Hip hop DJ and producer Afrika Bambaataa announced dead at 67
Afrika Bambaataa, a major influential figure in hip hop and alleged sex trafficker, has passed away.
Sources say that the DJ and producer passed away at around 3am in Pennsylvania following complications with cancer.
Bambaataa was born in The Bronx, New York, where he became an influential DJ in hip hop as the genre originally started to grow.
After hosting block parties in the city, he eventually started releasing music, beginning with his debut track ‘Zulu Nation Throwdown’, which was a reference to an art collective of conscious rappers.
One of his biggest hits was ‘Planet Rock’, which reached number 4 in the US, and was one of the first hip hop songs to use 808’s, which are now considered a quintessential part of the genre’s sound.
While the DJ had a celebrated career in music, it eventually turned sour, as Bambaataa was accused of sexually abusing multiple men throughout the 1980s and 1990s.
A civil case was issued against him in 2021 by an anonymous plaintiff who accused him of child sexual abuse and trafficking. Bambaataa lost the case after he failed to show up in court, and the plaintiff was given a default judgement “without opposition.”
This was one instance out of many when the DJ was accused of molesting boys.
Bambaataa always denied the allegations, saying in an interview in 2016: “I never abused nobody. You know, it just sounds crazy for people to say that, to hear: ‘You abused me.’ You know all my people back then, you know the hundreds of people that been around me. If something like that happened, why you never went to none of them?”
Afika Bambaataa died at the age of 67.