Flow Chart

He was the not-so-secret weapon in one of the defining groups of the 2010s, the quiet one off the mic and the master technician on the mic in a trio that helped set the tone for the commercial explosion of Southern trap and all but wrote the blueprint for how pop singers would phrase some of the decade’s biggest hits. If you’ve been anywhere near a radio or a pop playlist in the past decade, you’re familiar with the Migos flow, the staccato, triplet delivery that TAKEOFF perfected with his uncle QUAVO and his cousin OFFSET in MIGOS. The latter two were the group’s celebrities. Takeoff, who was 14 when the group formed, was the primary engine. The anchor and “technical glue.” The creator of some of Migos’ "most vivid and hilarious lyrics,” which he actually delivered in blizzards of cross-cutting, ever-changing flows that could turn even the sharpest heads in hip-hop. (And yes, sometimes there might just be one word repeated over and over and over. It was supposed to be fun, and it was.) All this while not appearing on the group’s biggest hit, an accident of time and space that he’d rectify by asking a startled interviewer, “Do it look like I’m left off ‘BAD AND BOUJEE’?” Even on the red carpet, the Migos flow kept flowing. And it did not, in fact, look like he’d been left off anything.

On Tuesday, less than a month after Takeoff and Quavo released an album that may or may not have confirmed Migos’ run had come to an end, their story took a tragic, heartbreaking turn. Takeoff, born 28 years ago as KIRSNICK KHARI BALL, became the 25th rapper murdered in the US in 2022, another chapter in a story that everyone in hip-hop is painfully aware of any hardly anyone else is paying serious attention to. He was at a private party at a bowling alley in Houston. There are 25 reasons and 25 stories, some possibly connected, some not, behind the murders of these men. There are difficult conversations to be had, within hip-hop, within various subcultures, within social media, within various cities and states. But also within the entirety of the American population. There’s one thing all 25 murders have in common, and it isn’t music. Takeoff wasn’t playing music Tuesday morning. Don't blame the hip-hop community, Houston police chief TROY FINNER said a few hours later. PNB ROCK, shot in Los Angeles a month ago, was eating lunch with his girlfriend. They, like all the other men, were victims of gun violence. Without *that* discussion, any other discussions will be embarrassingly incomplete. There are too many guns in bowling alleys, in restaurants, in clubs, on street corners, and everywhere else. We need to talk about this. We need to do something about this.

And One More Thing

We also need to agree to stop posting and sharing photos and videos of the body, which is in amazingly poor taste and serves no purpose except to disrespect the dead and dehumanize the rest of us. I don’t have the power to make everyone on social media do this, obviously. But we could do the world a favor by shutting the website TMZ, which fed that poisonous impulse once again Tuesday, out of our lives. (And by not rushing to publish stories based on their thinly sourced, deceptively written attempts to beat everyone else to the story. Block them and do your own reporting.)

Etc Etc Etc

The great and mysterious entity SAULT dropped *five* albums Tuesday, which it says will be available for exactly five days in a password-protected folder. You have social media skills. I’m assuming you can find the password... Experimental/futurist musician HOLLY HERNDON dropped exactly one song in which she deep-fakes herself with a cover of DOLLY PARTON’s “JOLENE”... The catalog of songs available to AMAZON PRIME members has ballooned from 2 million to 100 million, but unless you pay an additional monthly fee, you’ll have to listen in shuffle mode... The secret origins of the conductor.