Nip Agreed With Q-Tip About Industry Rule #4080įollowers of P&P IG already know the story about an Interscope A&R advising Nipsey that he needed to work on his dance moves. If you could use beats and rhymes to feed yourself and your family and uplift your homies he respected that.Ģ. He loved hip-hop so much that he never indulged in beef or made a practice of dissing other rappers, with very few exceptions. That love is what drove him to figure how to build his own computer from parts. That’s why he would ride the bus all the way from Crenshaw to Watts just to get one hour of instruction on the MPC. In some ways his whole life was a quest to get into the studio and lay down his raps. He was seven when Kriss Kross dropped “Jump” and he wanted to be a child rap star more than anything. Born in 1985, he grew up in South Central Los Angeles, in the aftermath of the Rodney King uprising and at the dawn of the Death Row era. While some of that may be true, before all of that Nipsey Hussle loved hip-hop. “Nip’s really about that life,” “He’s really in the streets,” etc. To the extent that people were aware of his movement, they held onto a superficial “gangsta rap” cliche. The rap industry-particularly the New York gatekeepers and tastemakers-slept on Nipsey for much of his career. But here are some of the big takeaways that stand out for me. Pigeons & Planes asked me to share 5 things I learned writing the first biography of Neighborhood Nip, which is tough because Ermias Asghedom was a complex individual and the book clocks in at 400-plus pages, including tons of footnotes. By the time I finish writing this it will be exactly one week since my book The Marathon Don’t Stop: The Life and Times of Nipsey Hussle was published (on March 23, my late mother’s birthday-much love to Mary Anne Kenner). As I sit down to write this article for Pigeons & Planes, it’s just a few minutes before midnight on Monday March 29th. Writing a book is a test of endurance, not unlike running a Marathon.

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