Nine Years After Nipsey Hussle and Bino Rideaux Recorded it, ‘Prolific’ is Ready

The cover of “Prolific,” the collaborative album from Nipsey Hussle and Bino Rideaux, due Aug. 14, 2026. Hussle selected the photograph used for the artwork while the pair were working on the project in 2017. (All Money In/Out The Blue/Atlantic Records)

Posthumous albums often come with an unavoidable question: How much of what listeners are hearing did the artist actually choose?

“Prolific,” the new Nipsey Hussle and Bino Rideaux album arriving Friday, comes with an unusually clear answer.

Hussle and Rideaux recorded the music together during an intensive three-month stretch in 2017, nearly two years before Hussle’s death. They also sequenced the project during his lifetime, and Hussle personally selected the photograph that became its cover, according to a Los Angeles Times interview published Wednesday with Rideaux and Hussle’s older brother, Samiel “Blacc Sam” Asghedom.

The 15-track “Prolific” is scheduled for release Aug. 14 by All Money In & Out The Blue Records under exclusive license to Atlantic Recording Corp. The date falls one day before what would have been Hussle’s 41st birthday.

For Hussle’s family, the long delay was intentional.

Asghedom, his brother’s longtime business partner and estate administrator, told the Times that people began pressing the family to release unreleased Nipsey music after the rapper’s death in 2019.

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He resisted.

“When we drop the music, we gotta feel like it’s the right time,” Asghedom told the newspaper.

The distinction matters because “Prolific” is not being presented as an album constructed years later from unrelated Nipsey verses.

Its foundation was already there.

Hussle and Rideaux began working together in 2016 after Hussle heard Rideaux’s music and invited the younger South Los Angeles artist to his studio. Two songs from that early session appeared on Hussle’s “Slauson Boy 2,” and the partnership grew into their 2017 collaborative mixtape “No Pressure.”

That same year, Hussle rented NoName Studios in Tarzana where he and Rideaux effectively moved in for about 90 days.

They slept there. They showered there. Producers and engineers rotated through. Music was made constantly.

During those sessions, the pair worked on “No Pressure” and the body of music that would eventually become “Prolific.” Rideaux described the atmosphere to the Times as part frat house, part summer camp, with the studio operating around the clock.

That history also requires one important qualification.

Although the recordings and sequencing date to Hussle’s lifetime, Asghedom has previously estimated that the project was about 80% finished when his brother died. The team later did finishing work using unreleased verses and other music Hussle had already recorded with Rideaux.

That is different from saying nothing was touched after 2019.

It is also different from constructing a new album around orphaned vocals.

Asghedom has repeatedly drawn that distinction, describing “Prolific” as a project Hussle deliberately created with Rideaux rather than a collection assembled by the estate after his death.

Even the artwork predates the tragedy.

Hussle chose a blue-tinted photograph showing him and Rideaux with friends at the Hollywood Roosevelt, a hotel they frequented while making the project. The album carried another name during the original sessions; the team later settled on “Prolific,” taking the title from the word Hussle famously had tattooed on his right temple.

The completed track list also reaches well beyond the two Los Angeles rappers.

Guests include Cardi B, Ty Dolla $ign, Leon Thomas, James Fauntleroy, Buddy and BH. The 15-song album includes the previously released “Reckless” featuring Static Major, “Sacrifices” featuring Fauntleroy, “All Summer” featuring BH and “I Just Wanna Know” with Cardi B and Ty Dolla $ign.

Several producers involved with “Prolific” also worked on Hussle’s 2018 major-label debut, “Victory Lap,” including Mike & Keys and Larrance “Rance 1500” Dopson.

Musically, Rideaux told the Times that “Prolific” is more vulnerable and experimental than “No Pressure.” Relationships play a larger role in the subject matter, and the production sometimes moves beyond the West Coast palette most closely associated with Hussle. One song, “Miami Off the Plane,” uses a Caribbean riddim-inspired beat, a sound Rideaux said neither artist had previously explored.

The experimentation adds another dimension to music Hussle was making as he prepared for the breakthrough that would come with “Victory Lap.”

Hussle, born Ermias Asghedom, was fatally shot outside his Marathon Clothing store in South Los Angeles on March 31, 2019. He was 33.

By then, “Victory Lap” had transformed years of independent momentum into mainstream recognition. The album earned a Grammy nomination for best rap album, and Hussle won two Grammys posthumously in 2020: best rap performance for “Racks in the Middle” and best melodic rap performance for his appearance on DJ Khaled’s “Higher.”

Recordings featuring Hussle have surfaced since his death, including his 2021 collaboration with Jay-Z, “What It Feels Like,” from “Judas and the Black Messiah: The Inspired Album.” But his estate has been notably restrained about turning his unreleased recordings into a full posthumous project.

That restraint is part of what makes “Prolific” notable.

Rather than rushing an album into the market while attention surrounding Hussle’s death was at its peak, his family waited more than seven years — and nearly nine years after the sessions themselves — before deciding this particular body of work was ready to be heard.

Rideaux, now 33 himself, told the Times he understands that releasing music involving an artist as revered as Hussle invites scrutiny. He also made clear that carrying forward what his mentor began has become inseparable from his own career.

The album arrives Friday, Aug. 14.

One day later, Nipsey Hussle would have turned 41.

After years of saying no to pressure for a posthumous album, his family is finally saying yes to one Hussle had already helped shape.

Trial for Suspect in 1996 Killing of Tupac Shakur Begins Aug. 10

​Duane "Keffe D" Davis, shown in this booking photograph provided by the Las Vegas Metropolitan Police Department. Davis is scheduled to stand trial starting Aug. 10, 2026, on murder charges in connection with the 1996 killing of rapper Tupac Shakur.

For nearly three decades, the Sept. 7, 1996, drive-by shooting of Tupac Shakur has stood as hip-hop'smost notorious unsolved murder. On Monday, that officially changes.

​Jury selection and trial proceedings are scheduled to begin Aug. 10 in Las Vegas for Duane "Keffe D" Davis, the 63-year-old former gang leader accused of orchestrating the ambush that claimed the life of the 25-year-old rap icon.

​The trial represents a surreal collision of past and present. Shakur was killed at the absolute peak of his commercial power, riding the massive success of Death Row Records' "All Eyez on Me." His death — followed six months later by the murder of Christopher "The Notorious B.I.G." Wallace in Los Angeles — effectively ended the East Coast-West Coast rivalry that defined 1990s hip-hop, leaving generations of fans without legal closure.

​Davis faces a single count of murder with a deadly weapon with the intent to promote, further or assist a criminal gang. He has pleaded not guilty and has remained jailed since his arrest in late 2023.

​Prosecutors are not attempting to prove that Davis pulled the trigger. Instead, they allege he was the shot-caller who provided the firearm and directed the hit from the passenger seat of the infamous white Cadillac that pulled alongside Suge Knight’s black BMW at a red light near the Las Vegas Strip. Knight survived the shooting with minor injuries; Shakur died six days later.

​According to grand jury transcripts, prosecutors maintain the shooting was direct retaliation. Hours earlier, Shakur, Knight and their Death Row entourage were seen on casino surveillance footage beating Davis' nephew, Orlando "Baby Lane" Anderson, following a Mike Tyson fight at the MGM Grand. Authorities have long characterized the violence as a tragic extension of a feud between the Mob Piru Bloods, associated with Death Row Records, and the South Side Compton Crips, tied to Davis and aligned with Bad Boy Records.

​The case famously sat cold for decades. It was ultimately revived by Davis himself.

​In recent years, Davis began giving high-profile interviews and published a 2019 tell-all memoir, "Compton Street Legend," openly detailing his presence in the Cadillac and his role as a South Side Compton Crips leader. Prosecutors have bluntly stated that if Davis had not written explicitly about the killing or spoken about it on camera, no one would have likely ever been charged.

​Davis' defense team plans to argue that the state is relying on unreliable witnesses due to the sheer amount of time elapsed since 1996. The defense has also suggested Davis' public confessions were fabricated for entertainment value and financial gain, attempting to capitalize on the enduring mythology surrounding Shakur's death.

​With a reported witness list of more than 200 names — including Knight, who is currently serving a 28-year prison sentence in California for an unrelated fatal hit-and-run — the Las Vegas proceedings are expected to draw massive international media scrutiny.

​Nearly 30 years after the Vegas strip went dark for one of music's brightest stars, the culture is finally going to court.

Betye Saar, Black Arts Pioneer Who Reclaimed Racist Images, Dies at 99

Artist Betye Saar, right, and basketball Hall of Famer Kareem Abdul-Jabbar, left, pose with scholar Henry Louis Gates Jr. during Harvard University’s W.E.B. Du Bois Medal ceremony in Cambridge, Mass., in October 2022. Saar and Abdul-Jabbar were among seven honorees recognized for their commitment to social justice. Saar, whose assemblage art confronted racist stereotypes and reclaimed Black imagery, died Sunday at 99, four days before her 100th birthday. (Photo credit: FAH1223, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)

Betye Saar collected the objects America used to belittle Black people — mammy figurines, pancake advertisements, washboards and cheap souvenirs — then made them tell a different story.

Saar, the pioneering assemblage artist whose landmark “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” transformed one of America’s most enduring racist caricatures into an armed figure of Black resistance, died in her sleep Sunday at her Los Angeles home. She was 99, four days shy of her 100th birthday.

Her death was announced by Roberts Projects, the Los Angeles gallery that represented her for nearly 20 years.

“Her singular vision transformed the course of contemporary art,” gallery co-founder Julie Roberts said in a statement.

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For Saar, found objects were never simply old things. They carried the history of who made them, who used them and what America once believed it could sell without shame.

She used racist collectibles, domestic tools, family photographs, clocks, cages, dolls and discarded materials to confront Black identity, sexism, memory, spirituality and liberation. Her work made her a central figure in the Black Arts Movement and one of the most influential assemblage artists of the past century.

Her best-known work, the 1972 assemblage “The Liberation of Aunt Jemima,” was roughly the size of a shoebox.

At its center stood a stereotypical mammy figurine, the smiling domestic servant once used to reassure white consumers and romanticize Black servitude. Saar left the broom in the figure’s hand but also armed her with a rifle and a grenade.

The servant had become a soldier.

Saar created the work for an exhibition devoted to Black heroes at the Rainbow Sign cultural center in Berkeley, California. The assassination of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. four years earlier had pushed her work in a more openly political direction.

King’s death “triggered a rage within me, and the mystic transformed into the warrior,” Saar later said.

Saar understood the danger of putting racist imagery back on display. She worried about how white viewers might interpret it and how such images had shaped Black people’s perceptions of themselves.

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“What saved it was that I made Aunt Jemima into a revolutionary figure,” she said.

The work preceded Quaker Oats’ decision to retire the Aunt Jemima brand by nearly five decades. When the company acknowledged in 2020 that the brand’s origins were rooted in a racial stereotype, Saar celebrated the decision but noted how long it had taken.

“The Liberation of Aunt Jemima” became a defining work of Black feminist art. Angela Davis later credited it with helping inspire the Black women’s movement.

Saar did not abandon the stereotype or pretend it had never existed. She forced it to surrender its original meaning.

That question — whether racist images could be reclaimed without repeating their damage — remained central to Saar’s work and later placed her in one of the Black art world’s most contentious arguments.

In 1997, Saar participated in a letter-writing campaign criticizing Kara Walker, who had received a MacArthur Fellowship for her provocative silhouette scenes depicting slavery, sexual violence and the antebellum South.

Walker’s supporters viewed the work as an unsparing confrontation with America’s racist imagination. Saar feared that its imagery reinforced the degradation it sought to expose.

She called Walker’s work “revolting and negative” and said it served the “amusement and the investment of the white art establishment.”

The dispute became an art-world version of a larger argument running through 1990s Black culture: Who controls images of Black suffering, who profits from them and when does exposure become exploitation?

Saar’s position was consistent with the work she had been making for decades. Racist images could be used, she believed, but they had to be stripped of their authority and redirected toward Black liberation.

Born Betye Irene Brown in Los Angeles on July 30, 1926, Saar spent part of her childhood in Watts, where she watched Simon Rodia construct the Watts Towers from broken ceramics, glass, shells, metal and other salvaged materials.

The towers showed her early what discarded objects could become in the hands of an artist.

Saar studied design at UCLA and initially worked in interior design, greeting cards and decorative arts. She later became a printmaker before a 1967 exhibition of Joseph Cornell’s shadow boxes inspired her move toward three-dimensional assemblage.

Her 1969 work “Black Girl’s Window” placed the silhouette of a Black woman behind glass, surrounded by moons, stars, a skeleton, astrological signs and family imagery. The Museum of Modern Art acquired the work in 2019, decades after it was created.

Recognition from major institutions often came late.

Saar received a solo exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1975, but large museums showed her work only sporadically for much of the following four decades. In 2019, the Museum of Modern Art and the Los Angeles County Museum of Art mounted concurrent solo exhibitions.

She continued creating well into her 90s from the Laurel Canyon home and studio where she had lived since 1962. Her work moved among politics, family history, mysticism and the spiritual energy she believed objects carried from their earlier lives.

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Even with her centennial approaching, Saar appeared less interested in assessing her legacy than in making something new.

“That’s what art is,” she told the Los Angeles Times in June. “Making something where there was nothing.”

Her 100th birthday is being commemorated with “Betye Saar’s Black Dolls,” an exhibition at The New York Historical in Manhattan. The exhibition, featuring 26 dolls from a promised collection of 100, continues through Oct. 4. Another exhibition, “Let’s Get It On: The Wearable Art of Betye Saar,” remains on view at Roberts Projects through Aug. 22.

Saar is survived by her daughters, artists Lezley Saar and Alison Saar and writer Tracye Saar-Cavanaugh; six grandchildren; and Rojo, her red-footed tortoise.

For more than six decades, Saar showed that reclamation required more than placing an old stereotype in a new frame.

She gave the figure a weapon, changed who held the power and dared America to look at it again.

More Than 20 Years After His Death, ODB Gets a Brooklyn Street Sign

Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s widow, Icelene Jones, second from left, holds an “ODB Jones Way” sign with members of the late rapper’s family during a street co-naming ceremony July 25, 2026, in Brooklyn’s Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood. The honorary designation at Franklin and Putnam avenues recognizes the Wu-Tang Clan co-founder, born Russell Tyrone Jones. (Ol’ Dirty Bastard Legacy via Instagram)

Ol’ Dirty Bastard spent his career refusing to fit neatly anywhere. Brooklyn has now found a permanent place for his name.

Family members, friends and fans gathered Saturday in Bedford-Stuyvesant as the city unveiled “ODB Jones Way” at the intersection of Franklin and Putnam avenues, honoring the late Wu-Tang Clan co-founder born Russell Tyrone Jones.

The location was not selected simply because it offered an available signpost.


A mural modeled after the cover of ODB’s 1995 solo debut, “Return to the 36 Chambers: The Dirty Version,” has watched over the corner for years. His brother Ramsey Jones said their grandmother still lives on the block.

“I am very honored to be here because my grandmother’s house is on this block on Putnam Avenue,” Jones said during the ceremony.

That family connection gives the honor more weight than the usual celebrity street designation. Brooklyn placed ODB’s name where his relatives still have roots and where residents had already created a neighborhood monument to him.

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The New York City Council formally approved the intersection co-naming in December. The measure became Local Law 48 on Jan. 17, designating “ODB Jones Way” at Franklin and Putnam avenues. It adds an honorary intersection name rather than replacing either street’s legal name.

Council Member Chi Ossé, whose district includes Bedford-Stuyvesant, worked with ODB’s estate and family on the dedication. Ossé previously led the successful effort to designate Nov. 15 — Jones’ birthday — as Ol’ Dirty Bastard Day in New York City.

While presenting that resolution in 2023, Ossé called Jones “a pioneer in the world of music, and one of New York’s immortal sons.”

ODB’s immortality was built on a voice that could sound like a rap verse, a singalong, an argument and a warning — sometimes before the same record ended.

He joined cousins RZA and GZA as an original member of Wu-Tang Clan, whose 1993 debut, “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers),” rewrote the possibilities for a large rap group. Where other members arrived with dense lyricism, street reportage or martial-arts discipline, ODB seemed governed by an entirely separate set of laws.

His delivery was ragged but deliberate, moving between rapping and singing without respecting the border between them. He could blow apart the structure of a song while becoming the part listeners remembered most.

That presence helped make “Protect Ya Neck,” “Shame on a N---a” and “Da Mystery of Chessboxin’” essential pieces of Wu-Tang’s early sound. Away from the group, “Brooklyn Zoo” and “Shimmy Shimmy Ya” turned his unpredictability into the center of the record rather than something producers needed to contain.

“Return to the 36 Chambers” received a Grammy nomination and established ODB as the first Wu-Tang member to release a solo album after Method Man. He later reached an even wider audience through “Got Your Money,” featuring Kelis, and his appearance on the remix of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.”

That Carey collaboration became a model for the rap-and-R&B remix long before record labels turned the combination into a dependable chart formula. ODB did not arrive to smooth out the song. His unpolished energy was the point.

His fame also came with arrests, addiction, incarceration and public episodes that were often treated as entertainment while he was alive. The spectacle sometimes swallowed the music and reduced a complicated person to a collection of outrageous clips.

Jones died Nov. 13, 2004, two days before his 36th birthday.

More than two decades later, the parts of his work once dismissed as disorder sound increasingly influential. Generations of rappers have adopted his cracked melodies, abrupt vocal shifts and willingness to make personality as important as technical precision.

There was no father to his style, as the famous explanation of his name went, and attempts to copy him usually proved why.

New York’s recent honors have moved ODB beyond the caricature. The City Council’s 2023 resolution recognized him as a distinctive MC whose influence outlived him. The new sign places that recognition directly into the Brooklyn landscape that helped create him.

The mural had already made Franklin and Putnam a destination for Wu-Tang fans. ODB’s face, drawn from the welfare-card image used on his debut album, turned the side of a neighborhood building into an unofficial memorial.

Now the city has added its own marker.

Plas Johnson, Saxophonist Who Gave ‘The Pink Panther Theme’ Its Voice, Dies at 94

The cover of Plas Johnson’s Capitol Records album “Mood for the Blues.” Johnson, whose tenor saxophone gave Henry Mancini’s “The Pink Panther Theme” its unmistakable sound, died July 15 at 94. (Courtesy Photo: Capitol Records)

Most people heard Plas Johnson long before they knew his name.

His tenor saxophone slides into Henry Mancini’s “The Pink Panther Theme” with a low, bluesy prowl, giving the animated cat in the film’s opening credits its cool, its mischief and its unmistakable strut.

The melody became part of popular culture. The musician behind it spent much of his career outside the spotlight.

Johnson died July 15 at his Los Angeles home, his children, Eric Johnson and Stephanie Oliver, told The New York Times. He was 94. A cause of death was not announced.

He died six days before his 95th birthday. His children said he had performed at his retirement community about a month earlier.

“The Pink Panther Theme” was Johnson’s most famous performance, but it accounted for less than three minutes in a recording career that crossed jump blues, jazz, R&B, soul, rock, pop, television and film.

His saxophone appeared on recordings by the Platters, Larry Williams, Little Richard, Fats Domino, Nat King Cole, Sam Cooke, Nancy Wilson, Ella Fitzgerald, Marvin Gaye, Dr. John, the Beach Boys and scores of others. He played tenor on the Platters’ “The Great Pretender” and piccolo on Bobby Day’s “Rockin’ Robin.”

 

Johnson was part of a generation of Black studio musicians whose work moved across genres more freely than the music industry’s marketing categories did.

A record might be sold as pop, rock, easy listening or a Hollywood soundtrack. Johnson brought to it the phrasing he had developed in Louisiana dance halls, blues bands, jazz clubs and Los Angeles recording rooms.

Other musicians knew what his name meant.

Louisiana arranger and producer Harold Battiste recalled that when producers could not hire Johnson, they looked for someone who sounded like him. Harmonica player and producer Bob Corritore remembered him after his death as a “musician’s musician.”

Mancini did not want an imitation.

He composed “The Pink Panther Theme” with Johnson’s tenor in mind after watching David Niven play the sophisticated jewel thief at the center of Blake Edwards’ comedy.

“Plas has the sound and the style I wanted,” Mancini wrote in his autobiography.

The theme was recorded in 1963 for the film, which opened in the United States in 1964. Johnson played during the introduction, returned for the central solo and closed the piece.

He later recalled that the arrangement felt special from the first run-through. When the musicians finished, the string section joined the rest of the room in applauding — an unusual response during a professional studio session.

Mancini’s music from “The Pink Panther” won three Grammy Awards, while the score received an Academy Award nomination. The American Film Institute later ranked it No. 20 on its list of the 25 greatest American film scores.

Johnson’s identity remained less familiar than the solo.

He sometimes met listeners who told him that his performance sounded exactly like the musician heard in the movie. Johnson would explain that they were listening to the same man.

He returned to the theme decades later, rerecording it for the 2004 tribute album “Ultimate Mancini” and the 2006 remake of “The Pink Panther” starring Steve Martin.

Johnson was born July 21, 1931, in Donaldsonville, Louisiana, and grew up in a family of professional musicians. His mother played piano, while his father played saxophone and banjo.

The family later moved to Thibodaux and then New Orleans. Johnson began as a singer before his father gave him a soprano saxophone. He switched to tenor at 15 and formed the Johnson Brothers Combo with his older brother, pianist Ray Johnson.

The brothers played dances around the New Orleans area, mixing the popular music of Louis Jordan, Dinah Washington and Charles Brown with the bebop of Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie.

The crowd did not always ask for bebop. The brothers played it anyway.

In 1951, singer and pianist Charles Brown heard Johnson perform at the Dew Drop Café in New Orleans and hired him. The job lasted about six months before Johnson was drafted into the Army, where he continued playing in a military band.

Johnson moved to Los Angeles with his siblings in 1954. Jam sessions led to recording dates, and his blues-touched sound proved valuable as rock and roll expanded the market for musicians who could combine Black musical language with the precision demanded by commercial studios.

A session with Johnny Otis brought him to the attention of Capitol Records executive Dave Cavanaugh. Johnson soon found himself recording behind Cole, Frank Sinatra, Peggy Lee and other major stars.

He could bring personality to a record without crowding the singer or arrangement.

“You just have to know when to start and when to stop,” Johnson said in a 2005 interview.

That judgment kept him working through decades of changes in recording technology and popular taste.

Johnson remained active in jazz while handling commercial studio work. He released albums under his own name, including “This Must Be the Plas!” and “Mood for the Blues,” and maintained a long association with trumpeter Harry “Sweets” Edison.

In 1970, he joined the studio band for “The Merv Griffin Show,” beginning a 15-year run that placed a working jazz ensemble inside a five-day-a-week television production. He continued accepting outside recording dates during the show’s run.

Johnson later appeared in Denny Tedesco’s documentary “The Wrecking Crew,” which brought wider attention to the Los Angeles session musicians behind generations of familiar records. The film also featured New Orleans drummer Earl Palmer, with whom Johnson had worked frequently.

By then, Johnson had spent more than half a century demonstrating how much identity a musician could fit into an introduction, a background fill or a few measures between a singer’s lines.

Alley Boy, Influential Voice From Atlanta’s Mixtape Era, Dies

Alley Boy, the Atlanta rapper whose hard-edged records helped make Duct Tape Entertainment one of the city’s most recognizable mixtape-era movements, died Monday, his daughter confirmed on Instagram.

Multiple outlets reported his death was caused by kidney failure.  He was in his early 40s. His exact age remains the subject of conflicting reports, with music publications placing his age at 42, while biographical databases list his birth date as March 3, 1981, which would make him 45.

The confirmation followed a day of confusion. Reports of Alley Boy’s death began circulating Sunday, but his daughter said Monday morning that he was still alive and criticized people for spreading the news prematurely.

Later Monday, she posted photographs in his memory, including a childhood image of Alley Boy holding her and another showing her hand resting on his. She marked the second photograph with the date July 20, 2026, confirming his death.

Alley Boy, smiles while holding two young children in an undated photograph. His daughter shared the image to her Instagram story on Monday, overlaid with an emotional message, to confirm the mixtape pioneer's death.

Alley Boy, whose real name was Curt Freeman, had publicly documented serious kidney problems and his need for a transplant. He said in 2023 that he had begun dialysis and later described undergoing treatment three times a week.

He attributed the damage to his kidneys in part to years of drinking codeine cough syrup, commonly called lean, and used later interviews to warn younger people about the habit. 

Alley Boy never became one of Atlanta’s biggest crossover stars. His standing came from somewhere else.

During a period when mixtapes could establish a rapper’s weight without a national radio hit, his voice carried through East Atlanta, Southern street rap and the artists who understood what Duct Tape represented. His performances were blunt and pressurized, often making anger, fear and desperation sound like parts of the same thought.

He told The Fader in 2011 that he grew up in Edgewood Courts, began rapping at 9 and entered a recording studio by the time he was 10 or 11. With both parents struggling with drugs, he lived with his grandmother and began paying for studio sessions once he could earn his own money.

“I always fell back to the music,” he said.

Freeman and longtime friend Big Bank Black co-founded Duct Tape Entertainment, an independent East Atlanta operation whose identity was built as much around loyalty and neighborhood ties as music. The company later became home to Trouble, another respected Atlanta rapper whose death in 2022 left a lasting wound inside the group.

Alley Boy introduced himself to a wider Southern rap audience with the 2009 mixtape “Da Don.” He followed it with “The Definition of F--- S---” and its 2011 sequel, records that established his reputation as an uncompromising street rapper during one of Atlanta’s most competitive mixtape periods.

“The Definition of F--- S--- 2” also earned attention well outside the usual mixtape circuit.

Pitchfork praised the urgency of the project and Alley Boy’s consistency, noting how easily his threats and more vulnerable moments ran into one another. The tape featured Trouble, Jeezy, Yo Gotti and Freddie Gibbs, but Alley Boy’s intensity remained its center.

His catalog eventually connected him with artists including Pusha T, Meek Mill, Future, Master P and Fat Trel. “Your Favorite Rapper,” with Pusha T, challenged performers whose public images did not match the lives they described on records. “War Cry,” released in 2013, included “Stack It Up” with Meek Mill, “Mama’s House” with Trouble and collaborations with Future, Master P, Yo Gotti and Young Scooter.

His 2012 project “The Gift of Discernment” showed more of the reflection beneath the confrontation. It arrived through Duct Tape Entertainment and was followed by projects including “War Cry,” “Alley Shakur (The Soul of a Runaway Slave),” “Definition of F--- S--- Pt. 3” and “AlleyGod.”

The Duct Tape name never became the commercial empire its founders envisioned, but its influence survived the label deals and internal fractures that slowed its momentum.

Less than a month before Alley Boy’s death, he joined Big Bank for an extended episode of the “Perspektives” podcast. The two revisited Duct Tape’s rise and spoke candidly about business inexperience, industry politics, financial problems and the decisions that kept the movement from reaching its full potential.

 

The conversation also turned to grief, mental health and life after the deaths of people close to them, particularly Trouble. Alley Boy spoke less like a rapper protecting an image than a man taking account of what the years had cost.

News of his death brought tributes from across Atlanta rap.

21 Savage called him an East Atlanta blueprint and legend. DJ Scream remembered him as one of the best rappers the city produced. Master P, who recorded with Alley Boy as part of the Louie V Mob period, praised him as a soldier and recalled the street records they made together.

Those reactions reflected a career whose importance was never best measured by chart positions. Alley Boy helped represent an East Atlanta rap world that existed outside the city’s most famous label systems, carrying Duct Tape’s name through mixtapes, collaborations and a voice that rarely softened itself for wider approval.

His final public chapter was different. He spoke openly about dialysis, his need for a kidney and the damage he believed codeine had done to his body. The same rapper who built his name on survival began using his experience as a warning.

“What was meant to destroy me woke me up,” he wrote after starting dialysis. “Now I know my purpose.”

Sparky D, Pioneering ‘Roxanne Wars’ Battle MC, Dies at 61

Sparky D, born Doreen C. Broadnax, is shown in an undated publicity photo. Broadnax, the Brownsville, Brooklyn, rapper whose 1985 answer record “Sparky’s Turn (Roxanne You’re Through)” made her a key voice in the Roxanne Wars, died July 4 at 61. No cause of death has been announced.

Sparky D, born Doreen C. Broadnax, the Brownsville, Brooklyn, MC whose 1985 answer record “Sparky’s Turn (Roxanne You’re Through)” made her one of the defining voices of the Roxanne Wars, has died. She was 61.

Her death was announced over the holiday weekend by her family. No cause of death has been announced.

She first recorded with the Brooklyn group The Playgirls, then broke out on her own with “Sparky’s Turn,” a direct response to Roxanne Shanté’s “Roxanne’s Revenge.” The record arrived during one of rap’s earliest full-scale lyrical wars, when answer records were not social media events but actual vinyl releases, pressed, shipped and judged by DJs, radio listeners and crowds.

The Roxanne Wars began after UTFO’s “Roxanne, Roxanne,” a 1984 record built around a fictional woman who rejected the group’s advances. Roxanne Shanté, then a teenage MC from Queensbridge, answered with “Roxanne’s Revenge.” The response was sharp, funny and ruthless enough to create its own industry.

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Then came the replies to the reply.

Sparky D’s entry stood out because it did not sound like a novelty record or a quick cash-in. She came at Shanté with a hard Brooklyn delivery and the confidence of someone who understood the assignment before there was a phrase for it. “Sparky’s Turn” was not just part of the Roxanne craze. It became one of the records that made the feud feel like a real fight.

The rivalry soon moved beyond wax. Sparky D and Shanté appeared together in staged battles, sometimes leaning into the boxing imagery that surrounded the feud. In 1985, the conflict was captured on “Round One: Roxanne Shanté vs. Sparky Dee,” one of the most memorable documents from rap’s first great answer-record era.

For a later generation raised on diss tracks, beef timelines and endless commentary, the Roxanne Wars can sound almost quaint. They were anything but. They proved that rap audiences would follow conflict across records, boroughs, radio stations and personalities. They also proved that women MCs were not side characters in hip-hop’s competitive tradition.

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DJ Premier, in an Instagram tribute, called her “one of the 1st Female Battle MC’s” and said her “relentless voice and delivery” made her a force.

“I became an instant fan,” Premier wrote, recalling her battles with Shanté.

MC Sha-Rock, one of hip-hop’s first women on record and a founding member of Funky 4 + 1, wrote that “the HIP HOP WORLD has taken a tremendous loss.”

Grandmaster Flash called Sparky D “one of the dopest female MCs from back in the day.”

That praise carries weight because Sparky D’s career connects two crucial eras: the foundational days when women such as Sha-Rock helped open the door, and the mid-1980s moment when MCs such as Shanté and Sparky D kicked it wider through battle records, street-level radio and live performance.

Sparky D understood that lineage. At a 2021 Bronx event honoring MC Sha-Rock, she said, “Without MC Sha-Rock, my mother, there would be no me.”

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After “Sparky’s Turn,” she continued recording through the 1980s. Her catalog included “He’s My DJ” with Kool DJ Red Alert, “Throwdown,” “Sparky’s Back” and the 1988 album “This Is Sparky D’s World” on B-Boy Records. The records placed her in the same gritty independent ecosystem that helped define New York rap before major labels fully understood the music’s commercial power.

Her life after the first wave of fame was not easy. Sparky D later spoke publicly about addiction, abuse and the doors that closed once her early rap run slowed. In a 2007 profile, she described herself as a woman who had been through hardship and come out with faith intact.

“You gotta go through something in order to grow,” she said.

In later years, Broadnax turned toward Christianity, gospel rap and ministry. She moved to Atlanta, founded Treasure Ministries and won a Gospel Choice Award in 2007 for “This Is for the Church.” That part of her story mattered, too. It was not a footnote after hip-hop. It was how she chose to keep using her voice.