Today in Hip-Hop — August 15: Nipsey Hussle Would’ve Been 41, and the Marathon Continues

Fourteen years and eleven months ago, a Crenshaw teenager born Ermias Joseph Asghedom pressed his first Bullets Ain’t Got No Name mixtape and started running the Marathon. Today would’ve been Nipsey Hussle’s 41st birthday. He was gunned down at 33 on the sidewalk outside his own Marathon Clothing store on March 31, 2019 — on land he owned, in the neighborhood he refused to leave, working on projects designed to keep Black wealth in South Central. The album title he chose the year before he died — Victory Lap — landed different once the finish line moved on him.

The Blueprint Was the Point

Nipsey’s catalog is only one studio LP deep, but the mythology sits inside the mixtapes and the business decisions around them. The Marathon (2010), The Marathon Continues (2011), Crenshaw (2013), Mailbox Money (2014) — a decade of self-released work built on the thesis that a rapper from South Central didn’t need a major to reach his people. He proved it in 2013 by pricing physical copies of Crenshaw at $100 each and moving 1,000 units in a single day. Jay-Z bought 100 of them. That was $100,000 in physical mixtapes at a moment when the industry had declared physical media dead.

By the time Victory Lap arrived in February 2018 — through his All Money In imprint with Atlantic distribution — the album didn’t need to prove anything commercial. It debuted at #4 on the Billboard 200, got the Grammy nomination for Best Rap Album, and Nipsey lost to Cardi B. He was fine with it. The bigger project was already running: Marathon Clothing on Crenshaw and Slauson opened June 2017 with QR-embedded merch tech nobody else was doing. Vector 90 — the co-working and STEM space in Crenshaw — was the actual point. He was buying the block, planning the redevelopment, and telling anyone who’d listen that the money made in the culture had to circle back into the neighborhood that made you. Posthumously: two Grammys in 2020 (Best Rap Performance for “Racks in the Middle,” Best Rap/Sung Performance for “Higher”), the Hollywood Walk of Fame star on August 15, 2022, and the intersection at Slauson and Crenshaw renamed Ermias “Nipsey Hussle” Asghedom Square.

Crenshaw to Compton, One Lineage

Nipsey didn’t emerge in a vacuum. The Crenshaw-to-Compton corridor he made his life’s work was mapped a generation earlier by the crew who taught the industry what South Central sounded like when it stopped asking permission. We made an N.W.A. Straight Outta Compton Hoodie that carries the block-letter typography of the 1988 debut — the album that established the visual and lyrical vocabulary Nipsey later inherited and rebuilt on his own corner.

Also Today in Hip-Hop

• Chief Keef turns 31. Born Keith Cozart on August 15, 1995, in Chicago — the teenager who dropped Finally Rich in December 2012 with “Love Sosa,” “Hate Bein’ Sober,” and “I Don’t Like,” and pulled Chicago drill from the South Side to the mainstream in one album cycle.
• 2016 — Nipsey drops Slauson Boy 2 on his own 31st birthday. Ten years into his mixtape run, the free digital release featured Snoop Dogg, Young Thug, Dave East, and Young Dolph. It became the final commercial mixtape released in his lifetime.
• 2022 — Hollywood Walk of Fame ceremony for Nipsey. The 2,729th star, at 6212 Hollywood Boulevard in front of Amoeba Music, unveiled on what would’ve been his 37th birthday. His grandmother Margaret Boutte, sister Samantha Smith, and fiancée Lauren London all spoke.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team

Jon Jones