September 23, 2008 @ 3:38 pm

What Happened To G. Dep?

Linda Hobbs

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Rapper reappears in Internet video…says he’s still down with Bad Boy

G. Dep, the former Bad Boy Records “Harlem Shake” pioneer, has seen better days. Today World Star Hip Hop posted a video of the rapper, who’s been under the radar for years, sitting in a park in New York discussing his desperate strides toward making a comeback.

Most recently, Dep dropped the DJ E.Nyce–hosted mixtape Deponomics. Now he says, “We got the G.Ometry coming soon. We’re trying to holla at Primo [for beats].”

The Harlem native started off as a “cameo rapper” on Bad Boy, before dropping his critically acclaimed debut album, Child of the Ghetto, in 2001. The song featured the hit single “Special Delivery” and "Let's Get It," made the whole world do a goofy dance called the Harlem Shake, and catapulted Dep into blinding star status.

But soon Dep (along with Loon and Black Rob, other fellow Bad Boy artists from the early millennium) quickly saw his career dissolve. On January 15, 2007, Dep was arrested for breaking a display cell phone during an argument with a T-mobile rep, the New York Daily News reported. Dep’s bail was $750. Unable to pay it, he remained locked up in N.Y.’s Rikers Island for 23 days.

Many fans wondered how did things get so bad. Dep admitted to the Daily News that before Child of the Ghetto, he signed a $350,000 five-album contract with Sean “Diddy” Combs.

“There’s a lot of things I should have looked into,” Dep told the Daily News. “At the time, I didn’t think about it too much…. When you got P. Diddy pulling up in the Johnson projects in a sky-blue Bentley, you don’t ask a lot of questions.”

Dep eventually blew the money and fell victim to a drug addiction.

In the World Star Hip Hop video, Dep— wearing a brown hoodie and looking somewhat lost—said that he accepts his current standstill on the label.

“Right now, the situation over there is like, if you’re not in motion, you’re in slow motion,” he said. “So, slow motion is better than nothing. So right now we’re on our grind. We just gon’ get our thing going and y’all gon’ see it live…whenever it happens…it’s going to happen sooner than later.”

Article tags: G. Dep, Sean "Diddy" Combs, Mase, Black Rob, Loon 

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