If you hung around Cafe Coco in the late 2000s, you almost certainly met Ross Norton. Rapping under the name kidDEAD, Norton was a uniter, a backpack-rap emissary to a fragmented scene who only wanted to see his peers succeed in a tough hip-hop city. On The Man Who Lived Forever — completed with help from lots of friends like longtime pal Nathan Conrad (aka Spoken Nerd) and released nine months after Norton’s untimely death in 2021 — kidDEAD raps like he’s trying out for Def Jux in its prime. It’s a funny, poignant record that boom-baps with the best of ’em. RIP to a real one.
