The words didn’t come to me last week, so I missed my usual Monday post on Substack.
My sister’s husband passed away last Monday morning. They were together over 50 years. A man I had known for most of my life, dead from cancer. The week before, his breathing had gotten labored, and he was disoriented enough to worry his family into rushing him to the hospital. He was diagnosed with stage 4 lung and brain cancer and given 3 to 6 months to live. Exactly one week later, on his 69th birthday, he drew his last breath. I was especially worried about my sister and how she would adjust to him no longer being in her life after so many decades of marriage, 2 sons, and 4 grandkids together.
I don’t handle death well. It’s not that my brother-in-law and I were close, because we weren’t. It’s that it weirds me out a little that you can be here one minute and just not be here the next, surrounded by people lamenting your loss, especially the ones who didn’t make much effort while you were alive. And there’s no definitive answer on where you go, if anywhere, and what comes next. Religion and science can be diametrically opposed on this, depending on who you ask.
I’m not looking for your opinion. The truth is, I don’t care what you think. My only concern is that whatever you believe comforts you when you need it to. I read last night that grief is unreleased love that has nowhere to go. I guess that’s comforting. But I can’t help seeing grief as a bit of a selfish emotion. We are forced to let go of someone we may not be ready to let go of, someone we want to keep around for our own pleasure or our own needs. I’m not sure the person who died wants to be dead or not, but most people don’t consider that. They just grieve the loss.
I realize that’s not a popular opinion. I’d rather celebrate someone’s life than cry over their passing. But it’s easy for me to say that, because I tell people what I think of them regularly. Well… when I like them.
This morning, exactly one week after my brother-in-law passed, I got the news that DJ Bigga Rankin passed away early this morning in Jacksonville. We were close. He was my “industry husband,” a term of endearment that meant we did events together, supported the same artists, and were like-minded. We were closer in the 2000s and 2010s, before COVID, but we were still close. And now he’s gone. There’s a documentary that was filmed last year where I talk about all of this at length. Hopefully it drops soon.
The amazing thing about Billy is that he survived kidney failure and was actively going to dialysis. He looked for a kidney transplant for over a decade and couldn’t find a match. When COVID hit, he was the person I worried about most, because his system was already weakened. As I called around our circle of friends this morning after his passing, I learned that Alley Boy, the rapper from DuctTape, had passed away early Saturday morning from a stroke. And luckily, two of my closest friends, Kingpin and Tony, had each spoken with Bigga at length just last night. They each talked with him about Alley Boy’s death, since they had all worked closely together, and they talked about how people only ever come together and share their love and gratitude once someone is gone. I tend to tell people how I feel about them naturally, so it’s rare that someone passes and I feel I left something unsaid. How amazing that Tony and Kingpin each got to tell Bigga how much they loved him, and got to hear him tell them what they meant to him. That is especially meaningful, since Bigga was gone a few hours later.
After the initial shock wore off this morning, I decided to post on Instagram to share the enormous emotion I was feeling for Bigga and our friendship. As I scrolled through tens of thousands of photos on my phone, I realized two things. One, I have a ton of photos of Bigga in my phone (the only industry person I have more photos with is Slick Rick). Two, I have too many photos of people who have passed away. Today, in my own phone, I saw a graveyard of the music industry. Life is precious, and it is short in this business. Bigga was my age, certainly too young to die. It horrified me to see how many people from this industry are already gone. We are notoriously stressed and overworked; we can be emotional and overly sensitive, and most of us carry financial stress because we don’t have steady, regularly paying jobs. Many of us are overly altruistic, or taken advantage of, or both.
But I will say this. Bigga lived an amazing life. He made a difference in the lives of so many people. He helped create so many successful artists and careers. He loved, laughed, and ran a DJ crew that mattered in the South. He put Duval on the map in hip hop. Even I scream “Duuuuuvaaaaalllll” when I’m in JAX, even when no one is listening. He created the Diamond Awards to show love to the people mainstream media ignored, because he felt the South was too often overlooked. He was the head of A&R at Think It’s A Game Records, had love and respect for upcoming artists, and helped anyone who needed it. He also refused to play dis records, and for a DJ that was unheard of, and it cost him, because dis records spread faster than any positive song ever could. Bigga was very often the first person to believe in what a new artist was doing. He was the first to offer praise and the first to lovingly admonish someone when they did wrong. Charity and community came first, always. Bigga was a loving husband, a devoted father to many kids, a proud Jamaican, a brother, a friend, an uncle, a partner, a great set of ears, a mixtape icon, a warrior, a DJ, and a king. And he made hip hop a better place for all of us.
Thank you, Billy. For everything. You will be sorely and selfishly missed.