Rapper Brother Marquis, a member of Miami hip-hop group 2 Live Crew, has died at the age of 58.
“Brother Marquis of the 2 Live crew has went to the upper room,” read the group’s statement posted on social media Monday. The group’s manager, DJ Debo, confirmed Marquis’ death to Rolling Stone. A cause of death was not immediately available.
Brother Marquis — as a member of 2 Live Crew alongside Fresh Kid Ice, Mr. Mixx, and Uncle Luke — made history with their expletive-filled 1989 album As Nasty As They Wanna Be. The album sold over a million copies, and became the first album in history to be deemed legally obscene after a federal judge ruled the year after its release that it was an “appeal to dirty thoughts and the loins, not to the intellect and the mind.” The ruling led to both the arrest of a record store owner who refused to stop selling the album and two members after a live show, the Circuit Court of Appeals overturned the court’s decision two years later.
The LP was the first by a southern rap group to sell 1 million copies. Marquis, whose real name was Mark D. Ross, first featured on the group’s LP Is What We Are, which included the single “We Want Some Pussy.” The group was known for recording parodies of other artists, including Roy Orbison, who sued the group for reimagining “Oh, Pretty Woman.” That case made it to the Supreme Court for the unapproved sample and ultimately prompted the legal precedent that commercial parody qualifies as fair use.
After the group disbanded in the Nineties, Ross joined Ice-T on Home Invasion track “99 Problems.” “Yeah, last year a lot of motherfuckers asked me/Why I didn’t do no old, sex, nasty shit,” Ice-T declares at the start of the 1993 track. “But, this year, I went down to Miami and got my n—a from 2 Live/Brother Marquis in the house.”
The group’s members Uncle Luke, Fresh Kid Ice, and Ross reunited in 2015 for a brief tour. In an interview with Rolling Stone at the time, Ross recalled the group’s raunchy live shows, and an instance where he had to “jump out of the back window” of a hotel after humping a fan onstage.
“My manager was telling me the guy had a 12-gauge shotgun,” he recalled.
“Some shows got more out of hand than others. When we would go into some of the towns it would be local law enforcement that had a problem with it – there’d be protesters and right-wing organizations,” Ross added at the time. “For the most part, when we were all together, our shows were kind of clean. Yeah, the girls had on booty shorts and the lyrics was crazy. Me and Fresh Kid Ice, on the other hand, have had some shows that were kind of over the top.”
Fresh Kid Ice, born Christopher Wong Won, died in 2017 at age 53 following a medical condition.
When asked in 2015 what he thought about music being more suggestive than what he was arrested for 25 years prior, Ross said it didn’t bother him. “They did what they did to us but we fought and won, for rappers and singers and everybody to have the freedom to say whatever they want in their material,” he told Rolling Stone. “That makes me feel good and proud, actually. I stood up for that. I fought for that.”
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