Cropped still from Artifacts’ “Wrong Side of da Tracks” video (1994).
Tame One, the New Jersey rap icon also known as Rahem Brown but best known as one third of Artifacts and a member of the rotating collective The Weathermen, passed away on Saturday, November 5 at 52. His mother announced his death on Instagram Sunday evening, and multiple outlets later confirmed the news.
“The medical examiner says the six pharmaceutical drugs that Trinitas hospital prescribed to him last Friday, combined with the weed he smoked over this weekend… his heart simply gave out,” Brown’s mother wrote, per RapReviews.com first reported">RapReviews.com. “I will not be responding to all the posts for a bit, but the hardest words I will ever post or say is, my son, my heart, is dead.”
Brown was born in 1970 and raised in Newark, NJ. He grew up on hip-hop, and his first love was graffiti. As a teen, he “bombed” his high school “so hard” with his tag that he “single-handedly caused the banning of the marker as a medium, for any artists from 9th grade through 12th!!!,” he told The Kool Skool in 2010. Together with El Da Sensei and DJ Kaos, he formed Artifacts in 1988, and the trio’s debut album, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, chronicled their crew’s legendary tagging tales throughout the tristate area. Kaos passed away in 2019.
In 2002, Brown joined Cage Kennylz and Masai Bey’s supergroup The Weathermen, which also included El-P and Aesop Rock. The following year, Brown and Cage formed the short-lived duo Leak Bros, releasing their first and only album, Waterworld, in 2004. Brown would go onto collaborate with other underground stalwarts such as Del the Funky Homosapien, KRS-One, and Yasiin Bey, as well as more mainstream acts like Travie McCoy. From 2003 to 2014, he dropped at least nine solo projects, the last of which was a Boom Skwad tape titled Skwadzilla.
Almost immediately after the news of Brown’s death broke, tributes poured in from across the hip-hop community, with veteran rappers and producer posting kind words and remembrances in his honor. Read some of those posts below.