Musician Fatman Scoop has died at the age of 53 after collapsing on stage during a show in Connecticut.
The tributes that have followed describe him as a rapper, but that’s not exactly right. There was no wordplay, no storytelling, and his stuff only rhymed insofar as he repeated himself a lot. Scoop was pure hype man, a return to the role of the MC in hip hop’s block party origins.
This made Scoop, born Isaac Freeman III, a fairly old school figure — even in his heyday. And as mainstream hip hop continues to slow and warp under the influence of trap, his ebullient, disco-sampling shout-a-longs seem to belong to a different universe.
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