Scarface on Dialysis after Covid-19 Complications caused Kidney Failure

During a recent interview with fellow Geto Boy member, Willie Dee, Scarface announced that he had been placed on dialysis after COVID-19 caused him kidney failure. “I fought COVID double bilateral pneumonia — both lungs — and kidney failure in my house,” Scarface stated. “I went back to the hospital. I just got out of the hospital [on April 20],” he added.

Pointing at his dialysis port, he said that “This is my new lifeline.” “I gotta change my entire diet, I gotta do dialysis four days a week, three hours a day. That’s taking all my blood out, cleaning it, and putting it back in my body,” Scarface added. He also said that he did not any kidney issues before his COVID-19 diagnosis.

Scarface also touched on the symptoms he has experienced with his diagnosis. “I couldn’t keep food down, I couldn’t get comfortable, I couldn’t sleep, I couldn’t stay woke, I could not breathe. It was the worst time of my life.” He also lost “probably 30 pounds.”

“Hanging on that string of death makes you really appreciate life,” Scarface said. “I was inches away from death.”

He also had some thoughts about Georgia Governor, Brian Kemp’s decision to reopen non-essential businesses. “That’s stupid. I think that they want us, black people to go out there…because clearly, we don’t know shit about this disease. We don’t know enough about it to be wanting to get back at starting life but notice that the barbershops and the beauty shops are opening. So we can pass that shit out amongst ourselves and kill ourselves. That’s the way I’m looking at it.”

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Fred the Godson, Nimble New York Rapper, Dies at 41

The Bronx musician was a forceful presence on mixtapes, filling his rhymes with clever punch lines.

This obituary is part of a series about people who have died in the coronavirus pandemic. Read about others here.

Fred the Godson, who for more than a decade was a respected figure in New York hip-hop, an understated master of wordplay with a signature flow, died on Thursday in the Bronx. He was 41.

His death, at Montefiore Medical Center, where he had been hospitalized since early April, was confirmed by his publicist, Matthew Conaway, who said the cause was complications of the coronavirus.

Back when mixtapes were still the coin of the realm in New York rap circles, Fred the Godson was a reliable, forceful presence. He had a husky voice, but it was nimble, too — all the better for the kind of wordplay-heavy punch-line-filled bars that thrived in those settings. Double entendres, homophones, homonyms, assonance — he always found a way to bend a rhyme.

Take his 2012 freestyle on Funkmaster Flex’s Hot 97 radio show, a regular showcase for high-finesse wordsmiths, in which his verse evolves line by line, one subtle tweak at a time: They see me on the block with the Lincoln parked They know I’m selling rock like Linkin Park Far as flow, they click on my link and watch You see me with the big Cuban link and watch “He was really committed to the wittiness and the bar work — he stood on that,” said Justin Harrell, a rapper who records as 38 Spesh and who was among Fred the Godson’s closest friends. Mr. Harrell recalled that Fred wrote all his rhymes with a silver Uni-ball pen on unlined yellow paper in a wholly illegible scribble. After he would record in the booth, he’d leave the paper behind, unworried about anyone filching his rhymes. “He knew no one would be able to read it,” Mr. Harrell said.

DJ Clark Kent, a seminal figure in New York rap, praised Fred the Godson’s wordplay in a tribute on Instagram: “He was easily one of the most dangerous MC’s around.”

Frederick Thomas was born on Feb. 22, 1979, and grew up in the Bronx, where hip-hop began. (Big Bronx was one of his nicknames.) He emerged in New York rap in the 2000s as a potent freestyler, spilling reference-dense lines over beats from other rappers’ songs, a New York tradition.

He quickly released a pair of impressive mixtapes — “Armageddon” in 2010 and “City of God,” part of DJ Drama’s Gangsta Grillz series, in 2011. He was named a member of XXL magazine’s 2011 Freshman class, an annual collection of hip-hop up-and-comers.

In the decade since, Fred the Godson had steadily released strong music and performed regularly, becoming an avatar of a hip-hop style that wasn’t always at the genre’s center. He collaborated widely, with Pusha T, Jadakiss, Cam’ron, Raekwon and many others.

Mostly he favored hard-boiled subject matter, sometimes tragic and sometimes leavened with triumph, as on “Toast to That,” his 2011 collaboration with Jadakiss. But he also touched on matters of the heart, most memorably that same year on the savage and wry payback tale “Monique’s Room”: “We sent a vid to your Facebook/I wish I seen how your face looked.”

Fred the Godson’s survivors include his wife, LeeAnn Jemmott, and two daughters.

Credit: New York Post