Keef Cowboy dies

Why it matters

Keef Cowboy was Robert Keith Wiggins. He was one of the Furious Five with Grandmaster Flash. He died on September 8, 1989, at twenty-eight, of complications from drug addiction. That is a sentence I do not want to write so quickly. But there it is. Cowboy is the person who coined the word "hip hop." That is not a small thing to be the person who did. The story Grandmaster Flash tells, and the story Cowboy himself told before he died, is that he started chanting "hip hop hippie to the hippie, the hip hip hop a you don't stop" to imitate the cadence of friends marching off to the Army. The chant stuck. Sugarhill Gang put it in "Rapper's Delight." The word stuck after that. He never got the publishing. He never got the money. He had been on the road with Furious Five since he was a teenager and the road took its toll. The word you use, the word a global culture worth tens of billions of dollars uses, is his. He was twenty-eight.