
Released in May 1997, Street Gospel came together in just 28 days. The prison bids partially delayed his rap career, which only began in earnest at 27. Over the next decade, he’d be frequently incarcerated for a wide array of misdemeanor and felony charges.
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The horrors are chronicled in harrowing detail on Street Gospel’s finale, “Dip Da.”Īfter the marriage dissolved, his mother moved the family to Compton, then to the west side of Pomona, dubbed “Sin Town,” where Free joined the 357 Crips. Born in Gardena, the future rapper moved to Oakland as a baby, where his earliest memories involved a drunken, abusive father, who would choke his mother in front of Dejuan and his younger sister. Until then, Suga Free could mostly be found procuring near Holt Street in Pomona. At that initial meeting, the friendly neighborhood playa partner immediately began beating on the table, busting out rhymes and courting fate. The Compton legend not only brilliantly produced Suga Free’s debut but discovered him, too - via Tony “Black Tone” Lane, who introduced Quik to Dejuan Rice at a baseball card shop in the mid-’90s. You can’t talk Street Gospel without DJ Quik. It’s an indelible KDAY staple, as locals-only as your favorite taco truck or instinctively taking Fountain at rush hour. native and a transplant, just start rapping “Why U Bullshittin’?” If they don’t start humming the sitar riffs and invoking “waves as deep as Redondo Beach,” they’re not from around here. Should you ever need to tell the difference between an L.A.

Vince Staples indicted ’90s hip-hop traditionalists for omitting Street Gospel from the canon. Or Schoolboy Q, who conscripted the rap veteran for a guest verse on his last album. You can see it in disciples such as Kendrick Lamar, who has repeatedly professed Suga Free’s importance to him and the community of Compton. In the two decades since the immaculately permed Pomona pimp with the freshly pressed white linen suit delivered one of the most unimpeachable West Coast rap classics, his influence has remained ubiquitous. It’s fitting that the world’s oldest profession would produce something as timeless as Suga Free’s Street Gospel.
