"Should I join the system I can’t be? Or gamble with the heat? Cancel all the dreams I speak for dying on my feet? Why should I rely on a piece of the pie that’s incomplete? Judas with the judge and the jury, hurry to catch defeat."
--Lastchild
"Should I join the system I can’t be? Or gamble with the heat? Cancel all the dreams I speak for dying on my feet? Why should I rely on a piece of the pie that’s incomplete? Judas with the judge and the jury, hurry to catch defeat."
--Lastchild
A stray bullet wrapped in a love letter from the early days of the millennium. An era of hard rocks and hard rhymes, coupled with a contradictory sense of optimism and expansiveness. An era I recall as grimier and more innocent, at the same time. Before mainstream hip hop made the full-on transition from culture to market. Before the way we were in the world was put up for sale. Before his untimely demise, Lastchild lived in the Typical Cats house—the basement apartment at 54th and Woodlawn. Qwa was there, Psylock was there, Mehloheem was there. Nat was there before he went back to NY. Qwel would take train rides from Howard to see us. We hustled paychecks from jobs we never showed up for. We conned cops into carrying groceries for us. We debated hip hop and plotted records and threw bowls of ramen when we argued. We snuck into buildings we had been evicted from to do laundry and fought construction workers with shovels. Outkast’s Stankonia was on permanent rotation, along with the Bush Babees’ Gravity. A permanent cloud of bless hovered beneath the ceiling. Still, the illest rhymes you heard weren’t mainstream platters or radio play—it was the joint Hellsent or Demention had just cooked up in a spiral-bound notebook. It was half a verse one of the Qs had left by an ashtray full of roaches, written on a sheet of paper covered in XBOX cheat codes. It was the unrehearsed thoughts that flowed in smoky, break of dawn ciphers. It was the 5 tracks Lastchild recorded before he took leave of this terra—the Humble and Low EP. Ten years after the fact, it remains a singular document of turn of the century Chicago hip hop. Evidence of a lost style. It sounds like him—cynical and sincere, rugged but nimble. He is heartless and plaintive in the same breath. He rasps, "Blunt in my grasp. Confront the sucker fast. Dump him in the trash. I ain’t got the fucking time. Shit gets ugly fast," before he implores, "Judge me as the one that I am. Son of the Summer Jam. Simple man that none of them understand." He sounds like us: heartbreak and unfulfilled promise—"Potential like a gun in hand." He is an indelible part of Tree City history. He was the last of the GVHC kids. He was a wayward genius, a multi-instrumentalist, a punk rocker and hip hopper, a lost poet, and a last son. He was my brother. He’s gone now. But we’ll see him again—and soon. Some leave because they were too swift for Babylon to catch. They’ll never touch him now.
Rest in Peace.
