There is a video I watch often. Posted a little over 10 years ago by an essentially defunct blog called Houston Hip Hop Fixit features Rich Homie Quan in a blue Argentine soccer jersey and at least five necklaces. Quan and the interviewer are repeatedly bathed in the stroboscopic red lights of a police car. There’s only one microphone, so Quan and the host nudge each other’s feet, politely sidestep, and shrug off apologies. The rapper performs the kind of easy myth-making that characterizes 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 and paper.
About 90 seconds into the clip, Quan starts talking about his relationship with Young Thug. He says they have a unique chemistry in the studio, more standard stuff. But a minute later – after an awkward jump cut in the video – Quan says he and Thug are releasing an EP. Absolutely, says the interviewer. Are there plans for when it will come out? “Before the year is out,” Quan replies. The interviewer asks if he’d be willing to reveal the title. Quan declines, but strokes his goatee, looks at the camera for a second – something he hasn’t done before – and taps the interviewer’s forearm for emphasis. “I can tell you,” he says. “The EP me and Thug are releasing? The hardest duo since Outkast.” The interviewer’s eyes widen. He starts to fight back (“Now that’s -“), but Quan cuts him off. “I’m not funny.” He pushes. “I’m not exaggerating. The hardest duo since Outkast.”
Quan, who died Thursday, a month before his 34th birthday, always did this: He coated the bold with a thick layer of charm and modesty. He was a born hitmaker whose commercial career was marred by record label issues, contract disputes and the uneven evolution of the industry over the course of the 2010s. Like Dre, Big Boi and a host of other Southern pioneers, Quan wrote songs that intelligently combined formal experimentation and personal introspection – with each new, choppy flow or harmonized side, he seemed to dig deeper into his own psyche. He leaves behind four sons.
Quan was born Dequantes Devontay Lamar in 1990 and grew up in Atlanta, where he excelled as a center fielder and literature student as a teenager. He was less successful in his short-lived career as a burglar, which landed him a 15-month prison sentence shortly after he dropped out of Fort Valley State University. “It really shook me up and opened my eyes,” Quan said. XXL of his time inside.
The first thing you noticed about his music were the titles. In 2012, Quan released his first mixtape, I go with every songa promise it almost delivers on. Early the following year, he broke nationally with “Type of Way,” which made him sound a little mean and a little touchy, and also like he’d almost drowned in a vat of charisma as a young child. (This single was released by Def Jam on iTunes, suggesting that Quan had signed with the label; in fact, he was still embroiled in a legal battle with a smaller company, Think It’s a Game Entertainment, for many years to come.)
“Type of Way” came out just as Future was captivating rap radio, and was seen by some early listeners as a variant of that Plutonian style. In his verses, however, Quan veers much closer to traditional rapping, using his melodic skills to expand the song rather than anchor it. It functions as an extended provocation—sometimes threatening, sometimes just playful. He boasts that he can spot undercover cops at a glance, and interjects lines like “I got a hideout, and sometimes I go there / To give my mind a break”; memories of subpoenas served are delivered in a delicate singsong. All of this confusion and apparent contradiction is actually contained by Quan, until it drives the song in a single direction with irrepressible momentum.
There were more titles, more hits: Still therethe Gucci Mane collaboration Trust God, fuck 12, I promise I will never stop going in. “Walk Thru,” a duet with Compton rapper Problem (now Jason Martin), is a clever song about collecting excessive club appearance fees that nonetheless sounds like it was conceived in a nightmare. The hook he gave YG in 2013 helped the regional star break into national radio for the first time on Def Jam. And when he went triple platinum with his 2015 single “Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh),” he did it by distilling his style more clearly than ever before. Wobbly and joyful, this song makes memorized descriptions of money earned sound like mini spiritual breakthroughs.
Meanwhile, his former collaborator was on his own path to stardom. Both Thug and Quan were dogged by conservative reactions to their work. It would be a few years before “mumble rap” became widely used as a pejorative, but some reluctant listeners predictably deemed them uninteresting writers or inadequate singers. Both accusations were, and are, rooted in ideological opposition to their style rather than serious evaluations of their music. But even to the initiated, Quan’s claim that what he and Thug were working on would establish them as better than Clipse or Black Star, better than Webbie and Boosie or Dead Prez or whoever, seemed unlikely.
What they delivered in September 2014 was both bigger and smaller than anyone could have expected, seismic but almost invisible. The tour that The Tour, Part 1 was supposed to be promoted but never actually materialized; some of the Cash Money albums teased during DJ drops, if released at all, were held up in labyrinthine legal proceedings for half a decade. The awful, Microsoft Paint-like cover called the group Rich Gang, a moniker that had already been used for Baby’s other post-Cash Money branding exercises. “Lifestyle,” the huge summer hit Thug and Quan had landed under that name, wasn’t even included. The tour doesn’t exist on streaming platforms and didn’t spawn any new hits. But it was as Quan promised: a perfect snapshot of two eccentrics manically searching for new veins to tap into. The hardest duo since Outkast.
One could credibly argue that The tour is the best rap record of the 2010s. It finds Thug, one of the decade’s true supernova talents, at his peak, or at least at his best—and yet it would be entirely reasonable to assume that Quan is his superior. Check out Quan’s verse on the shimmering “Flava,” in which he gleefully cries out about his son inheriting his features and 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,” the title of which betrays the depth of thought and passion Quan brings to the song. “My baby’s mama just put me on child support,” he raps:
Fuck an arrest warrant, I’m not going to court
I don’t care what the white people say, I just want to see my little boy
Go to school, be a man and enroll in college, boy
Don’t be a fool, be a man. What do you think the use of this knowledge is?
On Thursday, shortly after Quan’s death was confirmed, Quavo, one of the two surviving members of Migos, posted an Instagram story. “Good Convo With My Bro,” he wrote on a black background, tagging Offset, with whom he had been embroaded in a very public feud since shortly before the murder of their groupmate Takeoff in November 2022. Ten years ago, it seemed as though this cohort of Atlanta rappers would rule the industry indefinitely; today, the deaths of artists like Quan, Takeoff, Trouble, Lil Keed and Bankroll Fresh – as well as the ongoing RICO trial against Young Thug – hang like a dark cloud over one of music’s creative meccas.
After “Flex,” Quan’s career was no longer supported as it could or should have been by record labels; whether because of the Think It’s a Game situation, bad taste, or a lack of marketing imagination, he never got the boost he deserved. (He never worked with Thug again, either: In interviews on the subject, Quan was thoughtful and self-critical, though some of the details of their falling out may now be the problem of the Georgia justice system.) His best solo album, the thoughtful, technically virtuosic Back to basicswas entirely inspired by Kendrick Lamar’s DAMNEDwhich was surprisingly released on the same day.
The 2019 film Raw gemstones is typical of his directors’ productions. Josh and Benny Safdie are obsessed with realism – even their most outlandish scenes are cast with non-actors, their dialogue overlaps, the blocking develops naturally, the immersion in each character’s world is entirely ethnographic. Gemstones is set during the 2012 NBA playoffs, and the period details are handled with meticulousness. The only concession seems to come about halfway through, when LaKeith Stanfield’s character pulls his SUV up to a curb and “Type of Way” plays at a deafening volume. Even though that song didn’t come out until a year after the Celtics’ run, the filmmakers obviously felt it was worth fracturing their reality for harrowing effect. This sums up Quan’s career in many ways: a little detached from time, caught between eras, yet undeniable on the most basic level.
Paul Thompson is editor-in-chief of Los Angeles Book ReviewHis works have appeared in Rolling Stone, new York Magazine and GQ.
