Nes Wordz

The best rapper in the city

Nes came up battling at lunch on “The Path” at Walnut Ridge High School and recording his first tracks in an attic studio on Oakland Park. He took his name from his earliest moniker, Finesse the Wordsmith, and spent years making everyone around him better: with the Thoroughbreds, with Jack “Tha Audio Unit” Burton’s Takeover Gang from 2002, and then with us. By the time he closed out ComFest in 2016 and again in 2017, Columbus had stopped debating it. In Tha Audio Unit’s words, he was “at an absolute minimum, the best rapper in the city.”

Columbus Alive named him one of its Bands to Watch for 2017. Its writers called his 2015 set on the 2x2 Hip-Hop Festival’s Roofless Stage “moving, magnetic and undeniable — a force of nature with nowhere to go but up.”

His records

His solo debut, Since ’85 (2013), took shape after his wife dropped him at Tha Audio Unit’s studio with a suitcase and told Jack not to call until the album was done. Stupid Genius (2015), with beats from Tha Audio Unit, Soop and Billionaire Boyscout, traded the battle-rap punchlines of his youth for raw, plain-spoken honesty about where he came from. The AnyDayNow EP followed, and he was deep into an autobiographical album, to be titled Sheron, when he passed.

Before that, The Suffocation (2010) with Philly P was recorded in three days, and his verses on “Ease The Pain,” “Back In My Bag,” “Birdz” and “Holy Ghost” are all over this site’s archive.

Stream Stupid Genius

Off stage

Nes was a husband and a father of four, and in his last years a teacher at the Columbus Arts & Technology Academy. He was the friend who remembered where you went to school and what you were struggling with before anyone else noticed, and who would tell you, flat out, when you were wrong. “He’d give to a fault,” Darrio Lamont said. “Trying to give somebody a hand, he’d give a whole arm.”

“Music is the one thing that never left me … and never judged me,” Nes told Columbus Alive in January 2017.

June 2017

On Saturday, June 24, 2017, Nes closed ComFest with the Magna Media Group, dressed in all white while the rest of us wore black, and finished the set with “If It’s My Time,” the song he wrote for his friend MarShawn McCarrel. Hours later he was hurt in a fall. He died at Mount Carmel West on Wednesday, June 28, 2017. He was 31.

That July his son Daylon, performing as Young Nes with Soop on the decks, led the tribute at the 2x2 Hip-Hop Festival, and a mural of Nes’ grin went up on the Rice Paddy wall on Grant Avenue. “I’m motivated even more now to make sure his music reaches the people it needs to reach,” Soop said at the time. “We’re going to do everything we can to keep his legacy growing.” That is still the job.