People will take you for granted until you’re gone, a truth hip-hop is intimately familiar with. If an artist is “lucky,” they will live long enough to have their contributions simply forgotten, as with innovators undersung in their middle age like the late DMX and Shock G. Too common is the scenario where an artist’s talent is belittled just as their star rises, like when popularity invited cynicism to Lil Peep and Juice WLRD until their premature demises rendered their geniuses unimpeachable. If the tragedies in rap of the last few years — from Pop Smoke to King Von to Nipsey Hussle, and the list goes on and on — have spoken to anything broken in our culture, beyond the complete callousness with which we treat the lives of young hip-hop musicians, it’s that we fail to adequately celebrate our artists until they are no longer able to join in themselves.