While jerkin’ was relatively short-lived (though, eerily, is having revival on TikTok this month), it inspired his earliest recorded freestyles. Drakeo and his high-school friends established their own clique, dancing at house parties and outside their school. Jerkin’ grew out of gang culture as its pastel, skinny-jeaned release valve, its songs excuses for or instructions on its dances, which were captured on YouTube and amended by each successive crew. This was toward the end of the 2000s, when jerkin’ had become the dominant strain of rap among young Angelenos. But any comparison can only be carried so far: The man, like his music, was singular.ĭrakeo first participated in L.A.’s hip-hop scene not as an MC but as a dancer. There is a level on which Drakeo’s life and death work as a metaphor for a variety of systemic horrors. He accomplished all this despite losing more than three years of his creative prime to incarceration - including the nine months he spent in solitary confinement at Men’s Central Jail in downtown L.A. He was a pioneer of the careening flows that pushed underground rappers in L.A., the Bay Area, and Michigan past traditional bar breaks and into the avant-garde his baffling latticework of slang remade the language, and the flagrantly digital beats he preferred became standard for his subgenre. Drakeo the Ruler was dead at 28.Īt the time of his death, Drakeo, who was born Darrell Caldwell and raised some 60 blocks south of Exposition Park, was one of the best rappers in California and certainly one of its most influential. By the time his death was confirmed to family members roughly four hours later, the surreality had hardened into something more concrete. Premature memorials and instant theories about who was responsible spread there was gloating on Instagram. As he lay bleeding on the ground, waiting for an ambulance to arrive, eyewitness footage of his ravaged body seeped onto the internet.
At least one assailant stabbed Drakeo in the neck. It happened in what should’ve been a secure area of Exposition Park, where Live Nation was throwing Once Upon a Time in L.A., a one-day festival headlined by Al Green, Snoop Dogg, and YG, among others. last Saturday night, as Drakeo the Ruler walked toward a stage where he was scheduled to perform, a group of more than 40 men, many masked, swarmed him. The world lost an amazing artist, a beautiful human being, a father.Around 8:40 p.m. “This would never have happened if those promoters had the proper security protocol. Caldwell was lynched by 40 to 60 people,” said attorney James Bryant. Caldwell, who had knife wounds to his neck, died hours later at a hospital, authorities said. No security guards or police officers can be seen. Video played at the news conference of the moments leading up to the stabbing, which his attorneys called a “targeted assassination,” showed men in red pouring into into the fenced-off backstage area and attacking Caldwell and his small entourage. “Where was anyone? Where was anyone there to help him?” “How did these people get through? How did these people get access, backstage, to an artist?” Tianna Purdue, the mother of Caldwell’s 5-year-old son, said at the news conference announcing a planned wrongful death lawsuit. 18 while he was backstage waiting to go on at the Once Upon A Time in LA festival at Exposition Park, which also featured Snoop Dogg, Al Green and 50 Cent. Please look at the time stamp on the story to see when it was last updated.Ī lack of security allowed dozens of men to ambush rapper Drakeo the Ruler, who was beaten and stabbed to death backstage at a Los Angeles music festival, his family and their lawyers said Thursday.ĭrakeo, 28, an acclaimed West Coast rapper whose legal name is Darrell Caldwell, was stabbed to death on Dec. This is an archived article and the information in the article may be outdated.
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