Adolph Robert Thornton Jr, who turned brushes with dying into raps of survival, was killed while buying cookies in his hometown
Younger Dolph, a star of indie rap and a cousin of the late artist Juice Wrld, was shot and killed Wednesday in his hometown of Memphis, a number of law enforcement sources confirmed to Fox13 Memphis. He was 36 years old.
The rapper, whose actual name was Adolph Robert Thornton Jr, was shopping for cookies at Makeda’s Butter Cookies at about 1 pm Wednesday when a gunman drove up and shot through the window.
“The tragic shooting death of rap artist Young Dolph serves as one other reminder of the ache that violent crime brings with it,” Memphis mayor Jim Strickland tweeted. “My ideas and prayers are along with his household and friends.”
Dolph, who has 4.4m followers on Instagram, released his debut studio album King of Memphis in 2016
Dolph started freestyling along with his friends as a teenager and started releasing mixtapes in 2008. “It may be at a spot, it may be within the entice, it may be within the car driving – we simply fucking around,” he instructed the Guardian. He built a repute as an assured rapper hungry for achievement; as he rapped on In My System, off the 2017 mixtape Wealthy Crack Child, “I clocked in after I was 12 and never clocked out”.
“I’d relatively encourage anyone all day lengthy,” he mentioned in 2018. “To me, that’s timeless music.”
He additionally used shut brushes with death as gas for his music. In 2017, a beef with fellow Memphis rapper Yo Gotti devolved into a twig of bullets at Dolph’s SUV in Charlotte, North Carolina, earlier than club expertise; Dolph turned the alleged incident into promotion for his album Bulletproof, which includes the track 100 Shots. (Charlotte police instructed the Guardian that they counted “no more than 50” bullets on the scene, and didn’t set up if Dolph was related to the incident.)
Tributes have poured in from the music business. Chance the Rapper tweeted:
God bless Dolph 🕊 Real independent Memphis rapper born in chicago. loved by millions of ppl. Always showed love everytime I seen him this is tragic God bless his family man
— Chance The Rapper (@chancetherapper) November 17, 2021
Dolph was nearly killed that September, after an argument with three males in Hollywood Boulevard’s tourist district turned bodily; one man shot Young Dolph thrice, leaving him in a critical situation.
“I’ve been focused since I was 17, 18, 19,” he told the Guardian. “I simply knew that I used to be good.”
But he wasn’t “a person that lives in worry”, he added. “You bought some people who actually fear about that sort of shit. I don’t.”
Dolph is survived by a son and a daughter.
