Credit: Album Cover

Hip hop has been under the true crime spotlight in recent years, with the RICO case debating whether rap lyrics should be used in evidence. However, there have been occasions in the past where no philosophical debate is necessary, and the evidence is black and white. That was very much the case when Big Lurch staggered out onto the streets covered in blood and wailing incoherently.

Antron Singleton’s life had begun rather promisingly. Born in Dallas, Texas, he exhibited a knack for the arts at a tender age, penning poems from as young as of seven. As the rap scene rose up around him, he began to see a possible future for his art thanks to the likes of The Sugar Hill Gang and other early 1980’s pioneers of the genre. His poems soon took on an urban edge, vitalised by the hip hop boon in culture.

By 1996, he found himself in a rap collective of his own, founding Cosmic Slop Shop at the age of 20. The trio’s sound was a darker, Maggot Brain-inflected form of rap that quickly garnered them fans. However, their first hit, ‘Sinful’, was an ominous portent of what would follow. The Oakland, Los Angeles scene that they hailed from was steadily becoming overrun with conflict and drugs—both of which would imbue Cosmic Slop Shop with a reflectively fractious and barbed sound, both of which would also lead to a harrowing demise.

After three years of a relatively prominent rise and the well-received release, Da Family, in 1998. But by 1999, they were no longer. They craved more instant success than Da Family afforded them, not purely for artistic recognition but also, in part, to fund burgeoning habits. At least that was the case for Singleton, a wayward figure who had cut himself out as a rebellious maverick under his Big Lurch alias. He was set to launch his solo career as a daring and gravelly rapper before it was halted in horrific style one damning day in 2002, just as he was formulating his would-be solo record, It’s All Bad.

At the time, Big Lurch had been sharing an apartment with Tynisha Ysais, 21, and her boyfriend. It was not a pleasant abode. The then 25-year-old’s drug use was becoming rampant. On April 9th of that year, Big Lurch and the boyfriend managed to get their hands on some particularly potent PCP. What unfurled thereafter is lost in a bloody, tragic blur.

A friend of Ysais’ swung by the apartment late in the evening. Therein, she found her friend laying dead on the floor. Her chest had been torn open, a blade had broken off in her throat, and evident bite marks could be found on her exposed lungs, oesophagus and chest. Her naked corpse was a sorry-ravaged mess. In the streets nearby, Big Lurch simply stood naked, covered in blood, staring agog at the stars.

When the police cornered him, they found that his stomach contained large quantities of human flesh. He was bewildered and barely responsive, still staring skywards throughout most of the horrendous ordeal. The whys and wherefores of his brutal attack are lost in a frenzy that he can barely remember, and he eventually pleads not guilty to charges of murder and aggravated mayhem by reason of insanity. Alas, little discerning was done in the matter, and he was sentenced to life in prison without possibility of parole.

However, some semblance of thought would be given to this sorry mayhem a few years later when, in a suit reminiscent of the modern RICO hearings, the victim’s mother filed a wrongful death lawsuit not only against Singleton himself, but also his bodyguard, Stress Free Records, Death Row Records, and her daughter’s boyfriend. In the court filing, her claim was that the label had supplied him with the deranging PCP in order “to encourage [him] to act out in an extreme violent manner so as to make him more marketable as a ‘gangsta rap’ artist.”

Of all the details in this disturbing case, that’s the only one that requires debate. Sadly, it is one we’re still having, and it would seem it is the same societal faults driving it.