🎵 Quavo’s Heart-Wrenching Tribute to Takeoff

Plus, NewJeans offer a new direction for K-pop. MIKE turns his fortune cookie into an album.

Mic-Check Newsletter
7 min readJan 9, 2023

Tory Lanez faces more than 20 years in prison after being found guilty of shooting Megan Thee Stallion. Listen to the phone call that was key to his conviction here.

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A decade before the murders of Tupac and Biggie, DJ Scott La Rock, a member of the hip hop group Boogie Down Productions, was shot and killed. His death was a pivotal moment in hip hop history that jumpstarted the genre’s decades-long violence epidemic. Though Fandom.com lists a staggering 420 rappers who have been murdered since La Rock’s death, the epidemic has been exacerbated in recent years, stripping us of an entire generation of young talent. Of those 420 rappers, nearly 85% have been killed since 2018, including XXXTentacion, Nipsey Hussle, Pop Smoke, Young Dolph, PnB Rock, and most recently, Takeoff.

Takeoff was the youngest member of the rap trio Migos, a family affair that included his uncle Quavo and their cousin Offset. All three were raised together by Quavo’s mother in a suburb of Atlanta. The group had their first…

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