RIP Groggs
I was out for my late-night walk one night, and I flicked open Twitter to get rid of whatever notification was bugging me at the time.
The first tweet I saw was this;
“Oh shit, Groggs had a twin brother?” was what went through my mind.
As I looked more into it, and let the tweet and accompanying image sink in, I realised that Groggs had talked about a lot in his raps, but he’d never spoken about a twin brother. Groggs didn’t have a twin brother.
It was Groggs.
Groggs had died.
It took a long time for it to sink in.
I’d been aware of Injury Reserve for a long time, I’d liked a few of their songs that had randomly played on my Spotify, even added them to relevant playlists of mine, but it wasn’t really until early last year that I really started listening to them.
I could talk forever about the effect of Groggs’ lyrics on me in that short time, but I don’t want to. At the time of writing this, it’s unknown what happened to Groggs, but that doesn’t matter. The man was taken way before his time.
I made this little video in reaction to the feelings I felt initially in that following week. I stripped the instrumental from Injury Reserve’s “North Pole”, focusing the audio on Groggs’ verse, and just trying to create something that felt right.
The man was a humble, quiet, respectful figure from the interviews I’ve watched over the last year or so. I loved that he allowed Ritchie to talk for the whole hour-long interview with No Jumper and just focused on getting the cat’s attention. He eventually succeeded.
The fundraiser for Groggs’ family is attached below, if you’d like to contribute.
