The list of hip-hop artists who left the world before they could discover it is long and continuous • What causes it, and is there a chance it will change?
It seems like every moment new names are added to the rappers' never-ending dead list.
Most of them died at a young age, and the long, even outrageous list at this point, of hip-hop stars leaving money and potential wasted raises quite a few question marks about the direction the genre has taken in recent decades.
At the time of writing, a new name has been added to the list: 34-year-old rapper (and Beyoncé's distant cousin) Cardon (Martel Dirwan), who was shot in the head at his home in San Antonio last weekend.
In his death he was privileged to raise the average age of the rappers who died before him.
Before Cardon there were 6 Dogs ("Six Dogs").
A rapper from Atlanta who received initial attention in SoundCloud, gained a lot of popularity in it and from there was signed, as is the way of other rappers who started on the exact same platform, by a record company.
And like quite a few members of the genre, he too found his death at the inconceivable age of 21.
The cause of death is not yet known at this stage, but it is difficult to think of natural circumstances that would lead to the death of a 21-year-old man (if we ignore for a moment his infection with the corona virus during the summer).
The young musician, as mentioned, whose real name is Chase Amic, is just one of a long list, of rap artists who have died.
At least in rock'n'roll, a genre in itself quite dead, they reach the age of 27. A look at the list of rappers who have returned equipment prematurely in the last three years reveals an average age of about 24 years of existence.
The names sometimes do not mean much to the average person, because there are so many of them who have not had time to become non-genre sellers.
For every Mac Miller who died in 2018 after consuming an overdose and being considered a well-known star, there is Axil Aliji, a rapper from Minnesota at the beginning of her career, whose death (again - from an overdose) went under the radar - for reasons of relative anonymity.
Like 6 Doggies, Aliji was only 21. Lil Pip, a better-known emo-rap artist in his field, slammed him to death as a result of drug use in 2017, just two weeks after he turned 21. New York pop smoker died in February. 2020 during a burglary in a house in LA, when he was only 20 years old.
Jimmy Wopo, 21, was shot to death in 2018 in an assassination from a passenger car (Drive Bay Shooting), when he was about to sign a contract with the Wiz Califa label.
And there are also Juice World (21), China (25), XXXTentacion (20), Canadian Smoke Dog (21), and Nipple Hasel, who at least got to reach the extreme age of 33.
Who shoots and who consumes.
Americans, Canadians, Mexicans, Brazilians.
Women, men, everything goes.
The list is still long and drops jaws in its absurdity.
Say - "Okay, rap is a territory known for its high mortality rates", a stigma that stuck with it thanks to names like Tupac and Biggie in the East and West Coast wars in nineties rap (and actually goes back to the late '80s).
Say - "Musicians have always tended to die in popular genres."
Once upon a time these were rock stars falling one after the other - today, when hip-hop has dominated the industry for quite a few years and shaped mainstream pop in its image, these are rappers.
Add to that a socio-economic interest and a friction in crime among black communities in racist America, and sum it up in "Release us, what do you want, a dog bites a man, that's what he does."
And really there is no problem in doing so and these are always relevant arguments.
Only the gender, geographical and racial diversity - in the face of the age uniformity of these cases, makes the whole business look a little more like a generational matter to be taken into account.
It starts with the death ethos itself, which is amplified in hip-hop and has always been its creative engine.
Fifty Cent's breakthrough album from 2003 was called "Get Rich or Die Tryin '".
In the decade and a bit before that, the best-known label in the field was named "Death Row Records", and later also "Murder Inc".
Death has always accompanied rap at the program level and formed part of its mythology.
Even if there are those who think that a generation of stars has grown up here that the whole "sex, drugs and rock'n'roll" cliché seems ridiculous to them (and this is true in part) - in hip-hop, at least conceptually, death is still nice to them.
With all due respect to the mainstream Harry Styles pop stars who sing "Treat People with Kindness", quite a few of the names listed in the parade of the dead up here have songs and albums that deal with addictions, depression and inactivity.
Before his death, Lil 'Peep worked on the sequel to "Come Over When You're Sober".
In a song from 2017 he sings "Everyone tells me my life is short, but I want to die".
China's 2019 album was called "in case i die first", really the endless list of examples.
It was rooted long before that: Tupac became dead on some of his songs, to Biggie's debut album called "Ready to Die".
The rapper’s preoccupation with death is anything but innovation.
Okay.
The teens and twenties bring us to explore the worlds of annihilation.
Kurt Cobain also swears he has no rifle and Amy Winehouse has repeatedly found herself sinking into the black.
But here comes a demographic interest: Stars are falling today at a younger age, especially in rap.
And this is a theory that is becoming more and more prevalent among American industry figures, executives and producers, who are trying to crack what the hell is happening to so many artists in the genre in which they operate.
Hint: It begins in the year of birth and in its encounter with fame.
Many of the musicians mentioned here have broken into social networking platforms, a place where young age is a huge advantage.
It allows artists to control the platform and its natural understanding.
For talent hunting executives across the web, it allows for a more accurate reading of an artist's popularity.
Internet buzz as an indicator of success potential.
Now imagine young people aged 18-19 who have already managed to create interest in their small community, suddenly gaining online exposure and thousands of likes from people you do not know, because you have become a kind of Big.
Then a record company locates and picks you up, signs a contract (no matter how much more they talk about the death of the big labels, at the perceptual level even today the signing is a seal of success) and makes you really big, at least for a certain audience.
Success at a young age always comes at a price, and you are welcome to say hello to Michael Jackson and Britney Spears. They did not even have Instagram.
Add to that an entirely new element of the last decade and a half - popularity in social media, and here's a recipe for an emotional, mental, even physical roller coaster.
Fulfilled dealing with communication, it's another peanut.
But social media - the place where you are judged by the amount of likes you get for every new song and clip you put out, and can also disgrace an urban oasis in a small high school in Nevada?
This is already a troll of a different kind.
And this is evidenced by the plethora of Instagram rappers, ticks and soundcloud that broke out at a young age, gaining huge exposure and obsessively checking the amount of likes and shares they get on every post, video and photo they upload.
A tough world meets soft souls with money and access to everything they are offered (and there are those who offer, because of rubbing in the glow - or at least wallowing in it with filth).
And from there it is easy to escape to anesthetize consciousness by a variety of fun materials at varying levels.
And here we come to another prominent reason for all this annihilation.
There are those in the American hip-hop industry who claim that the dynamics between the rap world and the drug world have changed significantly in recent decades.
Mainly due to the rise of hip-hop to greatness and its great popularity in mainstream culture, for more than two decades.
"The relationship between hip-hop and drugs has completely changed," says Calvin Smiley, a lecturer in hip-hop and social justice at Hunter College in New York, in an interview with the Guardian.
He said early generations of rappers used drugs as a livelihood tool, such as Jay-Z and his past known as a drug dealer.
It was for them a means of getting out of a world of poverty, while they themselves used mostly alcohol and marijuana.
From the moment the success came, Smiley details, drug use has become a matter of snuff.
Drugs are now appearing in quite a few clips of new-generation hip-hop artists as a means of social marking.
Snoop Dogg, an Old School rapper, is identified with Wade.
The new guys prefer to show off mirrors covered in white powder.
The turning point in the balance of power is identified by Smiley in the previous decade, when rapper Juicy Jay contributed to the rise in popularity of an unsympathetic drug called lean.
And like anything that is becoming popular in urban culture, it too has found its way into the lyrics of the rap world.
Mentions of Sam have appeared in songs by Lil 'Wayne and Rudy Rich, and rapper Young Thag even drinks it quite freely during interviews.
And that's regardless of their fondness for conventional party drugs and of course prescription drugs, because something needs to bring you back down after an intense evening.
Of course, the glorification of the drug world is not limited to texts, and it has also reached the social media - the home ground of the right rappers, who make the writer of these lines feel two hundred years old.
Lil Peep for example, one of the standouts on the list that opened this text, was photographed with a cake in the shape of a X-ray ball to mark a million followers on Instagram.
Hours before he died, the peep was photographed with a prescription drug on his tongue.
classic.
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A post shared by @lilpeep
Lil 'Peep. Another rapper with overconsumption
The last, and perhaps most important, reason lies in the relationship between the record company and the artist.
For many years, middle-aged people in the form of personal managers mediated between the two factors.
They were the official balances between the label's desires and the artist's needs and desires.
They also served, when necessary, as a supervisory body, whose job it was to take care of the physical and mental well-being of gold album-casting customers.
Today, when the supply is so large and musicians are considered for label managers no more than disposable instruments (and the audience, admittedly, treats them as such, with every second this or that app generating a new splash), it's hard to find a manager who will really invest in his talent.
Let him make sure he does not get involved in a gang war, get enough hours of sleep and do not put too much nonsense in his nose.
And back to Mac Miller, probably the most familiar name on this list to the general public.
Some argue that the change is already beginning to happen, at least in the drug sector.
After the wave of deaths and killings of the past two years, the scene, they say, is beginning to sober up.
It does not happen during the day, but hints of awareness of the situation can already be found in Miller's big hit.
A kind of will left behind by an artist who is too young, who managed to realize a little too late that his conduct does not exactly meet the criteria of long-term life. "Self care, I treatin 'me right", he sings in the hit "Self Care", which ironically, In his clip he tries to get out of a coffin.
In tribute to Kendrick Lamar he added: "Hell yea, we're gonna be alright".
Do not be so sure.
"Self Care"