He Died 20 Years Ago. He’s Still New Orleans’ Hottest Rapper. (2024)

In New Orleans last November, between two new apartment buildings where the Magnolia public housing development once stood, paradegoers lined up to take photos with a life-size cutout of the rapper Soulja Slim. For each shot, photographer Polo Silk repositioned the cutout in front of a towering collage of other images of Slim. When it was their turn to pose, some women turned their backs to the camera and twerked to the bounce music played by a nearby DJ. No one could get the streets of New Orleans buzzing like Slim, even 20 years after his death.

Polo had first made a photo backdrop of Slim for his funeral in 2003, and he was now up to his fourth. People still wanted to be close to Slim, Polo said, because of “his realness.” Polo lived in the Magnolia and knew Slim when he grew up there and started rapping: “Everybody could really relate to what he was saying. … He was like our king.” When Slim was shot and killed at age 26, Polo said, he ascended “to sainthood.”

In the years since, reverence for Slim has spread to the upper echelons of hip-hop culture. Lil Wayne rapped, “Soulja Slim was a leader/ Who am I not to follow greatness?” Referring to Slim, Jay-Z rapped, “I’m a soldier from that mode—I’m the ghost of him.” Rihanna recently dined out in a Slim T-shirt under a kimono coat and several strands of pearls. Soulja Slim isn’t a household name; he’s something rarer: an icon’s icon.

It’s a remarkable position considering his modest national profile when he was alive. After a prison stint attenuated his first big break, Slim was killed before he could carry out a hard-won relaunch.

Still, in a sign of the prodigious afterlife in store, it didn’t take long following Slim’s death for some of his plans to come to fruition. During his last months, he had recorded “Slow Motion,” an ode to grinding hips and, to maximize its publicity, had his friend Juvenile add a verse and include it on his upcoming album. After Slim died, Juvenile didn’t initially release it as a single, but the track, like Slim himself, was undeniable. In August 2004, nine months after Slim was murdered, he became only the sixth artist ever to score a posthumous No. 1 hit. The song was credited to Juvenile featuring Soulja Slim, but Juvenile was quick to say that it had come from Slim, and to shout him out when he performed it, as in last year’s viral Tiny Desk Concert.

After this crossover success, Slim’s star continued to rise, in hip-hop and across south Louisiana. But while “Slow Motion” conferred his rank in the music industry, his legend grew from a groundswell, originating in the Magnolia and staying mostly out of mainstream view.

The scant mentions of Slim in legacy media over the years have nearly all concerned his murder, one of the more prominent cold cases in rap. In the decades since he was gunned down only steps from his mother’s front door, rumors have swirled about why he was targeted, but no one has been charged for the crime.

The mystery still drives traffic online and may have boosted his name recognition more broadly, but for many fans, assigning responsibility for his death has been less urgent than finding meaning in his life.

Born James Tapp Jr., Slim first became known around the Magnolia as Ice Cream, a tall kid who cut hair on his porch and kept everyone laughing. DJ Captain Charles, who broke a lot of early hip-hop records in New Orleans, lived in the complex and knew Slim since he was a baby: “Some people walk into a room and then it just get full of life. He was that kind of guy.”

The pioneering emcee Mia X, a collaborator and close family friend of Slim, met him when Slim was 15 and brimming with creativity. “He could design clothes, he could draw anything,” she recalls. “His hands were blessed.” He could also rap. After watching him move the crowd at a block party in the Magnolia around 1991, the DJ and producer KLC invited him to his basem*nt studio, a hotbed of early New Orleans hip-hop, and taught him how to structure a song.

At the same time, Slim was taking lessons from the drug dealers in his courtyard. His mother, Linda Tapp Porter, known widely as Ms. Linda, tried to steer him away: “Used to catch whippings with a leather belt, but that ain’t stop nothing,” Slim would rap. Even as he got hooked on the cocaine and heroin he was selling, he started recording music and performing as Magnolia Slim.

In 1994 the local label Hype Enough Records released his debut, Soulja Fa Lyfe, an album that brought listeners into Slim’s mind as he navigated the streets. The view could be grim. New Orleans had one of the highest per capita murder rates in the world that year, and he was in the thick of it. In one song, Slim focused on his Reeboks: getting sand in them as he ran from a shooting, then leaving an imprint on the face of an enemy.

Sess 4-5, a rapper who was in clubs with Slim in his early years, considers him a “genius.” “The pictures that he painted as an artist were very vivid, very graphic,” he says, “and in a way that other artists couldn’t put these … concepts together.” Ms. Linda told the Times-Picayune, “Everything in his life, it’s all in those songs. Some of that stuff, no mama would be down with. But that was him. He was real.”

Although Slim’s hustling helped fuel his writing and build his reputation, it also threatened to stamp out his music career. In 1996 he got in a fender bender while driving a stolen car and, according to police, separated the responding officer’s shoulder in a scuffle. (Years later, in the song “Soulja Life Mentality,” Slim rapped about police who “slam me down and wrestle me, just to put on handcuffs/ Then charge me with resistance.”) Slim pleaded guilty to theft and battery of a police officer in a deal for probation and a suspended sentence.

Late on the day he signed the plea agreement, Slim was in the back seat of an Oldsmobile that got pulled over in suburban Jefferson Parish. He stashed a blunt in his sock but couldn’t hide the semiautomatic rifle and full clip on the floor next to him. The arrest violated his hours-old probation, so he had to serve his previously suspended sentence in state prison.

“I was a f*ck-up,” Slim told the rap magazine Murder Dog of his teenage years, but “the older I got the more wiser I got.” In prison, he went off hard drugs and filled legal pads with lyrics. He had quit high school after his sophom*ore year, but, according to Mia X, he became an avid reader thanks to an older inmate. When he got out in 1998, she and Slim swapped copies of Frances Cress Welsing’s The Isis Papers, Sister Souljah’s memoir, and the pulpy crime novels of Donald Goines.

At that point, fortune smiled: KLC had joined the production team at No Limit Records, which was blowing up the Billboard charts. He brought Slim to No Limit impresario Master P, who made a handshake deal for him to record an album as Soulja Slim. Slim used the cash for a down payment on a duplex: Ms. Linda and his younger sister, who goes by Peaches, moved downstairs, and he moved upstairs, where he could build a studio.

Slim’s No Limit debut, Give It 2 ’Em Raw, including a track with Snoop Dogg, could have catapulted his career, but he couldn’t take advantage of it. Two days before its release, police pulled him over, ostensibly to measure his window tinting, and arrested him for possession of a loaded handgun and a blunt. Prosecutors eventually dropped that case, but soon after, he pleaded guilty to possession of the rifle in Jefferson Parish from two years earlier and went back to prison.

When Slim got out in 2001, having spent six of his 23 years behind bars, he was more determined than ever to break through as an artist. He recorded a second album for No Limit, The Streets Made Me, which included “Soulja Life Mentality,” a song that looked beyond the daily grind of hustling to how Slim felt as a “Black man in this white world.” But Slim’s evolution wasn’t a priority for Master P, who concentrated the label’s promotional resources on other projects, and the sales showed it.

Slim responded by building a label of his own called Cutthroat Comitty (“Committee spelled my way”). His first album on it sold so well independently that he got a national distribution deal to release a new version and assembled a roster of young talent around him. After No Limit and Cash Money Records had emerged from New Orleans as major forces in the industry in the 1990s, the city had high hopes for Slim as an artist/CEO. “I think Cutthroat Comitty was going to be huge with him and the artists that he signed,” says Mia X.

To introduce it to the world, Slim shot a video for the first single from his album. The day before Thanksgiving 2003, he invited Ms. Linda upstairs to screen an advance copy. Watching her son rapping on the screen, “I was just so amazed,” she told XXL. “He was free and it was beautiful.” A little while later, Slim ran an errand in his Escalade, parked it back at the duplex, and was shot multiple times as he walked to the door.

When Ms. Linda got the call, she was around the corner, preparing for her annual second line—a street parade with a brass band. Her parading organization, the Original New Orleans Lady Buckjumpers Social Aid and Pleasure Club, had since 1984 taken to the Uptown streets on the last Sunday in November. The second line tradition goes back to the 19^th century and serves as a vehicle for the collective memory of Black New Orleanians. Ms.Linda said that her club jumps “for the ones gone and the ones to come.”

After Slim was killed, Ms.Linda told ethnographer Rachel Breunlin, “I wasn’t going to parade and my members said, ‘You gonna do it. You got to do it. This what he would’ve wanted you to do.’” Normally, for her parade, Slim “would stand on a porch round the Magnolia on South Robertson and Washington Avenue, and wait until I passed to let me see him,” so when she and the Lady Buckjumpers reached that spot, they danced “on the porch where he used to wait for me to represent him.”

A week later, Ms. Linda staged a massive jazz funeral to celebrate her son’s life, with five brass bands propelling a shoulder-to-shoulder crowd that stretched for blocks. When the horse-drawn hearse stopped alongside the Magnolia, pallbearers pulled out Slim’s casket and lifted it into the air, to cheers.

From that day on, it was clear that New Orleanians would continue to keep him close. Soulja Slim memorial T-shirts and medallions appeared at gas stations, a Soulja Slim mural near an I-10 on-ramp, a Soulja Slim daiquiri at Gene’s on Elysian Fields Avenue.

Since he had been a teenager, Slim had inspired something more than typical fandom. People loved Juvenile and Lil Wayne; they believed in Slim. DJ Wild Wayne, a key promoter of New Orleans hip-hop, told ethnomusicologist Holly Hobbs that Slim’s exploits in the street and on the mic earned him “folk hero status” early in his career. Polo Silk says that by the time Slim was killed, he was “already legendary.”

Many describe him as embodying his community. In documentary footage of Slim’s funeral procession, KLC surveys the crowd filling Washington Avenue and says, “They’re him. All these people you see out here is him.” For the rapper Mista Meana, a stalwart of the city’s hip-hop scene, “he was New Orleans. … If you want to know a street guy from New Orleans, he was the epitome of it.”

Slim’s capacity to stand for others found a new purpose after Hurricane Katrina, when the city demolished its largest public housing complexes, helping to displace roughly 100,000 Black residents. Over the following years, as private developers replaced the projects with mixed-income apartment buildings, new murals of Slim cropped up near a couple of them.

Across New Orleans today, there may be more images of Slim’s face than of anyone else apart from Louis Armstrong.

The most striking one covered a wall of the Big Man Lounge, once a small hip-hop venue across the street from the Magnolia. The old brick buildings were gone and its residents scattered, but a close-up of Slim’s face next to a huge magnolia blossom showed that they had not been forgotten. When the artist Ceaux painted it in 2017, an influx of short-term rentals and new white residents were changing the face of several historic Black neighborhoods in town.

The mural’s subtext became text in the video for the song “Gentri Fire in the City” by Flagboy Giz, who dances in front of it while rapping that New Orleans is “gentrifying till all the Black people gone.” He wears a suit he created as a Black Masking Indian (also called Mardi Gras Indian), a venerable tradition among Black New Orleanians that pays homage to Native American resistance to white supremacy. Crowned by feathers in a camouflage color scheme, Flagboy Giz sports a chest patch that is a hand-beaded portrait of Slim in a headdress, a “commanding figure,” the rapper says, with “energy that was not to be messed with.” Black Masking Indian suits often depict Indigenous people battling colonizers, but “Soulja Slim himself is enough of a story to where that’s all I needed, was just his face.”

Across New Orleans today, there may be more images of Slim’s face than of anyone else apart from Louis Armstrong, each on a block retaining its pre-Katrina identity. For MiaX, Slim “is a reminder of the spirit of New Orleans before gentrification. … His memory is one of the things we hold on to when we think of what the city was, as far as family and the spaces we shared in the music community.”

Some of those spaces have been wiped off the map, and others have transformed, like Club Rumors—an early venue for Slim, now a multimillion-dollar office building. But there are also a few new ones, like DJ Captain Charles’ snowball shop on Washington Avenue, which recently hosted a Lady Buckjumpers meet and greet on a patio featuring a mural of Slim.

Slim also helps displaced New Orleanians stay connected to their pre-Katrina world. Captain Charles says that when he DJs shows out of town, “people from New Orleans are going to request Soulja Slim.” Polo Silk has seen a similar demand when he brings his photo backdrops of Slim to Houston and Atlanta, cities where large numbers of New Orleanians settled after the flood.

Slim’s hallowed place in hip-hop nationally evolved over the course of years, starting with tributes from rappers who had known him, like Juvenile, and who had grown up with him in the Magnolia. After “Slow Motion” hit the charts, Juvenile shot a video featuring folks in the complex wearing shirts and holding signs that read “RIP Soulja Slim.” Lil Wayne shouted him out repeatedly as he rose to superstardom in the 2000s, when rap aficionados were parsing his every word.

References to Slim later spread upriver from New Orleans to Baton Rouge (Boosie, then Kevin Gates) and over to Atlanta (Jeezy, Gucci Mane, T.I.). By the mid-2010s, more than a decade after Slim’s murder, Rick Ross started rapping about him, as did Future and Kodak Black. By 2020, former Magnolia resident Jay Electronica had Jay-Z featuring on his track “The Ghost of Soulja Slim.”

Although these marquee artists raised Slim’s standing, invoking him also reinforced their own. As MiaX puts it, “They want to be connected to the real.” Slim was a paragon of authenticity, a peer who was never watered down or co-opted by the entertainment industry, or pulled away from his community by fame. (Even after he had moved out of the Magnolia, he hung out there all the time.)

For a wave of rappers coming of age now, Slim is canon. G Herbo name-checked him on his top-10 album PTSD in 2020. When the Def Jam rapper Fredo Bang got clearance to use a hook of Slim’s on a new track of his, he said he didn’t feel “deserving” of listing Slim as a featured artist. Slim’s sister Peaches, who made that deal (and started rapping as G.I. Peachez in 2009), says that young rappers “love” her brother: “They look at him like Tupac or Biggie Smalls.”

As Slim became a touchstone for artists, he also attracted a following online, where a universe of videos and social media posts racked up millions of views. Slim was a subject of the 2004 documentary New Orleans Exposed, the source of candid footage later shared widely on the internet that still gets quoted regularly by friends and fans. Because so little of Slim’s life was captured on video, these glimpses of him laughing with his friend and collaborator BG, showing off his guns, and hanging out on the Parkway became precious relics. For Flagboy Giz, the few minutes of footage are “another thing that made Soulja Slim iconic.”

Then there are the hours of online content about Slim’s murder. In 2003 police arrested a reputed hit man, Garelle Smith, alleging that he had been paid $10,000 to kill Slim. But with no eyewitness to the shooting, the district attorney dropped the case, and Smith was killed in an apparently unrelated incident in 2011.

The motive in Slim’s murder was uncertain. Detectives told the Times-Picayune that they believed that “it had something to do with the record industry and a rival record label.” Public speculation turned to MasterP, whom Slim had targeted in a diss track after leaving No Limit, but police never named him. At the same time, Slim’s history of entanglements on the street held the possibility that someone else had had a score to settle.

With no further action from law enforcement, the director of New Orleans Exposed, known as Video Wayne, and others, including the popular (and controversial) YouTuber DJ Vlad, explored the case. The best of these videos include oral histories from Slim’s inner circle, offering a kaleidoscopic view of his Cutthroat Comitty era, if not answers about his demise. Many veer into tabloid sensationalism.

Peaches says that a lot of this material is “not true” and that much of it emphasizes “gangster stories” while leaving out other facets of her brother’s life. After ignoring it for years, she joined the fray in 2020, going online to respond to a documentary about MasterP and accusing him of having played a role in Slim’s killing.

We TV’s series Hip Hop Homicides addressed the issue in a 2022 episode in which MasterP professed his love for Slim. He said that Slim had been killed because he went back on hard drugs and “got caught up with the streets.” The show followed MasterP’s suggestion, but Peaches says that Slim was only smoking marijuana at the end of his life, and Slim himself, who was open about the subject, said in a 2003 interview that he’d stayed off hard drugs after getting clean in prison. Followers of the saga were left with more conjecture to toss around on the internet.

In any event, Peaches isn’t relying on others to tell her brother’s story. To help ground conversations about him online, she uploads family photos and interview clips to social media. She also has personal conversations with fans from out of town who make pilgrimages to the duplex she now shares with Ms.Linda. Drawn by Slim’s persona, the way he spoke his mind, his fearlessness, they “need so badly to feel connected to him,” Peaches says. They take photos of the garden on the spot where he died, and of his Escalade with the Cutthroat Comitty logo in the headrests. She and Ms.Linda send them home with posters and CDs.

To make more connections, in 2019 Peaches started a clothing line, the Soulja Slim Collection, and fielded orders from as far away as France. In 2021 a Texas company reached out to her about licensing Slim’s image for a soft drink. The label of Soulja Slim Strawberry Soda mimics the cover of Give It 2 ’Em Raw, with Slim’s gold teeth glinting while missiles fly over his shoulders. Peaches has a branded refrigerator case at home, so her daughter gets to see her uncle every day.

In 2022 Peaches, along with Ms.Linda and Slim’s son, who raps as Lil Soulja Slim, helped program a ball celebrating the rapper. The event, produced by the high-end clothing brand Emline, underscored Slim’s influence on fashion. (In 2017, long after Slim had called his Reeboks “souljas” and, with No Limit, had helped popularize camouflage clothes, Reebok issued a “Soldier” shoe with camouflage detailing.)

For the 20^th anniversary of Slim’s death, in 2023, Peaches tried to mount an exhibition of her brother’s outfits, handwritten lyrics, and other personal effects, but she couldn’t get a call back from any museum or cultural organization to host it. Even as the city touts its musical heritage, mainstream New Orleans has yet to embrace him. “When it comes to hip-hop and what he represents for hip-hop, I don’t think that they feel like that’s a part of history that should be highlighted,” she says.

Peaches put the exhibition on hold but didn’t let the milestone pass unacknowledged. On the most prominent billboard in town, overlooking the expressway by the Superdome, she posted a picture of Slim smiling in front of the Magnolia, and a message: “Real Souljas Never Die.”

Ms. Linda marked the anniversary as she has every previous one, returning to the place where her son used to wait for her second line. The Lady Buckjumpers’ parade stopped there after Katrina, when the Magnolia was sealed off, kept coming after the complex had been demolished, and, when a new building opened on the site, continued on a friend’s porch.

Last November they danced down Washington Avenue, ahead of the TBC Brass Band, in green suits and derbies, waving fans of green and yellow plumes. Thousands of second-liners followed them to the porch, just past Polo Silk’s cutout of Slim, to honor him.

TBC belted “You Don’t Want to Go to War,” a song Slim originally recorded with the Rebirth Brass Band, a New Orleans institution led by Ms.Linda’s fiancé, Philip Frazier. Trombone slides and cellphones poked overhead while Ms.Linda and her club members cut loose on the porch, knees pumping, arms to the sky. After a few minutes, they filed back onto the street and the band segued to the hymn “I’ll Fly Away.”

Slim always called Ms. Linda “my backbone.” MiaX says that he “adored his mother. … He was Linda’s best friend.” Their bond, affirmed every Thanksgiving weekend, undergirds the community’s remembrance of the rapper. Explaining her commitment to her son, Ms.Linda told Breunlin, “He took care of me, and I miss him. And he still doing his little thing even though he not here.”

Meanwhile, personal tributes to Slim continue to pop up, notably among celebrities of color: This February, French Montana referenced him in a song, and just a couple of weeks later, NBA star Zion Williamson, who plays for the New Orleans Pelicans, made a postgame appearance in an airbrushed Slim T-shirt.

Peaches points to representation like that as proof that her family’s efforts are working. And she sees a benefit to tending Slim’s legacy independent of mainstream institutions: “I don’t have to worry about it being on the inside, where they can control it. Like, it reached the outside. And once that happens, you can only see up from there.”