Heavy D’s sudden passing has me feeling a certain way. I’m really affected by it because Dwight Arrington Myers was unquestionably a forgotten and underappreciated legend of rap. He was also towering pillar of goodness and humanity. When he sliced through a crowd, his head poked above like a shark’s fin not just because he was taller, but he metaphorically elevated himself above the norm.
The “Overweight Lover” represented the best of hip-hop because he came packing with a killer delivery, intoxicating cadence, could switch up his rhythmic interval at will and wrapped his rhymes in such a smooth, authoritative baritone without diving into the cesspool of objectification, hyper-machismo, degradation, illicit drug celebration and reckless promiscuity to try to come up in the game. That’s probably why both Janet and Michael Jackson — and so many other elite artists — enlisted his wondrous wordplay on their records.
He’s the rap version of the NBA’s Clyde Drexler, the player many called the “Michael Jordan of the West.” Like Drexler, Heavy D just loved the game of music and performed it on a higher plain than most of his counterparts and contemporaries, but he never clamored to suck down all the spotlight like a wino downing a malt liquor bottle on the corner. Kim Whore-dashian he was not. So we forgot about him. And when Heavy D was no longer in his prime and receded to the periphery of rap’s radar, he became an afterthought while those who produced a landfill’s worth of mostly forgettable, fattening, non-nutritional, microwaveable music that induced diabetes of the brain got all the undeserved shine. So as these mindless miscreants of hip hop ricocheted repeatedly from the streets into the police interrogation rooms and into the concrete hotels and back to the streets again, our young black men followed them into prisons like a herd of cattle.
Heavy D was forgotten because of what he didn’t do rather than what he did during his illustrious, Hall of Fame career. He evaded the crushing fists of the law by simply not committing senseless crimes. He was not a regular visitor on police blotters, he didn’t get trapped in the entangling webs of sordid scandals. He did his thing and kept it pushing. Yes, the Overweight Lover struggled with his weight, which some quickly surmised contributed to his premature demise, but we all have something that we spend decades trying to reconcile and overcome. Despite his portliness, most of his life, he managed to hover above the fray. And it’s up above where we will now find him.
RIP, Heavy D.
Click on ‘continue’ below to view the list of the ten most forgotten lyrical lions who sculpted the modern landscape for which the current one-dimensional artists now harvest great fruit.
– terry shropshire
