Wed | Mar 22, 2023

Posthumous album set from ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ rapper Coolio

Published:Saturday | March 18, 2023 | 12:27 AM
Coolio appears at the 2015 ASCAP Rhythm & Soul Awards in Beverly Hills, California on June 25, 2015. A single from the rapper, who died on September 28, 2022 at age 59, ‘TAG You It’, dropped last Friday featuring Too $hort and DJ Wino.
AP
Coolio appears at the 2015 ASCAP Rhythm & Soul Awards in Beverly Hills, California on June 25, 2015. A single from the rapper, who died on September 28, 2022 at age 59, ‘TAG You It’, dropped last Friday featuring Too $hort and DJ Wino.

NEW YORK (AP)

The estate of rapper Coolio plans to release a studio album later this year that the Grammy-winning hitmaker had been working on in the days before he died.

Long Live Coolio will be the first posthumous album release from the Gangsta’s Paradise star, and the first single, TAG ‘You It’, dropped last Friday featuring Too $hort and DJ Wino.

The raunchy single’s video — that begins with Coolio and Too $hort in a boxing ring as various women gyrate — marks the last piece of visual content that Coolio appeared in before his death from cardiac arrest on September 28, 2022, at age 59.

Coolio won a Grammy for Best Solo Rap Performance for Gangsta’s Paradise, the 1995 hit from the sound track of the Michelle Pfeiffer film Dangerous Minds that sampled Stevie Wonder’s 1976 song Pastime Paradise and was played constantly on MTV.

The rapper would never again have a song nearly as big as Gangsta’s Paradise, but had subsequent hits with Fantastic Voyage in 1994, 1, 2, 3, 4 (Sumpin’ New) in 1996, and 1997’s C U When U Get There.

His career album sales totalled 4.8 million, with 978 million on-demand streams of his songs, according to Luminate. He would be nominated for six Grammys overall.

He starred in a reality show about parenting called Coolio’s Rules, provided a voice for an episode of the animated show Gravity Falls, and performed the theme music for the Nickelodeon sitcom Kenan & Kel.