Nipsey Hussle

Ermias Joseph Asghedom was born on the fifteenth of August 1985 at Los Angeles, the second of three children of Dawit Asghedom — an Eritrean refugee who had emigrated to California in 1979 — and Angelique Smith, an African American mother of Crenshaw heritage. The household was working-class Black-Eritrean. He was raised at the Hyde Park district of South Los Angeles and at the Crenshaw and Slauson corridor. He attended Alexander Hamilton High School and Hawthorne High School through the eleventh grade and left in 2003 at seventeen.

He took the stage name Nipsey Hussle in 2005 — a rendering of the comedian Nipsey Russell — and recorded his first mixtape Slauson Boy Volume 1 the same year. He released across the following decade fourteen further mixtapes — including the principal works Bullets Ain't Got No Name (2008), The Marathon (2010), The Marathon Continues (2011), Crenshaw (2013) and Mailbox Money (2014) — distributed principally outside the commercial-major-label system.

His decisive commercial breakthrough was the 2013 Crenshaw mixtape, which he sold at one hundred dollars per physical copy in a Proud2Pay direct-to-fan distribution system. He sold one thousand copies in twenty-four hours through the Marathon Clothing store he had opened at the corner of Slauson Avenue and Crenshaw Boulevard, generating one hundred thousand dollars in single-day revenue. The Proud2Pay model became across the following five years a principal independent-artist commercial template.

He signed with Atlantic Records on terms preserving his Crenshaw-based ownership in 2017 and released his first commercial studio album Victory Lap in February 2018. The album was nominated for the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Rap Album.

He co-founded across the same years the Vector 90 STEM and entrepreneurship co-working space at Crenshaw, the Marathon Agency talent-management firm, and the Asghedom Family Foundation Crenshaw community-development infrastructure.

He was shot ten times in the parking lot of his Marathon Clothing store at Slauson and Crenshaw on the thirty-first of March 2019. He was pronounced dead at California Hospital Medical Center later the same evening. He was thirty-three. The 2019 Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance was awarded to him posthumously.

He is honored here as the founder of the Marathon Clothing store and the principal Crenshaw community-organising voice of his generation.