TRIBUTE
Reggie Ossé, a knowledgeable and boisterous US broadcasting personality better known as Combat Jack, who parlayed his experience in hip-hop into a podcasting empire, died on Wednesday in Manhattan. He was 53.
The cause was colon cancer, said Chris Morrow, chief executive of Loud Speakers Network, the podcast group he founded with Ossé.
Ossé learned he had the disease in October.
Several generations of rappers, radio hosts and journalists mourned Ossé’s death. In an interview on Thursday, Atlanta rapper Big Boi called him “one of the brightest guys I’ve ever known” on music and black culture. “He was just a very intelligent curator of the culture,” Big Boi said. “He wouldn’t ask the same questions that every interviewer would ask.he was like one of our friends. He treated you like a friend.”
Ossé came of age in New York in time to see the rise of hip-hop from a local phenomenon to a worldwide craze. Working as a lawyer at Def Jam, an institution as important to rap in the early 1990s as Andy Warhol’s Factory was to art and music in the 1960s, he crossed paths with Jay-z, Puff Daddy and other early rap royalty before they were famous.
After walking away from the entertainment industry, he reinvented himself when the social web was in its infancy. He worked as a blogger under the pseudonym Combat Jack, then began to use the name as a podcaster in 2010. Combat Jack was able to coax hiphop luminaries into revealing parts of themselves they had never shown in public.
“The amazing thing about Combat Jack’s life is that he had two successful runs in the hip-hop business,” said Peter Rosenberg, a DJ with the New York rap station Hot 97. “One as an entertainment lawyer back in the day and then a second run as a podcaster where he became this real authority about everything that was hiphop culture and history.”
Reginald Joseph Ossé was born on 8 July 1964, in Brooklyn. Raised in Crown Heights, he took an early interest in the arts and applied to Cornell University’s fine arts programme. Frustrated with the course and impressed by a relative who worked as a lawyer, he decided to pursue a legal career. After graduating from Cornell, he attended Georgetown Law School. “He was a fan above everything else,” Morrow said. “The reason he got into law in the first place was he just wanted to be around the culture and the music.”
After graduating from Georgetown, Ossé began working at Def Jam at a time when hiphop was still young and artists and their representatives were learning how the business worked on the fly. Bobbito Garcia, a co-host of the early hip-hop radio show The Stretch Armstrong and Bobbito Show, met Ossé when they both worked at Def Jam. Garcia said he had a “vivacious, hilarious, bugged out, a little to the left type of personality that I fell in love with”.
Ossé later formed a firm with another lawyer, Ed Woods (who died earlier in the week). One client was Damon Dash, who worked with Jay-z to found Roc-a-fella Records. Ossé was involved in shopping Jay-z’s debut album to various, ultimately uninterested labels.
Years later, he met with 50 Cent, who was then unsigned but who calmly explained how he planned to take over the music industry.
In the early 2000s, Ossé grew disillusioned with the competition from larger players and left the business. He started writing about music under the pen name Combat Jack. He soon began testing the waters of broadcasting.
When Ossé began the Combat Jack show in August 2010, he began attracting listeners through in-depth conversations with figures like Dash, a legendarily terse interviewee who was unusually forthcoming with an old peer
His show was one of the first to cover hip-hop in such depth. As it gained popularity, eventually drawing hundreds of thousands of listeners, Ossé took on the role of elder statesman and developed a reputation for generosity toward his younger counterparts.
Morrow and Ossé began to work together in 2013. Their Loud Speakers network nurtured the careers of young broadcasters like Kid Fury, and provided a home to others like DJ Envy and Angela Yee.
The cancer diagnosis took Ossé by surprise, and when he left the hospital, in late October, he expressed confidence that he could beat the disease and continue to take care of his four children, Chuma, Chi, Kai and Kara Ossé. In addition to them, he is survived by his wife, Akim Vannossé, and his mother, Beatrice Jean-francois.
In the rap industry, Combat Jack commanded respect, Jason Ryan Lee, an editor at the entertainment website Bossip and a frequent guest, said in an interview: “Amongst the artists, among the executives, among other journalists,” he said, “Reggie Ossé was a name that really mattered.” © New York Times 2017. Distributed by NYT Syndication Service
“Amongst the artists, among the executives, among other journalists, Reggie Ossé was a name that really mattered”