Coolio, Legend Behind ‘Gangsta’s Paradise,’ Dies at 59
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Coolio, the rapper who shot to the top of the charts in the 1990s with albums like It Takes a Thief and Gangsta’s Paradise, has died.
His longtime manager, jazz saxophonist Jarez Posey, confirmed the death to TMZ on Wednesday evening, telling the outlet that Coolio was discovered unresponsive on the floor of a friend’s bathroom. Paramedics who responded to the scene pronounced the musician dead shortly after. An official cause of death was not shared, but TMZ reported the first responders suspected cardiac arrest.
Coolio, real name Artis Leon Ivey Jr., was 59.
Born in 1963, Coolio moved from Monessen, Pennsylvania, to Compton, California, with his mother and sister when he was 8 years old. After working as a firefighter and airport security guard, he launched his music career in 1987, with the single “Whatcha Gonna Do?”
His debut solo album, It Takes a Thief, was released in 1994, after the rapper signed with Tommy Boy Records. The album’s chart-friendly lead single, “Fantastic Voyage,” helped make him the “MTV hip-hop poster boy of the minute,” as a profile published in The Source that year asserted.
Coolio told the magazine that the driving force behind cutting the album had been his children. “I feel good about myself, but whether this album goes platinum, gold or sells a few hundred thousand—I don’t care about me,” he said. “I just want everything to be right for my kids. I’ve got to break the cycle for them.” (It Takes a Thief would eventually be certified platinum.)
In August 1995, he released his classic album Gangsta’s Paradise, with the title track charting in 16 countries, soaring to become Billboard’s Number 1 song of the year, and later winning the 1996 Grammy Award for Best Rap Performance. Featured on the soundtrack for the Michelle Pfeiffer vehicle Dangerous Minds, the song would go on to sell 3 million copies in the U.S. alone, going triple platinum.
Of the song’s famous opening bars, Coolio told Rolling Stone in a 2015 oral history, “I freestyled that; that came off the top of the dome and I wrote that down. I thought about it for a minute, and then I wrote the whole rest of the song without stopping, from the first verse to the third verse.”
“You know, I like to believe that it was divine intervention,” he continued, “‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ wanted to be born; it wanted to come to life, and it chose me as the vessel.”
In addition to releasing his third album of that decade, 1997’s My Soul, Coolio would go on to compose the theme song for the Nickelodeon sitcom Kenan & Kel, and make appearances in a legion of films and television shows, such as Celebrity Big Brother, Futurama, and Joel Schumacher’s Batman & Robin.
He is survived by his children, four of whom he shared with his ex-wife, Josefa Salina, to whom he was married between 1996 and 2000.
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