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Rappers We Lost in 2018

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Six hip-hop voices went silent before the summer of 2018 was even over.

Nicki Swift’s video tribute “Rappers We Lost in 2018” runs down a brutal stretch for the genre, from a Chicago drill pioneer felled by organ failure to a 20-year-old platinum-selling star gunned down outside a motorcycle dealership. The half-year tally reads like two separate tragedies happening at once: veterans whose bodies gave out after years of hard living, and rising talents cut down by gun violence just as their careers were taking off.

• Chicago drill pioneer Fredo Santana (Derrick Coleman) died at 27 on January 19, 2018, at his Los Angeles home following a history of liver and kidney failure.
• 20-year-old XXXTentacion (Jahseh Onfroy) was ambushed and shot during an armed robbery outside a Deerfield Beach motorcycle dealership on June 18, 2018; four suspects were later indicted for first-degree murder.
• 21-year-old Toronto rapper Smoke Dawg (Jahvante Smart) of Halal Gang was killed in a daylight shooting in the city’s Entertainment District on June 30, 2018.

The Veterans Who Built the Genre

Lovebug Starski, born Kevin Smith, is credited by hip-hop historians as one of the first MCs to actually use the phrase “hip-hop” in his rhymes back in the Bronx block-party era. He died of an apparent heart attack at 57 on February 8, 2018, in Las Vegas — a loss that hit especially hard among old-school heads who trace the culture’s foundation directly back to him.

Craig Mack’s death followed a month later. The Bad Boy Entertainment star who gave Diddy’s label its first true hit with “Flava in Ya Ear” in 1994 passed away at 46 (some reports list him as 47) on March 12, 2018, from heart failure in Walterboro, South Carolina, where he had joined the Overcomer Ministry in his final years. Fredo Santana, meanwhile, had spent much of his last year in and out of hospitals; his death at his L.A. home on January 19 came after a long battle with the liver and kidney complications that had already sidelined him from touring.

The Rising Stars Lost to Gun Violence

Baton Rouge’s Louis BadAzz, born Louis Robinson Jr., was building momentum in the local scene when he was fatally shot at 29 on May 2, 2018. Then came the two losses that dominated headlines that summer. XXXTentacion, just 20 years old and already a multi-platinum force out of Florida, was killed on June 18 in an armed robbery outside a Deerfield Beach motorcycle dealership — a case that led to four suspects being indicted for first-degree murder.

Twelve days later, 21-year-old Smoke Dawg of Toronto’s Halal Gang was shot and killed in broad daylight in the city’s Entertainment District on June 30, 2018, cutting short a career that had been gaining serious traction north of the border.

Two months, two rising stars in their early twenties, both gunned down in public — Louis BadAzz on May 2, XXXTentacion on June 18, Smoke Dawg on June 30.

A Genre Reckoning with Mortality

Taken together, the six deaths in Nicki Swift’s rundown show a genre losing people on two entirely different tracks. Fredo Santana and Craig Mack represent the toll that health crises and hard years on the road can take on artists barely into or just past their forties and fifties. Louis BadAzz, XXXTentacion, and Smoke Dawg — none of them older than 29 — represent the violence that keeps claiming rappers before they hit their commercial peak, an issue that’s been part of the conversation around hip-hop mortality for decades, the same conversation that’s followed artists from LL Cool J’s generation all the way through the current one.

It’s the kind of pattern that keeps surfacing whenever fans tally up celebrities who died far too young — a mix of preventable violence and health neglect that the genre has never fully shaken.

The video runs through the six in a specific order — XXXTentacion at the 0:25 mark, Louis BadAzz at 1:24, Smoke Dawg at 2:02, Craig Mack at 2:40, Lovebug Starski at 3:35, and Fredo Santana closing it out at 4:37 — and by the time it was published in late August 2018, hip-hop had already lost more of its own that year than most fans could keep straight.