There is a video I often return to. Posted a little over 10 years ago by an essentially defunct blog called Hip-hop fix in HoustonIt shows Rich Homie Quan in a blue Argentine soccer jersey and at least five chains. Quan and the interviewer are occasionally bathed in the strobe-red light of a police car. There’s a single microphone, so Quan and the host get in each other’s way, politely deferring and apologies. The rapper runs through the kind of light myth-making that characterizes all of these interviews: Yes, the debut album is coming; no, no more free mixtapes; yes, music runs through my veins; no, I’ll never put pen to paper.

About 90 seconds into the clip, Quan starts talking about his relationship with Young Thug. He says they have a unique chemistry in the studio, more of a standard thing. But a minute later — after an awkward jump cut in the video — Quan says he and Thug are going to put out an EP. Absolutely, the interviewer says. Any plans for when it’ll come out? “Before the year is out,” Quan replies. The interviewer asks if he’ll reveal the title. Quan declines, but he strokes his goatee, looks into the camera for a second — something he hasn’t done before now — and taps the interviewer’s forearm for emphasis. “I can tell you this,” he says. “The EP that Thug and I (are) going to put out? The hardest duo since Outkast.” The interviewer’s eyes widen. He starts to push back (“Now that’s—”), but Quan cuts him off. “I’m not funny.” He insists. “I’m not going to bet too much on it. The hardest duo since Outkast.”

Quan, who died Thursday, a month shy of his 34th birthday, was always doing this: wrapping the audacious in a thick layer of charm and humility. He was a natural hitmaker whose commercial career was compromised by label troubles, contractual lawsuits and the industry’s uneven evolution over the course of the 2010s. Like Dre, Big Boi and a host of other Southern pioneers, Quan wrote songs that deftly synthesized formal experimentation and personal introspection—with each new, clipped flow or harmonized aside, he seemed to dig deeper into his own psyche. He is survived by four sons.

Born Dequantes Devontay Lamar in 1990, Quan grew up in Atlanta, where he excelled as a center fielder and a literature major as a teenager. He was less successful in a short-lived career as a burglar, which led to a 15-month offer shortly after dropping out of Fort Valley State University. “It really made me think and opened my eyes,” Quan said. XXL of his time within.

The first things you noticed about his music were the titles. In 2012, Quan released his first mixtape, I go along with every songa promise he nearly fulfilled. Early the following year, he earned his national breakthrough with “Type of Way,” which found him sounding a little mean, a little sensitive, and also as if he were a young child drowning in a vat of charisma. (That single was released to iTunes by Def Jam, seemingly signaling that Quan had signed with the label; in fact, he would remain embroiled in a lawsuit with a smaller company, Think It’s a Game Entertainment, for years to come.)

“Type of Way” arrived just as Future was pulling rap radio into his orbit, and it was seen by some early listeners as a variation on that Plutonian style. But in the verses, Quan leans far more into traditional rap tropes, using his melodic prowess to enhance the song rather than anchor it. It functions as an extended quip—at times menacing, at times simply playful. Boasting of an ability to mock undercover cops with a single glance, he enjambs lines like “I got a hideaway, and I go there sometimes / To give my mind a break”; memories of served subpoenas are delicately vocalized. All this grumpiness and apparent contradiction is actually corralled by Quan until it propels the song in one direction with unstoppable momentum.

There were more titles, more hits: Still busythe collaboration with Gucci Mane Trust God Fuck 12, I promise I’ll never stop entering. “Walk Thru,” a duet with Compton rapper Problem (now Jason Martin), is a slick song about collecting inflated club-performance fees that still sounds like it was born in a nightmare. The hook he gave YG in 2013 helped launch the regional star off the shelf at Def Jam and onto national radio for the first time. And in 2015, when he went triple platinum with the single “Flex (Ooh, Ooh, Ooh),” he did so by distilling his style cleaner than ever. That song is wobbly and upbeat, making routine descriptions of hard-earned cash sound like minor spiritual breakthroughs.

Meanwhile, his early collaborator was on his own star trajectory. Both Thug and Quan were plagued by conservative reactions to their work. It would be several years before “mumble rap” became widely used as a pejorative, but they were, predictably, viewed by some unruly listeners as uninteresting writers or inadequate vocalists. Both accusations were and are rooted in ideological opposition to their styles rather than honest evaluations of their music. But even to the initiated, Quan’s suggestion that whatever he and Thug were doing would establish them as better than Clipse or Black Star, better than Webbie and Boosie or Dead Prez or whoever, seemed implausible.

What they delivered in September 2014 was both bigger and smaller than anyone could have expected, seismic but nearly invisible. The tour that The Tour, Pt. 1 was meant to promote, never actually materialized; some of the Cash Money albums teased during DJ drops would be tied up in labyrinthine lawsuits for another half decade, if they were released at all. The awful, sub-Microsoft Paint cover featured the name Rich Gang, a moniker that had already been used for Baby’s other post-Cash Money branding exercises. “Lifestyle,” the massive summer hit Thug and Quan had scored under that name, wasn’t even among them. The Tour doesn’t exist on streaming platforms and didn’t spawn any new hits. But it was as Quan promised: a perfect snapshot of two eccentrics manically searching for new veins to tap. The hardest duo since Outkast.

You could credibly argue that The Tour is the best rap record of the 2010s. It captures Thug, one of the decade’s true supernova talents, at or near his peak — but it would be fair to suggest that Quan has him beat. See Quan’s verse on the shimmering “Flava,” in which he gleefully screams about his son inheriting his features, then makes letting a girlfriend count his money seem more tender than any other intimate moment. Or take the heartbreaking “Freestyle,” whose title betrays the depth of thought and passion Quan pours into the song. “My baby mama just put me on child support,” he raps:

Fuck a warrant, I’m not going to court
I don’t care what them white people say, I just wanna see my baby boy
Go to school, be a man and enroll in college, boy
Don’t be stupid, be a man, what do you think that knowledge is for?

On Thursday, shortly after Quan’s passing was confirmed, Quavo, one of the two surviving members of Migos, posted an Instagram Story. “Good Convo With My Bro,” he wrote over a black background and tagged Offset, with whom he’d been embroiled in a very public feud since shortly before fellow group member Takeoff was murdered in November 2022. A decade ago, it seemed as though the group of Atlanta rappers would rule the industry indefinitely; today, the deaths of artists like Quan, Takeoff, Trouble, Lil Keed, and Bankroll Fresh—as well as Young Thug’s ongoing RICO lawsuit—hang like a dark cloud over one of music’s creative meccas.

After “Flex,” Quan’s career wasn’t supported by the record companies the way it could or should have been; whether due to the Think It’s a Game situation, poor taste, or a lack of marketing imagination, he never got the push he deserved. (He also never worked with Thug again: in interviews on the subject, Quan was reflective and self-critical, though some of the details of their split may now be of concern to the Georgia justice system.) His best solo album, the thoughtful, technically virtuosic Back to basicswas completely consumed by Kendrick Lamar’s DAMN ITwhich was surprisingly released on the same day.

The 2019 movie Uncut gemstones is typical of the directors’ output. Josh and Benny Safdie are obsessed with believability—even their most bizarre scenes are populated by nonprofessional actors, their dialogue overlaps, the blocking develops naturally, the immersion in each character’s world is wholly ethnographic. Gemstones is set during the 2012 NBA playoffs, and the period details are meticulously managed. The only concession seems to come halfway through, when LaKeith Stanfield’s character pulls his SUV up to a curb and “Type of Way” plays at deafening volume. Though the song wouldn’t be released until a year after the Celtics’ run, the filmmakers clearly felt that shattering their reality was worth it for the punishing effect. It sums up Quan’s career in so many ways: a little adrift in time, caught between eras, but still, on the most fundamental level, undeniable.

Paul Thompson is the editor-in-chief of the Los Angeles book reviewHis work has appeared in Rolling Stone, New York magazine, and GQ.