Let’s start this one off with severe trigger warnings: murder, drug use and, no jokes, cannibalism. This one is not for the squeamish.
One of the most fascinating subgenres in hip-hop history is that of horrorcore. While rap has adopted violent death as one of its central subjects ever since the dawn of gangsta rap, horrorcore took this preoccupation to an absurd degree. With its emphasis on over-the-top gore and cartoonish levels of villainy, it was something of the hip-hop equivalent of black metal, so extreme that it’s on you if you start taking the lyrics literally. (In fact, among my metalhead friends back in my school days, Gravediggaz’s “6 Feet Deep” was the first rap album that it was officially cool to listen to.) Unfortunately, just like with black metal, there is a story of a practitioner going too far, the singularly disturbing tale of Big Lurch.
Big Lurch got his rap name from his surface similarities to the intimidating, oversized butler from “The Addams Family,” as played by actor Ted Cassidy (who actually had his own novelty hit, “Do the Lurch” back in the day). The MC had some success on the Texas hip-hop scene, and he collaborated with the likes of E-40, Too $hort and Mystikal. Unfortunately, he also picked up a nasty PCP habit and, apparently, the lines between the extreme fantasy world of his outrageous lyrics and our reality began to blur. On April 10, 2002, he murdered his roommate Tynisha Ysais. She was just 21 years old. One would normally insert allegedly here, but this was a rather clear-cut case, especially as authorities found him naked, covered in the blood, in the middle of the street.
That alone was horrifying enough but what truly made him infamous was what medical examiners discovered after his arrest: there was somebody else’s human flesh in his stomach. When combined with the bite marks that were found on Ysais’s body led them to an obvious and disturbing conclusion about its origins.
When we discussed Simon Bikindi a few weeks ago, we mentioned how his music ended up being brought in as evidence during his trial for genocide. Something similar happened with Big Lurch, as prosecutors brought in his own songs as evidence that Lurch was capable of murder. One of those songs was a track originally called “The Puppet Master,” but which was renamed “I Did It To You!” when Big Lurch’s album “It’s All Bad” was eventually released. It was renamed to capitalize on Big Lurch’s newfound infamy, a truly appalling decision by Blackmarket Records to capitalize on the fact that a young woman had just died in the most awful manner possible.
The lyrics, to put it mildly, didn’t paint a particularly rosy picture. In “I Did It To You!,” Big Lurch describes himself as a “hungry lion” searching for “fresh meat.” The whole thing is a litany of murder fantasies, not entirely too different from many other horrorcore songs, with the key distinction that the MC in question actually ended up fulfilling its promise. Other horrorcore artists may have compared themselves to Jeffrey Dahmer in a hook, but the fact that he followed through makes it uniquely shocking.
The song was hardly necessary to prove Big Lurch’s guilt in this case, the only defense he had was an insanity plea that the state ultimately shot down. Lurch is now serving a life sentence for murder putting an end to his music career, at least unless some notoriety-seeking indie label tries to release some prison tapes like they used to do with Charles Manson. His story will live on for as long as people are discussing the most gruesome stories in hip-hop history.
World's Worst Songs 