Heavy D, 1967-2011

Heavy D, 1967–2011

One of the nicest things about driving north out of the city is that point ten or fifteen minutes past the Bronx Zoo when you see the familiar sign and you say to yourself or the unlucky person who’s in the car with you and has had to hear you repeat your own silly little favorite sayings again and again and again for the past ten years, “Money Earnin’ Mt. Vernon!” It’s such a great rhyme, it rolls off the tongue perfectly, really one of the best municipal nicknames anyone’s ever come up with. Sadly, the man who grew up there who coined the phrase — or, at least, the man who brought it to my attention, and probably the greatest number of other peoples’ — died yesterday. The beloved rapper and actor Dwight Errington “Heavy D” Myers; he was 44. Which is way, way too young.

This is the first Heavy D song I ever heard.

Needless to say, Heavy paved the way for many other plus-size rap sex symbols. Most notably, the Notorious B.I.G., who famously name-checked him in his song, “Juicy” and featured him in the video for “One More Chance.”

Heavy wrote the theme song for In Living Color, too. That that J. Lo used to dance to every week.

He was a good dancer himself, Heavy, and the bright green rain gear he wore in the video for what would become the biggest hit of his career is simply astounding.

In the mid-’90s, he started acting, with rolls in Laurence Fishburne’s 1994 play Riff Raff and Charles S. Dutton’s “Roc” on TV. I remember being hugely impressed with his performance in Nick Gomez’s New Jersey Drive. “Don’t fuck with my groove!”

He would go on to have a substantial career on screen. You can go see him today, playing a courthouse guard with Ben Stiller and Eddie Murphy in Tower Heist.

But it’s music that he’ll be most remembered for. He was not the H-E-R-B, he was the H-E-A-V. And there’s nothing but those kinds of hearts in hip-hop today.