Tag: obituary

Young Bleed, the Louisiana rapper who became one of No Limit Records’ success stories, has died. His eldest son, Ty’Gee Ramon Clifton, shared the news in an Instagram Reel, stating that the musician died on Saturday, November 1. Young Bleed had been hospitalized for a brain aneurysm following an appearance at a Verzuz event featuring members of No Limit and Cash Money Records. Young Bleed was 51 years old.

Young Bleed was born Glenn Reed Clifton Jr. in Baton Rouge, and he started rapping when he was nine years old. He sold his own tapes as a teenager and, in the mid-1990s, joined Concentration Camp, the local hip-hop group founded by fellow Louisiana rapper C-Loc. It was Young Bleed’s verse on C-Loc’s “A Fool” that got the attention of No Limit founder and label head Master P, who remixed “A Fool” for the soundtrack to his 1997 film I’m Bout It, changing the title to “How Ya Do Dat,” and signed Young Bleed to No Limit.

Young Bleed’s major label debut, My Balls and My Word, arrived the following year. The album sold half a million copies and topped Billboard’s Hip-Hop/R&B chart. For its follow-up, 1999’s My Own, Young Bleed jumped to No Limit’s distributor, Priority Records. He was let go from his contract, however, shortly thereafter. The rapper temporarily rebranded to Young Bleed Carleone’s and, in 2002, dropped Vintage as the first release on his own label, Da’tention Home Records.

Across the rest of his career, Young Bleed remained prolific, continuing to hop between labels while becoming a mentor to a new generation of hip-hop. He put out two projects—Rise Thru da Ranks from Earner Tugh in 2005 and Once Upon a Time in Amedica in 2007—on C-Bo’s West Coast Mafia Records, as well as several full-length collaborations with younger rappers. In 2010, Young Bleed also founded the record label Trap Door Entertainment, where he released four total albums leading up to the last of his lifetime, 2022’s Dare’ Iza’ God.

“Preserved could easily describe Young Bleed’s loyalty to the reliable sound of his earliest work,” David Drake wrote in the Pitchfork review of the musician’s 2011 album, which came out on Tech N9ne’s Strange Lane. “Bleed emphasizes the individualism, agency, and nobility of the street soldier, weaving a universal story of hustle and struggle through implied, writerly details and a sixth sense for style.”

Lô Borges, a legend of Brazilian popular music and one of the founders of the Clube da Esquina musical collective, died on Sunday, November 2. Borges’ family confirmed the news in a statement posted to his official social media pages. According to Folha de S.Paulo, the musician had been hospitalized for a drug-related infection, and Borges’ family wrote, in Portuguese, that he “fought bravely for 17 days.” Borges was 73 years old.

The sixth of 11 children, Salomão Borges Filho was born in 1952, in Belo Horizonte, the capital and largest city in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais. As teenagers, Borges and his older brother Márcio became associated with a group of musicians who gathered at the corner of Rua Divinópolis and Rua Paraisópolis in the neighborhood of Santa Tereza to smoke, hang out, make music. Their “corner club,” as it came to be known, blended MPB—música popular brasileira, one of the dominant styles of Brazilian music during the 1960s—with jazz, psychedelic rock, and the Beatles’ baroque pop.

Among those musicians was Milton Nascimento, who was about 10 years older than Borges and had moved from the town of Três Pontas to Belo Horizonte in 1963. A rising international star following his performance at the inaugural MPB festival in 1965, Nascimento co-wrote two songs on his 1970 album Milton, “Para Lennon e McCartney” and “Clube da Esquina,” alongside the Borges brothers. Lô was planning to join the Brazilian army at 18, but Nascimento invited him to Rio de Janeiro to work on another project.

Despite arriving deep in the midst of Brazil’s oppressive junta dictatorship, that album, 1972’s Clube da Esquina, became one of the most influential and acclaimed records in the country’s musical history. Borges claimed writing credits on eight out of 21 tracks, including “O Trem Azul,” album opener “Tudo que Você Podia Ser,” and “Paisagem da Janela,” a song whose recording was originally blocked by federal censors. “When I would speak of those morbid things/When I would speak of those sordid men,” he sings, in Portuguese, in the chorus, “When I would speak of this storm/You didn’t listen/You don’t want to believe/But that’s so normal.”

The same year as Clube da Esquina’s release, Borges, still only 19, shared his self-titled solo debut, colloquially known as Disco do Tênis (“sneaker album”). He reportedly became overwhelmed by his label’s demand for new material, however, and went quiet for much of the 1970s. He eventually resurfaced at the tail end of the decade on several songs from Nascimento’s Clube da Esquina 2 in 1978 and his own sophomore solo effort, A Via-Láctea, in 1979. He put out four more albums throughout the 1980s and 1990s, and had a late-career hit in 2003 with “Dois Rios,” a song he co-wrote for the Brazilian ska-punk band Skank.

Mtulazaji “P.E.A.C.E.” Davis, a founding member of the influential Los Angeles hip-hop group Freestyle Fellowship, has died. The news was shared on the group’s social media pages. “Rest well brother P.E.A.C.E,” the band wrote. “You had a great heart and you were authentic. One of West coast Hiphop royal treasures. You will be surely missed my friend. 💔💔💔💔.” A cause of death was not given.

In the 1990s, Freestyle Fellowship helped further the West Coast’s take on frantic, back-and-forth freestyling between rappers, serving as California’s jazz-inspired answer to New York’s own renaissance with Jungle Brothers, De La Soul, and A Tribe Called Quest in the Native Tongues collective. The hip-hop quartet—founded by P.E.A.C.E, Aceyalone, Myka 9, and Self Jupiter—constantly pushed each member to stay on his toes across his career, with P.E.A.C.E. often punching up his verses with extra enunciation and speed in frequently overlooked ways.

Born Mtulazaji Davis, P.E.A.C.E. grew up in Dallas before relocating to Los Angeles, where he funneled his creativity into playing numerous instruments. While attending high school in the 1980s, he took to hip-hop and began rapping, eventually becoming a regular at Good Life Café, the South Central Los Angeles cafe whose open mics became a hotspot for the city’s underground rap scene. P.E.A.C.E. bonded with cafe regulars Aceyalone, Myka 9, and Self Jupiter and the four decided to form a proper group.

Freestyle Fellowship released their debut album, 1991’s To Whom It May Concern…, with a focus on how exuberant and quick-witted they were as a group. While their peers were working on the makings of a jaded, gangster-focused side of hip-hop, Freestyle Fellowship introduced themselves as a conscientious act, with P.E.A.C.E. staking his own ground on “Physical Form” and “For No Reason,” in particular. (A special 30th-anniversary reissue of the LP went on to earn a Best Historical Album nomination at the 2023 Grammy Awards.)

Although Freestyle Fellowship upgraded their production and pushed themselves further lyrically on the follow-up, Innercity Griots, that 1993 album would be their last during their original run, as the group went on hiatus when Self Jupiter was incarcerated. In 2001, Freestyle Fellowship reunited for the album Temptations and followed it with the Shockadoom EP the next year. Self Jupiter returned to jail for a second sentencing, and it wasn’t until he was released in 2009 that the group could properly get back together in the studio, which they celebrated in the form of 2011’s The Promise.

Jack DeJohnette, the jazz drummer, pianist, and bandleader who played on Miles Davis’ Bitches Brew and worked closely with Sonny Rollins, Keith Jarrett, and many other jazz luminaries, has died. His longtime label ECM Records confirmed the news, and his personal assistant told The Guardian the cause of death was congestive heart failure. DeJohnette was 83 years old.

Born in Chicago, in 1942, DeJohnette grew up in a mostly segregated neighborhood, raised primarily by his grandmother and poet mother. From the age of five or six, he studied traditional piano with a neighborhood teacher; back home, his uncle was filling the house with jazz records by the likes of Duke Ellington and Billie Holliday. When that uncle, Roy Wood, became the first Black news announcer on a white Chicago radio station, DeJohnette gained access to an endless supply of jazz records that fueled an early infatuation with the genre. In a newly integrated high school at the dawn of rock’n’roll, he sang doo-wop and played in dance bands—occasionally on acoustic bass—formed by students exposed to a network of legendary Chicago jazz and blues labels like Chess and Vee Jay.

When a drummer friend left his kit in DeJohnette’s basement, he took up playing along to his uncle’s Max Roach, Clifford Brown, and Charlie Parker records and discovered he was a natural. Kicked out of high school for skipping class, he took up serious music study and played with a local quintet specializing in Thelonious Monk and Art Blakey arrangements. When his grandmother died, he bought a car, a drum set, and a Wurlitzer electric piano and hustled solo keyboard gigs at Chicago bars, practicing in the daytime for three hours apiece on the drums and piano.

His growing curiosity and expertise brought him into the orbit of Chicago’s avant-garde scene. After watching Sun Ra and His Arkestra rehearse at a nearby tavern, DeJohnette was invited into the fold and played drums for the outfit in an ad-hoc arrangement that continued into the 1960s as his status grew. Sun Ra and a new generation of jazz masters—particularly Miles Davis and John Coltrane—were coming into their own as composers, and DeJohnette would catch their shows at local club McKee Fitcher’s. “I’d go almost every night to hear Coltrane,” he told the Smithsonian in 2011, “and it was… what can I say? It was the most amazing experience of hearing music.” One night, when Coltrane drummer Elvin Jones was late for a set, the club owner yelled at Coltrane to “Let Jack DeJohnette play.” He joined the band for three songs—“a great physical and spiritual experience,” DeJohnette said. “John was like a train. He was like a magnet and you felt this pull.”

Dave Ball, the multi-instrumentalist, producer, and songwriter who performed alongside Marc Almond in the influential synth-pop duo Soft Cell, died yesterday (October 22). The band’s publicist, Debbie Ball, confirmed the news, writing that Ball died peacefully in his sleep at his London home. No cause was given. The musician was 66 years old.

Raised in Blackpool, England, after his adoption into a working-class family, Ball grew up a budding artist with a penchant for the Northern soul craze then sweeping the north of England, obsessively collecting Tamla and Stax singles. He moved to Leeds to study fine art in his late teens and met fellow student Almond, a lamé-clad performance artist. The pair bonded over punk and electronic music and cult films; after a few weeks of futzing with a Korg synthesizer, Ball enlisted his flamboyant new friend as a bandmate.

They were a strange pair—“Marc, this gay bloke in makeup; and me, a big guy who looked like a minder,” as Ball put it to The Guardian in 2017—but the contrast neatly superimposed onto their musical loves. They named the duo Soft Cell, punning on what they called “consumerist nightmares and suburban insanity,” and made songs amalgamating an unlikely trinity of Kraftwerk, Suicide, and cabaret. They made their live debut “at a college Christmas show two short months after they met, performing ramshackle, anticonsumerist songs against a backdrop of Super 8 films of destroyed radios and industrial landscapes,” Pitchfork’s Eric Torres wrote in his review of the band’s debut album, Non-Stop Erotic Cabaret. “The art-punk spark was lit.”

An early breakout single, “Memorabilia,” co-produced by Mute founder Daniel Miller, united their love of kitsch and acid house in a floor-filler that suggested the underground, avant-garde curios of their Some Bizzare label cadre were about to boil over. The eruption came with “Tainted Love,” a tempestuous, darkly intoxicating cover of a Gloria Jones song Ball had heard in a club as a teenager. Backed by a cover of the Supremes’ “Where Did Our Love Go,” the single was the United Kingdom’s second-best seller of 1981 and topped the charts in more than a dozen other countries.

The hit, and the debut album that followed, affixed Soft Cell in British music history: contemporaries of Depeche Mode and path-makers for bands like Pet Shop Boys, Erasure, and Spandau Ballet, even if Almond accused some of that crop of making heartless music “to pose against the Berlin Wall to.” The duo released two more studio albums in the ensuing years, The Art of Falling Apart and This Last Night in Sodom; both charted in the United Kingdom, despite the latter’s release after the group’s dissolution. Soft Cell also released one of the first remix albums, Non-Stop Ecstatic Dancing, and Ball, closely attuned to the evolution of electronic music, would fashion 12″ edits of their singles by splicing together segments of tape. Almond and Ball’s embrace of the clubland party lifestyle, and substance use, contributed to their split. As Ball wrote in his 2020 autobiography, Electronic Boy, “We’d been so successful very quickly, in constant demand and therefore always together—living out of each other’s pockets. I don’t think any relationship could have endured that pressure.”

Ace Frehley, the founding lead guitarist of Kiss, has died. A representative for Frehley told Rolling Stone that he had sustained injuries following a recent fall at his home. “In his last moments, we were fortunate enough to have been able to surround him with loving, caring, peaceful words, thoughts, prayers and intentions as he left this earth,” Frehley’s family shared in a statement to USA Today. “The magnitude of his passing is of epic proportions, and beyond comprehension.” He was 74.

Paul Daniel Frehley grew up in the Bronx. He was a member of several bands before answering Paul Stanley’s ad in 1973 seeking a lead guitarist. Stanley, Gene Simmons, and Peter Criss hired Frehley as a member of the band following his audition. In addition to providing the band’s iconic early riffs and solos, Frehley designed Kiss’ logo.

Like the rest of the band, Frehley was known not only for his playing, but for his on-stage theatrics and persona. He painted silver stars over his eyes—his persona in the band was “Space Ace” or “the Spaceman.” During solos, his guitar would emit smoke and lights, giving the appearance that it was catching fire. Frehley played on most of Kiss’ most iconic records, including their self-titled debut, Destroyer, and Alive!.

In 1978, all four members of the band released solo albums. Frehley’s was the most successful of the bunch, with his version of “New York Groove” landing on the Billboard singles chart. Frehley grew apart from Kiss’ creative direction and ultimately left the band in 1982. He continued making solo records and albums with his band Frehley’s Comet. His most recent solo album, 10,000 Volts, was released last year

The four founding members of Kiss reunited between 1995 and 2000; Frehley appeared on their 1998 album Psycho Circus. In 2001, he released his autobiography No Regrets: A Rock’n’Roll Memoir. In 2014, he and the rest of band’s original members were inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.