You could read the whole thing as a project against atomization. By the early 1990s, when the Los Angeles rap avant-garde coalesced around the Good Life Cafe on Crenshaw, distinctions were already being drawn: between New York and L.A., G-funk and jazz, the artificial and what was real. This was before Bad Boy vs. Death Row. But in 1992 there was already a sense that technically superlative and politically serious rap music—which sounded great in headphones on the bus and during polite performances at community centers—existed in perpetual opposition to what was fun, seductive, social.
The styles that emerged from the modest health-food store that was the Good Life, and then from its successor, Leimert Park’s Project Blowed, were a direct and defiant rebuke of this notion. And the ethos was never better distilled than in Freestyle Fellowship, the seminal quartet of Self Jupiter, Aceyalone, Myka 9, and P.E.A.C.E., who died over the weekend at the age of 51.
Born Mtulazaji Davis and raised in the Dallas-Fort Worth area before moving to L.A. as a child, P.E.A.C.E. was the rare artist whose mastery of craft was matched by an energy which revealed that craft’s depth and pliability. On stage—performing finished songs, freestyling, or in the innumerable battles where he was one of his generation’s most feared competitors—he was precise and practiced, yet seemed to be constantly inventing: not just to dazzle an audience or diminish an opponent, but to reach out and touch them, even if that touch was more like a fist to a jaw.
The Fellowship’s second album, Innercity Griots, was released by 4th & B’Way about six months before Wu-Tang Clan's Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers, in April 1993. And just as Ghostface opens the Wu debut with irrepressible, nearly feral energy, P.E.A.C.E. introduces Griots as if channeling something he can barely contain. First there’s the acapella piece, “Blood,” where his voice, drowned in reverb, dilates from quick balletic bursts into drawled out taunts: “Loooong goooooone.” This flows directly into the Bootsy Collins-sampling “Bullies of the Block,” where P.E.A.C.E.’s invocation of Mack trucks tracks with his sheer force, but grossly undersells his finesse.
As Griots gained renown and the Fellowship members carved out solo careers, the Blowed’s reputation as a petri dish for radical new rhythmic approaches (Riddlore’s stuttering, staggering counter-cadences) and vocal styles (Volume 10 contorting Chuck D’s genuflections into sailing knots) continued to grow. It could be loose and collaborative but was also famously rigorous: it was not uncommon for rappers with reputations as the best in other neighborhoods around the County to be booed, heckled, or laughed off stage. The guiding lyrical perspectives would fall under the umbrella of what would soon be called “conscious rap,” but there was an obsession with momentum and mutation. The jazz that undergirded Griots and the Fellowship’s 1991 debut, To Whom It May Concern… would be deemphasized on the later group and solo records, but the urgency and unpredictability remained.
Put another way: this was an environment that demanded showmanship. After P.E.A.C.E. passed, I talked to All City Jimmy, the rapper formerly known as Nocando, who was a leader of the Blowed in the generation after Fellowship. (He later went on to found Low End Theory, the weekly club night in Lincoln Heights that in the 2000s and 2010s became the epicenter of the beat music scene.) Like P.E.A.C.E., Jimmy is an all-world battle rapper and freestyler whose recorded music wields those tools for more introspective purposes. “P.E.A.C.E. is the heart of Freestyle Fellowship,” Jimmy says. “He’s also maybe the best performer I’ve ever seen—in rap and battle rap. No limiters at all.”
If P.E.A.C.E. had a different personality, his physical frame would not have been intimidating, or particularly notable. But on stage—and especially in battles—it seemed as if not only each limb, but every muscle in his face, was connected to the drums, the flows, the overwhelming desire to win. As a rap obsessive who came of age in the early 2000s, I cannot overstate the ubiquity of his battles, especially those from the Scribble Jam 1999, on mixtapes and file-sharing services. Those finals, between P.E.A.C.E. and Eyedea, are among the best arguments for battle rap as a medium: uproariously funny, slyly complex, pro wrestling if it were worried about driving toward an underlying truth. At the very end, P.E.A.C.E. loses—then hugs Eyedea so aggressively he looks as if he’s trying to tackle him. Now, both those men are gone. Eyedea died in his sleep in October 2010.
The Fellowship catalog is broken into three parts—an appropriately halting cadence—in part because of two periods during which Self Jupiter was incarcerated. P.E.A.C.E. would slip in and out of the public eye. For about five years starting in 1999, he spent much of his time crashing with the legendary producer Kenny Segal in a house south of USC, stringing together a piecemeal living off of music at a time when the record industry, and rap in particular, was exploding.
“People talk about living in the moment, or being present, and he was that on steroids,” Segal says. “He could often strike a scary or even violent presence in both a rap cypher or real life, but those that were close to him know that he was also super caring and fiercely loyal to his people. He also seemed to be almost superhuman: incredibly strong and agile even though he didn’t seem to work out or take care of his body in any way, and he could ingest cocktails of drugs and alcohol that would literally kill another person and seem totally unfazed.”
The styles flowed, and flowed, and flowed. “Freestyling was like talking for him,” Segal continues. “I saw him sometimes go a day or more only talking in freestyles, often in various voices or characters he came up with.” P.E.A.C.E.’s solo studio catalog is limited to two albums: 2000’s Southern Fry’d Chicken and Megabite, released four years later. Both contain enough hairpin turns and razor-toothed diatribes to reflect what made the man so revered in one of the most competitive rap scenes on the planet. Segal sums it up: “P.E.A.C.E. was one of the most visceral humans I have ever met.”
While that opening suite on Innercity Griots is indispensable, when I think of P.E.A.C.E., my mind goes to two other records. The first is “Can You Find the Level of Difficulty In This?,” the sprawling opener from the 2002 Fellowship EP Shockadoom, if only because the first couplet in his verse—“Time is running out, only 30 second to go/Keep marching in that madness”—could well be the description of the way he wrote, rapped, and evidently lived. The other is buried deep in Megabite, on a song called “LookinForLove.” Over skittering drums that sound like a Leimert counterpoint to “Is That Yo Bitch?,” P.E.A.C.E. imagines another person taking stock of him:
You know what?
He, he stood up there
He did his
He rapped it to ya
He died
He told the truth
And he didn't lie
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