One of the biggest hip hop rapper Coolio of ‘Gangsta’s Paradise’ dies at 59

US artist Coolio’s career album sales totalled 4.8 million with 978 million on-demand streams of his songs, and he was nominated six times for a Grammy award.

Coolio, the rapper among hip hop’s biggest names during the 1990s with hits including Gangsta’s Paradise and Fantastic Voyage, has died at age 59.Born Artis Leon Ivey Jr, the artist died at the Los Angeles home of a friend, longtime manager Jarez Posey said on Wednesday. The cause of death was not immediately clear.

Coolio won a Grammy award for best solo rap performance for Gangsta’s Paradise, the 1995 hit from the soundtrack of the film, Dangerous Minds, in which Michelle Pfeiffer starred, which sampled Stevie Wonder’s 1976 song Pastime Paradise and was played constantly on MTV.

In an interview more than 10 years later with Britain’s The Voice talent show, Coolio said he had “no clue” the song would go on to endure for so many years.

“I didn’t write Gangsta’s Paradise – it wrote me,” he said. “It was its own entity, out there in the spirit world, trying to find its way to the world, and it chose me as the vessel to come through.”

The Grammy, and the height of his popularity, came in 1996 during a fierce feud between the hip-hop communities of the two US coasts, which would take the lives of Tupac Shakur and The Notorious BIG soon after.

Coolio managed to stay mostly above the conflict.