It has been a tumultuous week in popular music, with current affairs as intense and unpredictable as the stormy summer weather on the Jersey Shore.
Heavy Hearts in Hip Hop. Harlem-born rap artist Marcel Theo Hall, known famously as Biz Markie, passed away on Friday evening at the age of 57 due to complications of Type 2 diabetes.
Markie came up in the mid ’80s – an early spearhead of beatboxing in hip hop. He was part of the Juice Crew, the Queensbridge-oriented rap collective formed by producer Marley Marl and D.J.
Subscribe to keep reading
This story is from our archive. Get your SandPaper Annual Pass for access to our digital archive, plus everything else a pass includes. Details below.
Annual Pass — $18 Details
365-day access to:
- The complete SandPaper digital archive (stories date back to 2012).
- Full photo galleries from our photographers.
- The entire catalog of SandPaper games, puzzles and quizzes.
How it works
- Enter your email below and click to pay the one-time $18. Card details are entered on Stripe’s secure page.
- You’re in straight away — no password to create, and nothing to set up or manage.
- You stay signed in. If you’re ever signed out, or you read on a new phone or computer, we’ll email you a code to get you back in.
- Never auto-renews. Your pass is good for one year. We will email you when it expires so you can renew if you’d like.
See our site policies for more information.
Already a subscriber? We’ll email a code to get you back in.
