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There’s a video I return to often. Posted just over 10 years ago by an essentially defunct blog called Houston Hip-Hop Fix, it shows Rich Homie Quan in a blue Argentina soccer kit and at least five necklaces. Quan and the interviewer are bathed off and on in the strobing red light of a cop car. There’s one microphone, so Quan and the host step on one another’s thoughts, deferring politely and shrugging apologies. The rapper runs through the sort of light mythmaking that marks all these interviews: Yes, the debut album is coming; no, no more free mixtapes; yes, music runs through my veins; no, I never touch pen to paper.

About 90 seconds into the clip, Quan starts talking about his relationship with Young Thug. He says they have unique chemistry in the studio, more boilerplate stuff. But a minute later––after a clumsy jump cut in the video—Quan says that he and Thug are going to release an EP. Most definitely, the interviewer says. Any plans on when that’s gonna drop? “Before the year’s out,” Quan replies. The interviewer asks whether he’d be willing to reveal the title. Quan declines, but he strokes his goatee, looks for a second into the camera––something he hasn’t done to this point––and raps his hand on the interviewer’s forearm for emphasis. “I can tell you this,” he says. “The EP me and Thug [are going to] drop? The hardest duo since Outkast.” The interviewer’s eyes widen. He starts to push back (“Now that’s—”), but Quan cuts him off. “I’m not being funny.” He presses. “I’m not putting too much on it. Hardest duo since Outkast.”

Quan, who passed away Thursday, one month before his 34th birthday, was always doing this: cocooning the audacious within a thick layer of charm and humility. He was a born hitmaker whose commercial career was compromised by record label issues, contractual lawsuits, and the industry’s uneven evolution over the course of the 2010s. Like Dre, Big Boi, and a host of other Southern pioneers, Quan wrote songs that smartly synthesized formal experimentation and personal introspection—with each new, clipped flow or harmonized aside, he seemed to burrow deeper into his own psyche. He leaves behind four sons.

Quan was born Dequantes Devontay Lamar in 1990 and was raised in Atlanta, where, as a teenager, he excelled as a center fielder and student of literature. He was less successful in a short-lived burglary career, which led to a 15-month bid shortly after he dropped out of Fort Valley State University. “It really sat me down and opened my eyes,” Quan told XXL of his time inside.

The first things you’d notice about his music were the titles. In 2012, Quan released his first mixtape, I Go In on Every Song, a promise on which it very nearly delivers. Early the following year, he earned his national breakthrough on the back of “Type of Way,” which made him sound a little mean and a little sensitive, and also like he nearly drowned in a vat of charisma as a small child. (That single was issued to iTunes by Def Jam, which seemed to indicate that Quan had signed to the label; in fact, he would remain locked in litigation with a smaller company, Think It’s a Game Entertainment, for many years.)

“Type of Way” came out as Future was pulling rap radio into his orbit, and it was seen by some early listeners as a variation on that Plutonic style. But in its verses, Quan skews much closer to traditional modes of rapping, using his melodic skills to augment the song rather than anchor it. It functions as an extended taunt—sometimes menacing, other times merely playful. Boasts that he can spot undercover cops with a single glance enjamb against lines like “I got a hideaway, and I go there sometimes / To give my mind a break”; memories of served subpoenas are delivered in delicate singsong. All of this knottiness and seeming contradiction is in fact corralled by Quan until it propels the song in a single direction with irrepressible momentum.

There were more titles, more hits: Still Goin In, the Gucci Mane collaboration Trust God Fuck 12, I Promise I Will Never Stop Going In. “Walk Thru,” a duet with the Compton rapper Problem (now Jason Martin), is a slick song about collecting inflated club appearance fees that nevertheless sounds like it was spawned in a nightmare. The hook he gifted to YG in 2013 helped get the regional star off the shelf at Def Jam and onto national radio for the first time. And in 2015, when he went triple platinum with his single “Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh),” he did so by distilling his style more cleanly than ever before. That song is wobbly and joyous, making rote descriptions of money earned sound like tiny spiritual breakthroughs.

All the while, his early collaborator was on his own star trajectory. Both Thug and Quan were dogged by conservative reactions to their work. It would be a couple of years before “mumble rap” was in wide use as a pejorative, but they were, predictably, seen by some resistant listeners as uninteresting writers or inadequate vocalists. Both charges were and are rooted in ideological opposition to their styles rather than earnest evaluations of their music. But even for the initiated, Quan’s suggestion that whatever he and Thug were working on would cement them as better than the Clipse or Black Star, better than Webbie and Boosie or Dead Prez or whomever, seemed improbable.

What they delivered, in September 2014, was at once bigger and smaller than anyone could have expected, seismic but nearly invisible. The tour that Tha Tour, Pt. 1 was meant to promote never really materialized; some of the Cash Money albums teased during DJ drops would be held up in labyrinthine court cases for another half decade, if they were released at all. The terrible, sub–Microsoft Paint cover dubbed the group Rich Gang, a moniker that had already been used for Baby’s other post–Cash Money branding exercises. “Lifestyle,” the massive summer hit Thug and Quan had scored under the name, wasn’t even included. Tha Tour does not exist on streaming platforms and did not spawn any new hits. But it was as Quan promised: a perfect snapshot of two eccentrics searching manically for new veins to tap. The hardest duo since Outkast.

You could credibly argue that Tha Tour is the best rap record of the 2010s. It captures Thug, one of the decade’s true supernova talents, near or at his apex—yet it would be very reasonable to suggest that Quan gets the better of him. See Quan’s verse on the shimmering “Flava,” where he shouts, buoyant, about his son inheriting his features, then makes the act of allowing a girlfriend to count his money seem more tender than any other intimate moment. Or take the harrowing “Freestyle,” its title belying the depth of thought and passion that Quan brings to the song. “My baby mama just put me on child support,” he raps:

Fuck a warrant, I ain’t going to court
Don’t care what them white folks say, I just wanna see my lil boy
Go to school, be a man, and sign up for college, boy
Don’t be a fool, be a man, what you think that knowledge for?

On Thursday, shortly after Quan’s passing was confirmed, Quavo, one of the two surviving members of Migos, posted an Instagram story. “Good Convo With My Bro,” he wrote over a black background, and tagged Offset, with whom he’d been locked in a very public feud since shortly before their group mate Takeoff was killed in November 2022. Ten years ago, it seemed this cohort of Atlanta rappers was going to rule the industry indefinitely; today, the deaths of artists including Quan, Takeoff, Trouble, Lil Keed, and Bankroll Fresh—as well as Young Thug’s ongoing RICO trial—hang like a dark cloud over one of music’s creative meccas.

After “Flex,” Quan’s career ceased to be supported as it could or should have been by record companies; whether because of the Think It’s a Game situation, bad taste, or a lack of marketing imagination, he never again got the push he deserved. (He also never worked with Thug again: In interviews about the topic, Quan was reflective and self-critical, though some of the particulars of their falling-out may now be the concern of the Georgia justice system.) His best solo album, 2017’s thoughtful, technically virtuosic Back to the Basics, was swallowed entirely by Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN, which was surprise released on the same day.

The 2019 film Uncut Gems is typical of its directors’ output. Josh and Benny Safdie are obsessed with verisimilitude—even their most outlandish scenes are populated with nonprofessional actors, their dialogue overlapping, the blocking evolving naturally, the immersion in each character’s world totally ethnographic. Gems takes place during the 2012 NBA playoffs, and the period details are managed with fastidiousness. The lone concession seems to come about halfway through, when LaKeith Stanfield’s character pulls his SUV up to a curb, playing “Type of Way” at a deafening volume. While that song wouldn’t come out until the year after the Celtics’ run, the filmmakers evidently felt that fracturing their reality was worth it for its punishing effect. This, in so many ways, sums up Quan’s career: unstuck in time ever so slightly, caught between eras, yet still, on the most fundamental level, undeniable.

Paul Thompson is the senior editor of the Los Angeles Review of Books. His work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and GQ.