Shawty Lo dies in an Atlanta car crash

Why it matters

Carlos Walker, who recorded as Shawty Lo of D4L, died in a single-car crash on Cascade Road in southwest Atlanta on September 21, 2016. He was 40. The Atlanta Police later attributed the accident to a combination of alcohol consumption and speeding. Shawty Lo is one of the architects of the snap-music sub-genre that briefly dominated Atlanta-and-the-South commercial rap in the mid-2000s. D4L's "Laffy Taffy" was a national #1 in 2006. Shawty Lo's solo single "Dey Know" (2008) is one of the foundational Bankhead-narrative rap records and an early prototype of what would become the streaming-era Atlanta sound. He had spent the years between "Dey Know" and his death mostly working as a label executive and reality-television personality (a 2013 Oxygen network show titled All My Babies' Mamas was canceled before it aired after public protest over the title). The catalog he made is real. The loss is real. You should hear "Dey Know" if you do not know it. It still works.