BeatKing, the Houston rapper and producer who built an empire out of knowingly anarchic Southern strip-club music, has died. As Houston’s ABC News affiliate reports, BeatKing’s manager Tasha Felder confirmed reports of his passing in an Instagram post last night. According to TMZ, he passed away yesterday after suffering a pulmonary embolism. BeatKing was 39.

BeatKing was born Justin Riley in Houston, and he started out playing music in church, drumming for his organist mother. When he started making music, though, BeatKing found himself far from the church. With his 2010 mixtape Kings Of The Club, BeatKing established his Club God persona and started to build a regional cult following. BeatKing’s style never varied too much from the blueprint that he set with his early tapes. He favorited thundering and simplistic 808 beats, catchy booming-chant hooks, and extremely nasty and funny lyrics about fucking. His music tied together historical strains of underground Southern rap, but there was never anything too intellectual about his music. He was trying to party.

BeatKing’s music was always Houston-centric, and that’s where he found much of his audience. Over the years, though, BeatKing’s style spread around the world, thanks to the internet. BeatKing first landed on my radar in 2014, when he and the late Three 6 Mafia great Gangsta Boo released their collaborative mixtape Underground Cassette Tape Music. The collaboration between Boo and BeatKing illustrates something else about his music: As ribald and dick-centric as BeatKing always was, his greatest collaborators were always women, and women were always his intended audience.

Over the years, BeatKing was a prolific force, cranking out a steady stream of mixtapes and independent albums. His videos often went viral, thanks to big hooks, ratchet antics, and BeatKing’s endless supply of novelty T-shirts. Often, he’d build tracks out of samples from viral WorldStar videos. He worked with a lot of big stars — Juicy J, 2 Chainz, Ludacris — but his most frequent collaborators were women from the underground Texas scene like Queendom Come and Big Jade.

In 2020, BeatKing’s song “Then Leave” went viral on TikTok and eventually achieved gold status, becoming one of his biggest-ever hits. His “Outside” remix, released earlier this year, is another viral hit. A few months ago, Nicki Minaj brought BeatKing out onstage at her Houston tour stop. Just last month, BeatKing released his album Never Leave Houston On A Sunday. Check out some of his work below.

RIP to one of Houston’s greatest producers and overall icons, long live Beatking and his shirts pic.twitter.com/3ZrZKRwgGI

— Adamabo (@semiinteresting) August 16, 2024