Mac Dre is killed in Kansas City

Why it matters

Andre Hicks, who recorded as Mac Dre, was shot and killed on Interstate 435 in Kansas City, Missouri, on November 1, 2004. He was 34. He had been driving between shows, traveling in a van with friends. Another car pulled up alongside on the highway and opened fire. The case has never been solved. Mac Dre is the central figure of the Bay Area hyphy movement that ran from roughly 2002 through 2008. His Thizz Entertainment label was the Vallejo-based imprint that put out most of the hyphy-era anchor records. His own catalog is enormous (he had released more than two dozen albums between 1993 and his death) and stylistically distinctive: high-energy, dance-driven, slap-and-thump-bass-and-cracking-808s production, lyrically committed to a specific Bay Area party-and-hustle vocabulary ("ghost ride the whip," "thizz," "feelin' myself") that would influence the next twenty years of Bay rap. He was 34. You can still hear his cadence in every Bay Area rapper who came after, and you can hear hyphy-era production in plenty of records made far outside the Bay. The lineage runs through him.