20 Years After Mac Dre’s Death, the Furly Ghost Still Lingers

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hen I ask the security guard at Oakland’s Mountain View Cemetery for directions to Plot 47, he replies, “You lookin’ for Dre?”

He’s an older brown-skinned man in a crossing guard vest, sporty sunglasses and an afro protruding from a trucker hat, his hair seasoned by strands of grey. As I talk to the thin, tall, square-shouldered brotha, I wonder: Is this what Mac Dre would’ve looked like had he been able to see elderhood?

As he hands me a map, he says folks always come looking for Mac Dre’s burial site, usually to take pictures and leave tokens of appreciation.

Those visitors are about to arrive in large numbers. On Nov. 1, 2004, Mac Dre was shot and killed in Kansas City at age 34. Which means that Friday, Nov. 1, will mark 20 years since his death, and a loss felt in every pocket of the Bay.

A week before the anniversary, I get to the gravesite and take in each letter engraved in the mahogany-colored marble headstone. ANDRE ‘MAC DRE’ HICKS.

The gravesite has character. Two small pinwheels blow in the wind. There’s a couple coins, a piece of quartz and a small figurine of Ernie from Sesame Street. Two feathers stand atop the headstone, and at the center sits a six-inch metallic statuette of Mac Dre on a scooter in a straw hat and stunna shades — a classic image of the legend in Hawaii.

Born in Oakland on July 5, 1970, Dre grew up in Vallejo and became a proud representative of the Crestside neighborhood. But in reality, he held it down for the entire Bay Area.

His decorated rap career spanned 15 years. He recorded album after album, toured continuously and created a subculture within a subculture. His Treal T.V. documentary is a cultural cornerstone. And his contributions to our lexicon are undeniable. If the Bay Area had its say, “Thizz” would be in Webster’s Dictionary.

Despite serving a five-year stint in a federal prison after being charged with conspiracy to commit bank robbery (a trial during which his lyrics were played for the jury), Mac Dre had a prolific music career unlike any other.

And it’s still going.

A decade after his death, aerosol artists The Illuminaries put up a mural of Steph Curry in a classic Thizz face pose for the NBA Finals in Oakland. Last year, Curry’s company Unanimous Media announced a forthcoming Mac Dre documentary.

And just last month, NFL star-turned-media personality Marshawn Lynch was in Cuba for Amazon TV’s NFL coverage, where he taught locals the Thizz Dance.

And here I am, two decades after Mac Dre’s death, at his gravesite asking questions to the wind blowing through the pinwheels by his headstone.

You know you influenced everything from fashion to media, drug culture to car culture, spoken language to body language, right?

Mac Dre was a man of many aliases — Andre Macassi, Ronald Dregan and more — but I was speaking to “Furl,” a.k.a. “The Furly Ghost.”

How did you do it, Furl? How do you become immortal? How do you influence generations of artists? How do you represent a region even after your demise? What does that mean for us? Are we haunted by the ghost of Furl, or are we enchanted by the legacy of a Mac named Dre? 

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he History of The Bay Day, an annual day party organized by podcast production duo, rapper Dregs One and audio engineer DEO, is a collage of Bay Area hip-hop culture. Graffiti writers, MCs, media makers and more rub shoulders as panel discussions and live performances take place on the main stage.

This year, I walk in with Mac Dre on my mind.

Is Furl’s spirit still here? What does Mac Dre mean to fans of Bay Area hip-hop history? Is the lingering presence of “hyphy culture” impeding the progress of current Bay Area rap?

When DJ ShellHeart plays Mac Dre during her events, she says, “it brings the party up to a whole ‘nother level, even in 2024.” Behind her dark-tinted sunglasses, ShellHeart’s eyes widen as she adds, “I get chills talking about it, that’s how I know his spirit is still here.”

In the snack line, Logan Murdock, writer for The Ringer and co-host of The Real Ones, tells me Mac Dre’s legacy lives on because there were “so many different versions of Dre, just like there are so many different versions of the Bay.” And as far as moving beyond the hyphy era, Murdock urges people to acknowledge the variety of Bay Area artists since Dre’s passing. “Artists like 22nd Jim, AllBlack, SOB x RBE, and others who’ve taken the genre forward,” he says.

I run into producer Trackademicks, who compares Dre’s contribution to Bay Area hip-hop to the corn tortilla’s place in Mexican cuisine. “It’s part of our cultural fabric.” And just like there’s so much more to Mexican cuisine, there’s more to Bay Area hip-hop culture. “When folks decide to fixate,” says Trackademicks, “thinking you can only be the corn tortilla, that’s where the problems lie.”

As for Mac Dre being a vital ingredient in our cultural roux, DJ Amal tells me that “Mac Dre gave us weird. He gave us different. He gave us obscure.” His influence, and the imprint of the hyphy era, is present in new artists both in and out of the Bay, she says. “It’s a reference point, it’s a foundation for a lot of stuff that we do now.”

On the venue’s back patio, DJ H Holla plays Mac Dre’s “Get Stupid.” Upstairs on the terrace, Oakland-based lyricist Alia Sharrief doesn’t hesitate to tell me, “Mac Dre is the reason we’re dipped in A.1.”

“People are going to have their positives and negatives as far as impact and music and message,” Sharrief adds, referring to Dre’s promotion of pimping and pandering. “But when it comes to being happy, having heart and soul for the Bay Area… Mac Dre did that. And he still got us feeling ourselves today.”

San Francisco photographer Stetson Hines notes that Mac Dre’s work brought economic growth. Talking about Dre’s Treal T.V. and other media endeavors, Hines asks, “You ever think about the videographers and photographers it created?”

Well-known Pittsburg rapper and Mac Dre collaborator Husalah says Dre’s spirit has persevered because he represents a fading identity, “the street guys.” Akin to mobsters in Chicago, Husalah says they were once looked down upon, but now they’re celebrated.

“It’s an outlaw life,” says Husalah, before going on stage. “We was cutthroats, pirates. Mac Dre was a pirate,” he says, explaining how as free-spirited artists with street ties they’d live freely, eating off of the land, drinking wine and playing their metaphorical “fiddle or violin.”

People romanticize artists from the true underground, Husalah says, and “Mac Dre represents one of the most authentic subcultures.”

Before leaving, I talk with rapper, producer and studio engineer Xarina.

When asked if she hears Mac Dre’s influence in the rappers she works with, she says matter-of-factly: “I record Mistah F.A.B. … When he feels like rapping like Mac Dre, he will rap like Mac Dre. In 2024.”

She adds that other artists — Seiji Oda, LaRussell, and Nef the Pharoah to name a few — have taken aspects of Dre’s style and “flipped it and made it new and fresh.”

“He’s hyphy,” Xarina says of Seiji Oda. “But it’s not same hyphy. It’s a refined new hyphy that fits into 2024.”

Seiji Oda is a 26 year-old Japanese and Panamanian guy from Oakland who makes “lo-fi hyphy” music; it’s tranquil yet saucy, and it’s recently gained momentum.

After he produced the beat for his latest track, “Peaceful,” a friend pointed out that Oda had inadvertently flipped Mac Dre’s “Thizzle Dance” without realizing it.

“Intrinsically,” he says, “I heard it and I felt it.”

Seiji Oda was just six when Mac Dre was killed, and says he got Mac Dre vibes secondhand from the artists who were popular in the 2010s. “I was listening to Ezale and P-Lo,” says Seiji Oda during a phone call. He watched their videos, noticing how they embodied aspects of Dre’s music. “The way that it was passed down to us,” says Seiji Oda, “was through that lineage.”

Few can speak to Bay Area hip-hop lineage like Ray Luv. Raised in Santa Rosa, as a teen he was close friends with Tupac, as a young adult he had his own career as an MC and nowadays Luv is the COO of Thizz Entertainment, managing Mac Dre’s estate.

Luv even has a story of Mac Dre and Tupac sharing the the same space.

In high school, Luv and Tupac once cut class to visit a video shoot for a Too Short song featuring Ice Cube. As Luv, Tupac and Shock G of The Digital Underground were being interviewed by famed comedian Mark Curry, Mac Dre arrived.

“When Mac Dre got to the door, everybody stopped, and all you heard was ‘Mac Dre!'” exclaims Luv, elevating the pitch in his tone to imitate the guests. “This was a room full of stars and celebrities, but Mac Dre was one of those figures, like Pac in a way; a star among stars.”

Luv says that these days, Dre’s brand is active, with companies regularly reaching out for potential action figures and hologram collaborations. “Without any marketing or promotion,” adds Luv, “he does millions of streams every month.”

Why has Dre’s brand and spirit stood the test of time?

“The reason we haven’t, per se, grown past Mac Dre, is because I don’t think that he’s someone to grow past,” says Luv, before remixing an iconic Maya Angelou quote. “People may not remember the words to your songs — they might not remember any of your songs — but they will always remember the way you made them feel.”

And Mac Dre made us feel ourselves.

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o understand Mac Dre’s impact, I revisited his discography and looked at old photos. I drove around, taking note of murals and stickers with with Mac Dre’s imagery, as well as people wearing Thizz gear. In 2024.

I spent time listening to a wide array of artists eager to discuss Dre’s legacy.

Famed Oakland-born actor Daveed Diggs asserts that Mac Dre “is under-appreciated as a lyricist and as a originator of cadences.” His hip-hop group clipping. often uses Mac Dre songs as a reference for a particular feel, Diggs says, and deeper cuts like “Since ’84” and “Me Damac” are some of his favorite Mac Dre tracks.

“If I ever had written a verse as good as any of those,” Diggs testifies, “I would have stopped, I would’ve just stopped.”

Angelically hyphy extraterrestrial Frisco native Alien Mac Kitty (AMK) attributes the “Mac” in her name to Mac Dre. In a voice note, she says she carries on that spirit, just as she carries on the legacy of her late father, pioneering San Francisco rapper Cougnut. “He and Dre were actually really cool,” says AMK, adding that Mac Dre made everything fun, funky and colorful, in the most respectful way. The underground lyricist says that “Furl is still alive, and his spirit runs through the entire Bay Area renaissance right now.”

The journey — all of the conversations — were worth it. But the answers to my questions were in the soil at Mac Dre’s gravesite all along. The cigarette butts and tiny trinkets, the holistic stones and loose change donated to the patron saint of the hyphy movement. All evidence that Mac Dre’s spirt, the ghost of Furl, is still alive — and it lives in the people.