Remember reading some of the comments in thread about the death of Prodigy, thought this was an article worth sharing.
I see their names and hold my breath. You do this when you’re a 40-something hip-hop head and you’ve glimpsed the name of an M.C. your age trending in the news. Once it might have meant tawdry scandal or legal shenanigans. Now, too often, it means someone’s been struck down. Not by bullet or blade. But by illness.It’s like watching the return path of a deadly boomerang from our youth. That projectile picked off a cohort of young black boys via gunshot and incarceration. Now it’s having a second go around at those it missed via our blood and bones.
The tragedy is that this current wave of untimely deaths is partly rooted in the same morass of ills that threatened to kill us as kids, with the legacy of poor nutrition, second-class health care and diseases that disproportionately affect black people doing the job that bullets failed to do years ago.
Just two weeks ago, I saw the name of Prodigy from Mobb Deep trending on Twitter. He died at 42, complications of sickle cell anemia. There’s a well-practiced litany during these moments: the shock, the commiserating texts and social media posts, the flood of memories. For me the memory was of Prodigy smiling.
It was 2008, and I was shooting the pilot of a hip-hop show for BET. We ended with a freestyle session, and Prodigy was among a group of M.C.s belting out lyrics. He smiled the entire time. I remembered that expression, and I remembered the M.C. beside him: Sean Price. Born in Brooklyn, Mr. Price was a member of the Boot Camp Clik collective and had etched his place in hip-hop lore. He died in his sleep two years ago at age 43.
Both men were paragons of New York City hip-hop in the mid-’90s. Both survived treacherous hoods to become near mythic figures. Both are gone now. And they’re far from the only ones. Phife of A Tribe Called Quest died last year at age 45 of complications of diabetes. The underground maestro Pumpkinhead died in 2015 at 39. Then there was Nate Dogg, who died in 2011 at the age of 41, after a stroke. And the great James Yancey, a.k.a. J Dilla, preceded them all about 10 years ago, at age 32, after battling lupus.
They were all of my generation. All dead by their mid-40s.
I couldn’t imagine being 40-something in hip-hop when I was a teenager. Forty meant pain-in-the-neck parents and other grown-ups grumbling about that irritating, nonmusical noise coming from my Walkman or my boom box. Hip-hop meant the silky word play of Big Daddy Kane, the urgency of Public Enemy or the verbal bravado of MC Lyte. It seemed incongruous, even absurd, to put the words “40” and “hip-hop” in the same sentence.
Forty also just seemed a long way away, a place you’d have to run a gantlet to reach. When I was a teenager we thought that surviving past your early 20s meant we would have found the Holy Grail. Then, it was assumed, you’d be good. You’d escape the pathologies of the hood. You’d no longer live under the shadow of that huge boomerang of death whirling overhead, threatening to clip you at any moment.
That went for me, too, though I was far from some tough street kid. Yes, I liked block parties and chatting with girls. But I liked to read books at lunchtime and write short stories even more, which took me to a good college and eventually to a career as a music journalist. I still went to public school in 1980s New York. I still lived in certain neighborhoods: Flatbush, Brooklyn, and Freeport, Long Island. And I was still subject to certain realities.
Like being 16 in the Starlight Ballroom in Brooklyn when I bump into the gunman who’d just fired up in the air, only to have that gunman point his piece in my face and pull the trigger. Attribute it to Providence or a misfire, but the round didn’t discharge. I lived.
Now I’m here. A fact that was recently driven home for me in amusingly irritating fashion the first time some whippersnapper on Church Avenue in Brooklyn greeted me with, “What’s good, O.G.?” I nearly broke my fool neck looking around to see who he was talking to.
But that’s me these days, 40-something, not exactly enamored with much of today’s hip-hop and father to my own teenager. What does it mean to be a hip-hop parent? For me, it means moving heaven and earth to protect my daughter from any hint of the menace that threatened my own teenage years.
It means selectively introducing her to the music I loved at her age, sometimes coaxing an approving grin from her, sometimes getting a skeptical eyebrow. And sometimes it means reaching a musical détente, like when we decided we both liked “Contralla” by Drake enough for it to become our sunroof-open, singalong summer song.
The most obsessive part of being a 40-something hip-hop head has meant keeping an anxious eye on Twitter to see if another name will make me hold my breath. They all hurt. And none hurt more than the 2016 death of the Toronto rap legend King Reign, who was also my cousin.
Reign was 40 and seemingly fit as a drum, until the day his body gave up on him after a heart attack. That loss aches and always will.
Recently, I’ve thought of Prodigy’s smile, I’ve remembered Sean Price’s bear hug and I still hear King Reign’s chuckle.
I’d be lying if I didn’t admit that I’m also listening for the sound of a boomerang’s whirl, wondering if it’s coming back to get me.
Selwyn Seyfu Hinds (@selwynhinds) is a screenwriter and a former editor of the hip-hop magazine The Source.
