33 year old rapper, Nipsey Hussle has been shot dead outside his clothing shop.
He was shot a number of times and pronounced dead on arrival at hospital
Two other people were wounded in the shooting outside Marathon Clothing in South Los Angeles.
Nipsey Hussle’s album Victory Lap received a nomination for best rap album at this year’s Grammy Awards.
The 33 year old rapper was celebrated for his socially conscious lyricism. He was a member of the Crips gang Rollin 60s as a young man. “It was like living in a war zone, where people die on these blocks and everybody is a little bit immune to it”. He told the LA Times in 2018 of his time with the gang. “I guess they call it post-traumatic stress, when you have people that have been at war for such a long time. I think LA suffers from that because it’s not normal yet we embrace it like it is after a while.”
His rap career began in the mid-2000s and was signed to Epic Records. However, the major label deal was an unhappy one and led to an album being indefinitely shelved, and he didn’t release his debut album, Victory Lap, until 2018. It reached No 4 in the US charts, and features collaborations with Kendrick Lamar, Diddy and YG.
Hussle invested in community projects in Los Angeles, including a co-working space called Vector90 that hosts entrepreneurs in Crenshaw. It includes a programme called Too Big to Fail, designed to help local people train in science, technology, engineering and maths. Hussle described it as a “bridge between Silicon Valley and the inner city” and had intended to create a national network of centres.