Mac Dre

The Vallejo rapper who carried the Bay Area's mack talk into hyphy: "Mac" in the name, "Tongue of a Pimp" in an album title, Thizz as the brand.

Andre Louis Hicks was born in Oakland on July 5, 1970, and grew up in Vallejo, where he claimed the Country Club Crest neighborhood. He started rapping as MC Dre in 1984 and switched to Mac Dre a year later, because, he said, the first name sounded too East Coast. Whatever the reason, the new name put him in the Bay Area's mack tradition, the one The Mack put on screen in Oakland in 1973.

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In March 1992, at 21, he was arrested on a trip to Fresno and charged with conspiracy to rob a bank. He was convicted, sentenced to five years in federal prison, and released in 1996 after serving about four. From the Fresno County Jail he recorded Back n da Hood over the phone. The story in the Bay is that he was locked up for his song "Punk Police"; KQED's reading of the court transcripts found the song was played at trial but was not central to the case.

Out of prison he started Romp Records, moved to Sacramento in 1998 and founded Thizz Entertainment. In the early 2000s he became a central figure in hyphy, the Bay Area movement of fast-paced records and a new style of dance, and he popularized the Thizz dance and the Thizz face. The albums include Heart of a Gangsta, Mind of a Hustla, Tongue of a Pimp (2000), Thizzelle Washington (2002), and Ronald Dregan: Dreganomics and The Genie of the Lamp (both 2004).

After a Halloween show in Kansas City in 2004, the van he was riding in was shot at on U.S. Route 71 early on November 1. He died of a gunshot wound to the neck. No one has been charged, and the case is unsolved.

For this archive, Mac Dre belongs with Pimp C: a man whose documented life was in music, who wore the mack's talk and style as a persona. KQED's Pendarvis Harshaw, writing on the twentieth anniversary of his death, found collaborators who celebrate his outlaw image and some who call the pimp side of it a problem. Thizz Entertainment's Ray Luv told KQED the catalog still draws millions of streams a month.

ALSO KNOWN AS
Andre Louis Hicks

BORN
Oakland, California, 5 July 1970; raised in Vallejo

STATUS
Killed 1 November 2004, Kansas City, Missouri, aged 34

ERA
1970–2004

ASSOCIATED WITH
Vallejo (Country Club Crest); Romp Records; Thizz Entertainment; the hyphy movement

STANDING
Persona