustian antihero as African trickster, he carved a niche in a space designed to keep him looking in from the outside.

Like Johnson’s, the rapper MF DOOM’s face was photographed sparingly over the course of his public life. He sometimes sent imposters to scheduled performances. Most unobstructed views of his visage are from his first career as half of the rap duo KMD, when DOOM was known as Zev Love X and his brother and rhyme partner, DJ Subroc, was still alive. Born in London and weaned on golden-age hip-hop in Long Island, DOOM turned to a facade only when tragedy and circumstances required.

In the spring of 1993, just months before his 20th birthday, Subroc was struck and killed by a motorist while he was crossing the Nassau Expressway. Months later, Elektra Records shelved KMD’s second album, Black Bastards, and DOOM disappeared from the public eye. He returned from the heartbreak in the late ’90s with a mask and a book of rhymes. At open-mic nights in Manhattan coffee shops, he constructed his legend and found an audience yearning for his story and flair. He donned a replica helmet from the movie Gladiator and rapped in the third person. “The story was coming together, and it worked and became popular,” he later said. “Now people wanted to see shows.”

In Johnson’s lifetime, he too made it his business to sell out shows; it was his only real venue for profit. The record industry barely served Black audiences and had firm ideas of what white people would and wouldn’t buy. It wanted faceless Black musicians, cheap talent to service cheapened customers. Scouts boarded southbound trains and returned with recordings of local acts, purchased without contracts or royalty agreements. In this darkness, Johnson spun a path for himself out of mythos and style.

He roused juke joints across bayous and the Black Belt. He recorded only 29 songs total, but he performed constantly. He found a way to make a living, to claw, to get by. Johnson passed at the age of 27, supposedly poisoned by the scorned lover of his most recent paramour. His recordings have gone platinum since their 1990 rerelease by Columbia. Only in death did Johnson become another level of legend—not a ghost, but a man ahead of his time.

DOOM retained a following and his privacy even up to his premature death at 49. For a decade, he had essentially been living in exile in London, trapped in the brutal machinery of the U.S. immigration system. His family announced his passing on New Year’s 2020, two months after it had taken place. In the time since, he has received escalating acclaim and interest. Listenership of his music rose by over 850 percent across streaming platforms in the weeks after his death was announced. Biographies and podcasts on his life were in the works soon after. People want a glimpse of the man who built the myth, in part because of the very thing he hoped it would obscure. They want to peer inside.

This is as much the essence of hip-hop as any sound or rhyme—it’s the heartbeat of Johnson’s blues, which echo in rap and in DOOM’s life. Death strips the myth away, but death just might replace it with the thing you desired to begin with: a chance for your art to transcend time. Not as a catch-22, but more as a collective response to the tragedy—a final bit of glorification from the art form, and also from us. First you were no one, then someone, and at last, someone loved enough to now be lost.

Fifteen weeks before she was found dead on her kitchen floor, Lola Mitchell sipped cognac on the web series Drink Champs and let slip how she wanted to be remembered. She was, she swore, born a star. “When people be telling me how great I am,” said the rapper known to the world as Gangsta Boo, “I don’t wanna sound arrogant, but I also want to tell them, ‘I already know,’ because my dad used to tell me that when I was little.” She adjusted her earrings and lowered her head. Then she found the truth inside the truth: “I always felt chosen.”

Mitchell grew up, admittedly, “pretty decent,” in a two-parent household until she was 14 years old. Her family was part of a wave of upwardly mobile Black Memphis residents who flooded to Whitehaven, a neighborhood best known for housing Elvis’s Graceland. Her parents listened to Memphis royalty: Al Green, Isaac Hayes, Aretha Franklin. Boo’s first rhymes were poems to her father. She chanted incantations over karaoke machines and hoped to compete with the leading local rap act of the time, 8Ball & MJG.

She met DJ Paul and the rest of the still-unformed Three 6 Mafia at a talent show in high school. Later, the group’s first choice for a female member didn’t show up to the studio, so, as Mitchell told it, “I got there and never left.” At 14 she joined the group. At 15 she recorded her first official verses inside her bedroom closet.

Mitchell was uncommonly skilled. She read passages of the Bible and turned them into 16-bar paeans in her spare time. At age 16, Boo dropped her first solo track. At 19, her single “Where Dem Dollas At” ruled the radio waves throughout the South. She was a vital member of Three 6’s first incarnation, but she was wary of navigating a partnership dominated by men. To whispers that Mitchell was somehow less than, that her lyrics were ghostwritten, her artistry fraudulent, she responded with fire. Her image was her own construction: “I always came across exactly how I wanted to.” She fed off the comradery and competition of the collective but emphatically insisted, “I have my own identity and thoughts.”

Gangsta Boo left the group in 2001, depressed and searching for meaning. She tried getting back into religion, repenting for her time spent as the devil’s daughter. Later, she admitted what she was looking for was a clean slate. She wandered and meditated. She talked about her desire to just “be Lola”—“a daughter,” “a sister,” “an auntie.” She was her own protector. Her own shield. “Why indulge in a business,” she asked, “that’s not indulging me back?”

She reappeared in recent years as an elder for a new generation. She called herself the “Boo-print.” She did not suffer fools gladly. She told no lies. Mitchell insisted her descendants know their worth and fight for it. At a time when rap is treated in some corners as deficient—as too feminine, too different from what it was—Boo served as a beacon of resolve. She knew the game and how they played it. She was herself, whatever she wanted that to mean.

A few weeks after her passing, her friends and family held a funeral. Her fans still mourned. DJ Paul, her Triple-6 cohort, didn’t attend the service but said he had paid for it in full. He was criticized for this choice enough to prompt a response. “It wouldn’t be nothin’ but about four or five muthafuckers in there if it wasn’t for who I created. Nigga, what I created,” he said of Mitchell, the star who crowned herself.

“I discovered her,” he swore—as if light can be rediscovered once it’s already shined.

On a slope near the banks of the Harlem River sits 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, a thoroughly domestic building. There are glass doors in the entrance, a call box, and a camera tucked out of view. FedEx and UPS drivers routinely wheel packages under the cover of scaffolding. It is the largest of three adjacent apartment buildings in the South Bronx neighborhood of Highbridge and can be seen at certain altitudes of upper Manhattan.

If not for the street sign that says “Hip Hop Blvd” below “Sedgwick Av,” you would not know that the complex is anything other than a mid-century relic. On August 11, 1973, a teenage DJ named Kool Herc and his seventh-grade sister, Cindy, paid $25 to rent out the rec room in this building for a party to fund Cindy’s new wardrobe. Herc spun records all night. He charged a quarter for “the ladies” and a half-dollar for “the fellas” the evening hip-hop arrived. Three hundred people attended, including Grandmaster Flash, Red Alert, and a young KRS-One. Herc played James Brown, Incredible Bongo Band, and the Jimmy Caster Bunch. His musical palate came from his childhood in Jamaica and his parents’ record collection. He’d taught himself to alternate between the same record on two turntables so that he could stay on the peaks of a song. Hip-hop gasped its first breaths, and Sedgwick became its Bethlehem—a true holy ground.

Congo Square in New Orleans is a different birthplace of a different genre, but the earth is no less holy. Culled from Louisiana swampland, it is a memorial to jazz music and its origins, marked by gray brickwork and broad oaks. Over the years it has been a fortress, and then a place where enslaved people were allowed some measure of autonomy—where they could eat, dance, play music, and thrive.

French settlers had little knowledge of the land in New Orleans and, at first, struggled to feed their labor force. To lessen the burden, they allowed enslaved people to be self-sufficient, providing them with parcels of land, “free days” without field labor, and the liberty to sell their goods. The enslaved were allowed to spend their free days as they saw fit, and so the site, not yet named Congo Square, became something else entirely.

Visitors to antebellum New Orleans wrote of Congo Square’s “vast numbers of negro slaves, men, women, and children,” who spent their day “drumming, fifing and dancing in large rings.” They described dancers with “fringes, ribbons, little bells, and shells and balls.” The enslaved people wore head wraps of yellow, blue, red, green, and brown and sold peanuts, coconuts, and popcorn. They wielded narrow drums, “from two to eight feet in length,” banjos carved from gourds, percussion instruments “made of a gum stump.”

The square became a vector of culture. Those in bondage could move beyond their station, back to the practices and sounds of Africa. It was a place of freedom.

In 1845, the New Orleans City Council required enslaved people to have written permission to attend the dances. By 1856, the council adopted an ordinance making it illegal to beat a drum, blow a horn, or play a trumpet in public. The dances at the square ground to a halt, but the art forms that it created—the kindling of jazz music—lived on. What mattered was never the land but the liberty it provided, that it let a threatened people transcend the boundaries of space and time, talk to the dead and the lost, pass them down through sound.

The building at 1520 Sedgwick is a product of a different age but has its own layered record. The building and the street it rests on are named after the Union general John Sedgwick, who told his soldiers moments before his death in 1864 that the enemy “couldn’t hit an elephant at that distance.”

Construction for the apartment building was announced in May 1965 and was completed in less than two years at the cost of $2.3 million. Units were moderately priced. When the neighborhood started to change in the late ’60s, The New York Daily News sent a reporter to write a story about drugs tearing the place apart. A white resident told them, “We do not have a race problem here, but one of crime—narcotics in particular.” By the start of the ’70s, the exodus of white residents from the Bronx had already begun. The completion of the Cross Bronx Expressway had carved up the borough and stifled its economy: 60,000 residents uprooted, 600,000 manufacturing jobs lost. By the time of Herc’s party, the Bronx was literally burning. Slumlords would pay third parties to start fires in buildings so that they could pocket the insurance money.

In 2008, 1520 Sedgwick was sold to a venture capitalist and real estate developer. This was during the height of the property boom, when private equity funds scooped up buildings throughout the city. For a period the space fell into disrepair: According to the city, the number of violations increased from 82 to 598 in just one year.

After battling for control of the building for the better part of five years, tenants purchased 1520 Sedgwick in 2011 with the help of a housing nonprofit. Their faith in their little Bethlehem never wavered. If there is a lesson to the story of this place, it’s the same as that of Congo Square: To transcend a lack of protection requires a space within and beyond those confines. Before the tenants took over 1520, one of the residents, a 70-year-old woman, told the landlords, “I was here before you bought this building and I’m going to be here when you lose this building.” And so here—as before—what she was saying, without saying, was In this life or the next.

The flowers De La Soul received in their March 2023 performance at Webster Hall were bouquets of both joy and grief. Eighteen days earlier, Dave Jolicoeur, the realist and workman of the Long Island triumvirate who’d once gone by the name Trugoy the Dove, had died after struggling with congestive heart failure. Thus, a mid-spring show meant to be a celebration of the long-awaited arrival of their catalog on streaming platforms, a late-night jubilee in honor of their work and artistic philosophy, became partly a funeral and partly a chance to glorify the lost.

There were petals everywhere, though few of them were real. Daisies—the mark of De La’s debut album—were made of bright orange and blue rubber and stuffed with helium, with light shining from behind them. The vibe was of a moment less trapped in time than sojourning comfortably in it. A disco ball and a bar were within eyeshot of portraits of Dave. It was not clear how many of the people in the crowd had seen the group perform before, but there was a general and inescapable feeling—an unshakable impossibility—that Dave might, at any moment, walk out into the spotlight.

De La had promised as teenagers that “without my one and two there where would there be my three,” and yet there they were, wise man Posdnuos and DJ Maseo, no longer a magic number but a pair of brothers, cleaved: these men who had lost out on streaming profits for two decades and had watched their kin slowly and prematurely die as their date of redress was nearest. In the crowd, we did not know where—or even whether—Dave’s passing and his record industry mistreatment aligned, but it was hard to spot where one thing stopped and the other began.

It would seem like this would doom the evening, but it heightened the affair. The club was stuffed. The floor shook. Bodies moved in unison, unbound. Guests onstage greeted one another with open arms and wide eyes. Native Tongues spoke and sang their shared tunes: hugging one another, lifting one another, consoling one another, dancing with their pain.

Onstage that night there was loss. Onstage that night there was light. You could look up and feel the heartbeat of a true and holy communion. It was the strum of a bluesman’s guitar. The beat of what we were and the truth of what we are. It is what some of us will do when we lose another one of us: We will wail, and dance, and love, and cry.