The killing of Charizma: A 1990s hip-hop legend who never got his chance
Since Chris Manak, known more commonly as DJ Peanut Butter Wolf, formed label Stones Throw Records in 1996, it has served as one of hip-hop’s most vital hotbeds for innovative and truly boundary-pushing artists. Some of the label’s most notable records are the ones you tend to see as prerequisites in the collections of every aspiring DJ of the past 20 years: Madvillian’s Madvillainy, J Dilla’s Donuts, and Quasimoto’s The Further Adventures of Lord Quas, among others.
If you asked Manak to choose the Stones Throw record that meant the most to him personally, though, he’d probably say it was 2003’s Big Shots, the first and sadly the only studio LP credited to his friend and collaborator Charizma, aka Charles Hicks, Jr—one of the great “what if” stories in hip-hop history.
Manak put together Big Shots as a tribute to the MC who’d first come up the ranks within San Jose, California, back in the early ‘90s, cobbling together the recordings they’d done together as Charizma and Peanut Butter Wolf when they were fresh out of high school. Back then, the pair had generated enough attention to earn a recording contract with the Disney-owned record label Hollywood Basics, later known as Hollywood Records.
However, that blessing very quickly turned into a curse when the execs at Hollywood tried to take control of Charizma and PB Wolf’s image, essentially trying to push them into one of the two acceptable pigeonhole categories of the time: gangster rap akin to NWA or teenage hip-hop pop, à la Kris Kross. Refusing to give up creative control of their music and style, the group was completely stifled, and their recordings were left on a shelf, unreleased.
Despite that setback, 20-year-old Charizma was still emerging as a celebrity in northern California, as his unique flow and savvy wordplay won him devotees at every live show and suggested almost certain stardom as the ‘90s hip-hop explosion began. Opening slots for the likes of Nas, House of Pain, and The Pharcyde only increased that profile. But then, on December 13th, 1993, while waiting in his car at a stoplight in East Palo Alto, California, Charizma was shot and killed in what appears to have been a tragic case of mistaken identity.
Because he’d yet to gain national notoriety and still hadn’t had a proper record released, Charizma’s death went largely unnoticed by the wider hip-hop community. For PB Wolf, however, the unthinkable loss of his friend sent him spiralling for months. Once the initial mourning period was over, he had to determine his next steps as a musician without the collaborator he’d thought would be with him for the long haul.
“After Charizma passed, I stopped for a while and gathered up what I had learned from being signed and working with various labels,” Manak told the Los Angeles Times in 2004, “I decided to take all that experience and throw it into creating my own label. Just go ahead and do it myself.”
Manak always planned to try and release the recordings he’d done with Charizma, but decided to try and build up the reputation of his Stones Throw label first, thus providing a better platform to share his fallen friend’s music with a wider audience, which is exactly what he did with the release of Big Shots in 2003, a full decade after the rapper’s death.
“Charizma was really the first MC who had exactly what I was looking for,” Manak said at the time of the record’s release. “He was amazing”.
Listening to Big Shots is pretty amazing experience, as well, not just because you’re hearing a great ‘90s MC who went largely unheard in his own time, but also in the way that PB Wolf’s sophisticated production delivers that ’92 sound through a distinctly 21st century prism, making tracks like ‘Ice Cream Truck’, ‘Jack the Mack’ and the standout chillout cut ‘Methods’ feel completely outside time altogether—from some parallel universe where Charizma lived on and became one of the biggest MCs on the planet.
