#Chucky Thompson, One of Bad Boy’s “Hitmen,” Dies at 53

Chucky Thompson—the hip-hop, R&B, and pop producer best known for his work with Bad Boy Records—has died, AllHipHop and Billboard report. He was 53 years old. As a member of Bad Boy’s in-house production team the Hitmen, he was responsible for some of ’90s hip-hop and R&B’s biggest hits, including the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Big Poppa” and Faith Evans’ “You Used to Love Me.” The producer Young Guru first shared the news of Thompson’s death on social media, before Thompson’s publicist Tamar Juda also confirmed the news to Pitchfork.

“It is with a very heavy heart that I can confirm the passing of Chucky Thompson,” Juda said. “To anyone in his orbit, you know how generous he was with his energy, creativity and love. Both the music industry, and the world has lost a titan.”

Thompson was born in Washington, D.C. on July 12, 1968. One of his earliest gigs was playing in Chuck Brown’s go-go band the Soul Searchers, before connecting with Sean “Puffy” Combs, who had just been fired from Uptown Records and in the process of founding his own label, Bad Boy Records. At 24, Combs asked him to produce a track for My Life, the followup to Mary J. Blige’s debut LP What’s the 411?;  Blige was so impressed she asked to have him produced the entire LP, for which he earned a Grammy nomination for Best R&B Album.

Over nearly three decades in the industry, he racked up composer and production credits with the likes of Usher, New Edition, TLC, Jennifer Lopez, SWV, Color Me Badd, Mya, and more. But his most enduring hit came from outside the Bad Boy family with Nas’ “One Mic,” from the Queensbridge rapper’s 2001 comeback LP Stillmatic.