It would be tempting to trace his life’s itinerary and conclude that Shock G’s travels mirror hip-hop’s own trajectory across the continent: born in New York, filtered through Floridian bass, and finally landing in the Bay, where the Panthers and P-funk mixed freely in his brain. But the rapper and producer born Gregory Edward Jacobs in 1963, who died April 22 at the age of 57, did not seem to move so linearly. Instead, his style was pulled down from low-earth orbit and up from the 99-cent bin where he found his signature prop; it was the product of a long, deliberate education, but also forged in alchemic fits of genius that are impossible to teach.

There is a similar urge to look at incidents from an artist’s adolescence and turn them into parables — clean origin stories for the myths that would come later. In Shock G’s case, there’s some truth to that lens. When Jacobs was a teenager in Tampa, Florida, he dropped out of high school to form a DJ crew with his friends. His clique, the Master Blasters, got so hot so quickly that Jacobs was soon made the youngest regular radio DJ in the region. At 16, he had already secured the kind of gig you’d imagine would silence the naysaying adults in his life. Of course, he didn’t keep it, instead getting fired for playing the full, 15-minute version of Funkadelic’s “(Not Just) Knee Deep” in a slot that was only supposed to last for five.

Without a regular gig and with tension in his home life after his parents’ divorce, Jacobs simply left. He traveled the country for a time, backpacking and picking up odd jobs. But his passion for music did not subside; it shapeshifted. He had the notion that he would teach himself the piano — the sort of idea an itinerant young man typically wouldn’t have, at least not until conceding to a permanent address. But Jacobs slipped into the practice rooms at colleges and abused the test-play allowances at music stores until he had the basics down — and then something far beyond the basics.

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