Rich Homie Quan Was the Missing Link of Southern Rap

Quan was born Dequantes Devontay Lamar and raised in East Atlanta. He was a fan of James Patterson’s Alex Cross books, and grew up as a star center fielder, which I always found cool, because you don’t hear too much about Black baseball studs anymore. He told Rawiya Kameir in 2015, “I played from 14 to 18—like, I was very good at it. I was Mr. Baseball my freshman year. We were good and we had great talent. I don’t wanna say it’s a white sport now, but it is. I feel like a lot of us [Black players] get overlooked but it’s the way it goes, though.” Quan has said he turned down an opportunity to play in college, and he ended up hanging around Atlanta where he got sent to jail on burglary charges, which is where he started writing poetry that later morphed into music. Seamlessly blending rapping and singing, he would go on to be one of the faces of one of Atlanta’s greatest eras, the warped and wild and gaudy early 2010s—an era that lives in my mind as the image of Quan’s arm wrapped around Thug, medallions on his chains the size of a hockey puck, in the video for “Lifestyle.”

Not too long after Tha Tour Pt. 1, Quan and Thug drifted apart for reasons that were never made entirely clear. A joint tour for the mixtape never materialized. Soon enough, Quan retreated to the background. The reasons to blame were a molly addiction, Atlanta street politics, and label issues, made worse by a leaked song, from the Rich Gang sessions, where Quan alluded to what sounds like rape: “I don’t want your ho, just want that cookie from her/She tried to resist so I took it from her/How are you gonna tell me no?/You must not know who I am.” He later apologized for the lines, but they always stuck with him.

He had a few hit-or-miss comeback projects, namely the emotionally resonant Rich as In Spirit, which has its moments. And, even though he was out of the spotlight, I never thought of Quan as a World Star–era artifact. It always felt like any day that the new Rich Homie Quan song would appear on my Instagram feed and he would be blasting out of every speaker again like nothing had ever happened. That was the way things were supposed to go. Preferably side by side with Thug. They would finally go on that tour, arms locked, matching designer outfits, Birdman in the shadows with dollar signs for eyes. It probably never would have happened, but that didn’t stop me from dreaming about that Hollywood ending. Rarely does rap get to experience those.