With viral street hits like “Half-N-Half” and the OhGeesy-assisted “Let Me Know” 24-year-old Shoreline Mafia associate Mac P Dawg, whose real name is Joshua Andrade Galvez, was well on his way to establishing his own limelight. However, fans and, Shoreline family alike, were blindsided by the news of gun violence in the Koreatown neighborhood of Los Angeles that left the rapper shot dead on Monday (April 6).
In the wake of his passing, TK Kimbro, the co-founder of R Baron Group, the West Coast creative management agency behind Shoreline and Mac P, shares a heartfelt tribute from Fenix Flexin and details his plan to honor the rapper’s life by sparking the conversation to change the narrative on gun violence and violence in rap in L.A.
HipHopDX: What about Mac P Dawg was special and let you know he had what it takes to be a part of the foundational establishment of R Baron artists?
TK Kimbro: Well yeah, the way that we do everything is pretty much artist-driven. So, the official artists on The Machine Works are AZChike, 1TakeJay — and then you have Mac P Dawg, and Helluva. And then, as far as me and Picasso, we really love Hip Hop. So we are always individually looking for something new, always on our own, or as a collective. So, I think that the key thing to us is being able to — I invest in movements, as a lifelong person in Hip Hop. If you get down 1TakeJay, you get 1TakeQuan and 1TakeOcho. Or if you get AZChike, you get AZSwaye. If you get Shoreline, you get Mac P Dawg. If you get Helluva, you get Drego, Bino, Sada Baby, all the producers, all the artists that he’s working with. I met Mac P Dawg and Shoreline at the same time.
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I met the four members at a meeting before, and then we had another meeting at OhGeesy crib and Mac P Dawg was there — it was a gang of them. It was all the OTX, all the homies were there. It was probably 15 of them. And Mac P automatically the first time I saw him, he didn’t have a rap or nothing. It’s like I think they say Chace Infinite did it with A$AP Rocky — you could look at an artist and be like that’s the artist. They might not even be rapping yet. You just see all the things. I think they said the same thing with Lil Baby. Coach K and them was like, ‘he had been around for years, so he was just in the streets doing his thing’. I saw it, bro. And he was like, ‘Yeah, I got songs, too’. I’m like, ‘Word’. He’s like, ‘Yeah, I rap’. And me and P were both like, ‘All right. He got something’. It wasn’t like it was ready to go, but it was there.
And he had this thing, you could tell. Like a label, or me, or anybody could invest money into something, but doesn’t mean that it’s going to get the return. But they all are hustlers. Everybody I deal with, once again, they are all self-contained movements. And probably after that meeting, that’s probably like August 2017, we went on the road in February 2018. And by January 2018, he had had “Half-N-Half”, him and Fenix Flexin. And they had the song, and I was like, ‘Look bro, you have to start doing this song on the road with us.’ He’s like, ‘For real?’. I’m like, ‘Yeah. Just come and open up’. I think he was in Santa Cruz, and then they put him in the set. They let him come out to the song, and the girls was going crazy. I’m like, ‘Oh yeah, this is it’.
So, we just kept letting him work, and he kept doing songs, him and some of the other homies. And he started doing songs — man, by the end of 2018 I was like, ‘Yeah, man. Let’s go and get this guy a deal.’ But I saw it the first time I saw him. It was just it was a coolness. It was a self-awareness. It was just somebody who knew what they wanted to do it. I knew bro had the star power from the first time that I saw him. And it was just like how do we capture this? It’s like they say lightning in a bottle. How do you capture the lightning?
HipHopDX: What about Shoreline Mafia makes them so unique and strong and how do you think them as a group and their fans will get through this?
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TK Kimbro: The biggest thing that I could say that I saw from last week to now, when I look at Shoreline, is Marvel Universe. I told everybody — and this is a dating thing, I’m just kind of dating myself. It’s like maybe three movements that have been group movements in the last 30-years that have what I call Marvel Universe. So, these are just entire worlds on their own. And it goes maybe three, four deep. You’ve got the main thing, the secondary squad, the third tier, and the fourth tier. And some of us even go deeper than that. And that’s like the Wu-Tang Klan, Dipset, and then A$AP Mob. Each one of them things that I named, they went super deep because it was cultural. It wasn’t just the rap, it represented something beyond the rap. It was all this stuff and the rap. You know what I mean? So, that’s how Shoreline was.
When the Mac P Dawg thing happened, everything that I had told every label, or that I told people about Shoreline, and how they touch the audience, it kind of all came to fruition for me because everybody got to see it themselves. They got to see like, ‘wow, this is on Variety’, or this is on this magazine. It’s bigger than just rap. They all rap, but it’s just you couldn’t make something like that in an office, you know? That would have to be something that was created. They created it. They would have to be friends, and brothers, and people that came together. And that’s what it was. And I don’t know. I felt like Mac P Dawg was the younger version of that. He was just getting known. It was all just in its infancy.
HipHopDX: What sort of state is Mac P Dawg’s musical discography in? Can fans still expect the mixtape he was readying for this year?
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TK Kimbro: It wasn’t really where it was at. It’s hard for me to speak on that outside of he was just doing his thing, and he was super committed to getting out all the way. And all he was talking to me about. Like ‘Bro, I’m ready to go 100 percent’. Literally last Monday, a couple of hours before he went to go to rest we had talked to the label on the EP. And shoutout to my man, Dev, over at Atlantic because he’s just getting the mixing together on everything. So, I can’t even — this is just such a tragedy, bro.
HipHopDX: How can we begin that conversation about violence with the youth?
TK Kimbro: Well, I think the first thing that we can do, because it’s so deep for me, I think the first thing that we could do, which is deep, but we got to quit normalizing a lot of the things that happen to us here. Bless you. We got to quit normalizing a lot of things that happen to us in the Western world. I don’t know how we do that. I don’t know. It’s like somebody at home, and if you like, ‘Yo, there’s a rapper that came out last year. L.A. is the most prolific city when it comes to murders of rappers. There’s a lot of people that have been murdered out here, or things that happen to do with L.A. as far as murder and violence. And people be like, ‘Oh, it be gangs’. There’s gangs everywhere, street shit everywhere. It’s normalized, we normalize violence. I’m just saying what we are going through, you know? we need more clarity, man, amongst ourselves.
And that just means humans. We got to figure out how we normalize people getting murdered. So, it’s just like in America we’re supposed to have all this bread, and we supposed to be the top Western civilization, but we normalize murder. Like ‘Oh yeah, he got murdered. 12 people get murdered in Beverly Hills.’ Anywhere, broad day — Sandy Hook school shooting. Kids could get shot. Anybody can get shot, It’s normalized. So, I would just tell people to be a little bit more empathetic to violence, to gun violence. To understand that it’s going to affect you. It’s affected me before I was born, during my life. It happens. I’ll be connected to violence, American violence. And at some point you have to realize that if you continue to live, you have to realize what the end goal is. So, it’s just something to think about. I don’t expect a 15-year-old person on TikTok that’s doing a dance, the Murda Boy dance, or the shoot them in the head, I don’t expect them to get it. But you probably are going to deal with somebody dying.
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HipHopDX: What needs to change on the business side of things with regards to rap in the LAnd and how artists are developed.
TK Kimbro: I think we need more self-contained business kings. We need more — shout out to Mack and Co, which is Rucci’s team. Those are my good people. Shout out to my homie Holiday, and the homie Turk. I feel like they’re going to do what we’re doing now. They’re going to take it to a whole nother level because they’re younger than us. And you have to have people that don’t want to rap, but that have the best interest for the rappers. And I feel like the best interest is always going to be either you invest money or time into it, and you on the front line. So, my thing to everybody is like the guy that is behind the Blue Blux Clan. Shout out to the Blue Blux Clan. He’s investing his time and money into them. So, anybody that’s fully invested, I think that’s the thing. And he going to make a deal with the majors. And we just follow in the blueprint of Anthony ‘Top Dawg’ Tiffith. I feel like Top is the best that ever did it. He took the most successful blueprint on the West Coast commercially and artistically, and he’s risen to the highest levels. From going to the White House, to the Kennedy Honors, to sold-out world tours, to multi-platinum records — It’s an incredible ride. So, we just want to continue in that.
And shoutout to Atlantic. I think Atlantic is the best corporate partner to have for anybody. Their track record as the number one record label stands for years. And they have the highest level from Bruno Mars to Cardi B. We just had the boy out of Compton, Roddy Ricch number one record. And I think that just goes to them nurturing talent, and being able to do that. So, for all the younger people, and the kids that are in high school and junior high now, everybody doesn’t have to rap. We need more business people, and we need things that are more censored in West Coast culture. So, if you understand the business, it’s your friend, your cousin, your brother and sister, you’re going to have more of an interest in making sure that these things are taken care of culturally. Because it’s your people. You’re going to feel closer to it.
HipHopDX: What steps would you like to see be taken to both honor Mac P Dawg’s legacy while also constructively moving toward changing music culture in L.A?
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TK Kimbro: We need to just keep doing what we doing. Keep celebrating the multicultural experience of L.A. Keep celebrating specifically the roots of street rap, gangster rap, reality rap. And that’s in inner city Los Angeles, South L.A., Compton, Watts, Inglewood, Gardena, Hawthorne. We need to do that. That’s black and brown people traditionally. That has been the experience of the downtrodden in L.A. So, we need to celebrate that. We need to understand that’s an American cultural revolution. It’s very native to the land, it’s very indigenous to the land. It’s something that everybody should understand, and you should hold it in high regard. Even if you don’t understand it, because at the end it’s art. It’s just American art and it’s great.
So, I would want people to celebrate and champion it more by understanding how important it is. So, the quicker it is to understand that, I feel like the quicker you’re going to have better results out of it. Understand the culture of violence. Understand this great thing that was created in the West 35, almost 40-years ago, that was called gangster rap that morphed into reality rap, or reality rap into gangster rap, to street rap, to now we just have a post-modern version of all of it. But I love to see five more Roddy Ricchs’, Three more Shorelines’ and have some more brothers out here, and some of my Latino people, and some of my other people of color behind it. Or, some more women behind it that are just driven, eccentric. People that are more West Coast-centric, that are more L.A.-centric. People that are more like, ‘I know what this audience is going to want, and let me give it to them, and let me give it to them undiluted’. I feel like if we can get more on that, the music is going to last.
Stream the Shoreline Mafia tribute track “RIP Mac P Dawg” by Fenix Flexin above.
