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Music

Tim Dog Is Dead

Tim Dog lived a life so outlandish that even in death, he still had people fooled.

Dateline NBC has broken the news that Tim Dog, the rapper-turned-con-artist whose song "Fuck Compton" sparked the East Coast/West Coast rap beef, is dead, and has been so since his death was first reported on Valentine's Day of last year.

In May of last year, a woman named Esther Pilgrim had accused Tim Dog (real name Tim Blair) of faking his own death to get out of a $20,000 debt, which led to a Mississippi prosecutor named Steve Jubera issuing a warrant for the rapper's arrest that would stand until the State of Georgia could produce a death certificate. I reported on the story, calling up various Atlanta hospitals and morgues to try and uncover evidence of Blair's death (I found none, as the death certificate wasn't on file at the time, and Blair died in Hospice care). In the process, I dredged up Tim Dog's second career as a con artist who traded in on his past successes as a rapper to convince women he met on dating websites to give him money. His schemes were aggressively absurd—one involved gathering investors for a nonexistent black male stripper tour throughout Northern Europe, and his final con was a pyramid scheme involving catalogs for luxury goods in the Dominican Republic—and the outrageous details of his final years (and multiple assertions from his friend Kool Keith that his death was a hoax) only served to fuel the speculation that Tim Dog had indeed faked his own death.

The more of the story I uncovered, the more I realized that Tim Dog seemed like an asshole, but he was also a dead asshole. Two separate victims revealed to me that he was very sick, and every trail I followed yielded a idle speculation from conspiracy theorists, or straight-up dead ends. The best lead I had was this: While running his pyramid scheme in the Dominican Republic, a woman Blair had hired as an assistant uncovered that she was involved in an elaborate hoax. She alerted the authorities, and shortly thereafter, Blair disappeared. I developed a theory that Tim Dog had gone into hiding because he felt the heat was coming down on him, and in hiding, he succumbed to his illnesses and died. With no evidence to corroborate my version of events, I abandoned the story.

When NBC Dateline reported they'd finally uncovered Tim Dog's death certificate, I chuckled. Of course fucking Tim Dog was dead, and had been dead all along. But the story of Tim Dog was not the story of a guy who faked his own death. It was the story of a troubled man who had a brush with fame and went on to live a life so outlandish that even in death, he still had people fooled.

Drew Millard is Noisey's Features Editor. He's on Twitter - @drewmillard