You could read the whole thing as a project against atomization. By the early 1990s, when the Los Angeles rap avant-garde coalesced around the Good Life Cafe on Crenshaw, distinctions were already being drawn: between New York and L.A., G-funk and jazz, the artificial and what was real. This was before Bad Boy vs. Death Row. But in 1992 there was already a sense that technically superlative and politically serious rap music—which sounded great in headphones on the bus and during polite performances at community centers—existed in perpetual opposition to what was fun, seductive, social.

The styles that emerged from the modest health-food store that was the Good Life, and then from its successor, Leimert Park’s Project Blowed, were a direct and defiant rebuke of this notion. And the ethos was never better distilled than in Freestyle Fellowship, the seminal quartet of Self Jupiter, Aceyalone, Myka 9, and P.E.A.C.E., who died over the weekend at the age of 51.

Born Mtulazaji Davis and raised in the Dallas-Fort Worth area before moving to L.A. as a child, P.E.A.C.E. was the rare artist whose mastery of craft was matched by an energy which revealed that craft’s depth and pliability. On stage—performing finished songs, freestyling, or in the innumerable battles where he was one of his generation’s most feared competitors—he was precise and practiced, yet seemed to be constantly inventing: not just to dazzle an audience or diminish an opponent, but to reach out and touch them, even if that touch was more like a fist to a jaw.

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