Craig Mack dies

Why it matters

Craig Mack died on March 12, 2018, of congestive heart failure at his home in South Carolina. He was 46. He had been living mostly outside the music business since the early 2000s. The most consequential thing about Craig Mack is that he was the first artist signed to Bad Boy Records, before Notorious B.I.G. He recorded "Flava in Ya Ear," the 1994 single that went platinum and was, for a brief window in late 1994, a bigger hit than anything Bad Boy had released. Then Biggie's Ready to Die dropped in September 1994 and the Bad Boy attention shifted, more or less permanently, to Biggie. Craig Mack's career never reached that 1994 ceiling again. He left the music business in the late 1990s and joined a religious commune in South Carolina, where he lived until his death. The 1994 commercial moment was real. The career did not last. You can put on "Flava in Ya Ear" right now and the song still works. The career got short. The hit did not.