Down for Life: Remembering Shawty Lo

Early Wednesday morning, Atlanta rapper Shawty Lo died in a car accident​ in South Fulton County, Georgia. As reported by Atlanta's WSB-TV​, the 40-year-old, born Carlos Walker, crashed into several trees before his car caught fire and he was ejected from the vehicle. He died on the scene. Two women were in the car with him but did not suffer life-threatening injuries. As the news spread, figures throughout hip-hop and the Atlanta community expressed their condolences, a testament to the impact that Lo had on his city and music at large.

Shawty Lo is widely recognized as one of the pioneers of rap's snap movement of the mid-2000s, a joyful, dance-oriented subgenre that came out of his Bankhead neighborhood in West Atlanta. The sound of snap music, controversial and derided despite its popularity, has proven immensely influential over time. "He was everything to me and for a lot of us coming up," fellow D4L member 2$ Fabo told me during a phone conversation on the afternoon of Lo's death. He added, "He started a path for us, laid out a plan, we followed it and it worked."

​Shawty Lo was the mastermind behind the group, whose track "Laffy Taffy" is the definitive snap anthem, peaking at number one on the Billboard Hot 100 in early 2006. He was also a charismatic person who made the lives of the people around him as much a priority as his music.​ "Lo used to rent these cars like the Pacifica, and it was about 13 of us. Everybody in the hood knew him, so I was in awe sitting in the truck with him. We were the D4L Mob then," Fabo said, thinking back to the group's beginning stages in the early 2000s. He remembers Shawty Lo would pick him up to go play basketball. Lo and D4L's Mook B eventually built a studio themselves. "When we started doing the music, he'd stop for people around the time of 'Betcha Can't Do It Like Me.'​ He'd pull through Bowen Homes, stop, get out and say, 'Fabo, hit the dance for 'em!' We'd hit the dance and you could see the joy on his face. It was real."

Despite the line in the sand that snap music drew between opposite sides of the Mason-Dixon, millennials and Gen-Xers, and those who felt rap music should be something you could dance to versus ones who just wanted conventional bars, Shawty Lo was arguably the most successful artist at balancing between snap and trap music. He garnered the respect of his peers, working with artists like Gucci Mane, Lil Wayne, and Young Jeezy. Even longtime rival and fellow Bankhead native T.I., who inspired Lo's hit "Dunn Dunn," noted yesterday on Instagram​ that he couldn't "say enough about how much [Lo] meant to the city."

​​"He brought that real street culture to the game," said Fabo. "Just like Jeezy. Just like Gucci. I think he put Bankhead on the map with that. You had a lot of cats in Bankhead that wanted to shine like Dem Franchize Boyz, like K-Rab, The Shop Boyz. All these people came up from under Lo." His debut album, Units In The City, solidified itself as one of trap's most celebrated albums and earned him Rookie of the Year honors and Track of the Year for "Dey Know" at the 2008 BET Hip Hop Awards. Beyond the accolades the album afforded him individually, Shawty Lo proved that snap wasn't a fluke, and even with the relative barrenness and silly nature of its production, the subgenre could still house some of the most hardcore content in rap. Without it, some of the most inventive music to come out of Atlanta in the past eight years, from Soulja Boy to Migos, would not sound the way it does. Snap gave way to minimal, melodic Southern gangster music that still dictates the dominant sound in rap as a whole these days.

The draw of his music went beyond how he could hold his weight with the best of Atlanta's street music scene on production that would otherwise be marginalized for its playfulness. There was a briskness to Lo's delivery; he never really rapped. His cadence and lazy falsetto, while obviously not as refined as the singer's, took more from the sly braggadocio of a Curtis Mayfield (whose Superfly album featured him matter-of-factly serenading about ghetto life and having bad bitches in his bed in the early 70s) than it did any of his contemporaries. Before rap-singing became as much of an expected formula for artists as it is today, Shawty Lo made a career out of talking shit exclusively through melodic bars.

​In an interview this past May with Dirty Glove Bastard, longtime friend DJ Scream, who hosted nearly all of Lo's mixtapes, spoke to the power of Shawty Lo's vocal distinction: "I don't care how slow or fast you rap, how lyrical you are, if you don't have a unique voice it doesn't matter. You could never stand out and be the biggest… So many of Shawty Lo's classics are classics because they can't be matched." Some of the best examples of this are "Easily I Approach,"​ where he smoothly harmonizes about having money long before his rap career, the infectious "na na na's" in "Foolish,"​ and his contribution to Soulja Boy's "Gucci Bandana"​ where he boasts about looking down on people from his oceanfront house.

Lo's impact on Atlanta expanded way beyond his musical career, Fabo confirmed. "If you was in Atlanta way before Lo was a rapper, you knew his name. Period," he says confidently through the phone. "Before I started doing all this, I was in the street. Everybody was wondering, 'Where Fabo?' Lo came and got me out the street! He'd say, 'I can't watch you do that to yourself.'" Over the years, Lo has been recognized for his charitable efforts towards those in need from throwing charity basketball games, to giving people jobs to handing people in the community money when he could. Along with his own musical output and role in tweaking rap's dominant sound, It's those memories that will immortalize Carlos Walker as a beloved figurehead in Bankhead and Atlanta as a whole. That legacy will live on.

"From paying people's rent to paying people's light bill, if he had it, you had it," Fabo fondly recalled. "That was his everyday conversation. Making sure people were good."

Photo credit: Thaddaeus McAdams/Getty Images​

Lawrence Burney is a staff writer for Noisey. Follow him on Twitter​.