John Fletcher, who as Ecstasy of the hip-hop founding group Whodini was the engine of some of the genre’s first pop hits, wearing a fancy Zorro hat all the time, died on Wednesday. He was 56 years old.
Jonnelle Fletcher, her daughter, confirmed the death in a statement, but did not specify the cause or say where she died.
In the mid-1980s, Whodini – initially formed by Fletcher and Jalil Hutchins, who later joined DJ Grandmaster Dee (born Drew Carter) – launched a series of essential hits, including “Friends”, “Freaks Come Out at night ”And“ One Love. ”Whodini was introduced as a sophisticated street connoisseur with a pop ear, and Fletcher was the group’s outspoken character and the most alive rapper.
“I can’t sing,” he told The Los Angeles Times in 1987. “But I heard someone rap one day and I said to myself, ‘I can do this.’ I rap in the tone. I try to be unique. I have my own style. “
John Fletcher was born on June 7, 1964 and grew up in the Wyckoff Gardens projects in Boerum Hill, Brooklyn. He first worked with Mr. Hutchins, who was from neighboring Gowanus, when Mr. Hutchins was trying to record a theme song for the recently influential radio DJ Mr. Magic.
This collaboration received significant local attention, and Fletcher and Hutchins soon signed on to Jive Records, which named them Whodini. They quickly recorded “Magic’s Wand”, produced by Thomas Dolby, and “The Haunted House of Rock”, a Halloween song.
“Ecstasy was really one of the first rap stars,” Barry Weiss, the executive who hired them, wrote on Instagram. “Not just a brilliant voice and speaker, but also a womanizer and sex symbol when they were very rare in the early days of rap. Whodini helped to lead a female audience to what had been a traditional male art form. “
Most of the group’s initial material was recorded in London, when Mr. Fletcher had just finished high school. Their eponymous debut album from 1983 was produced by Conny Plank, who had also produced the bands Kraftwerk and Neu! Whodini also toured Europe before finding real success in the United States.
“We didn’t go to university and get a college degree, but that was our education, just seeing the world,” said Fletcher in a 2018 interview for the YouTube channel HipHop40.
On his next album, “Escape” (1984), Whodini started working with producer Larry Smith, who amplified his sound and gave an attractive touch. (Mr. Smith was also responsible for the successful Run-DMC albums.) “Escape” contained the songs that would become Whodini’s seminal hits, notably “Friends” and “Five Minutes of Funk” (released as flip-sides on the same 12-inch single) and “Freaks Come Out at Night”.
“Friends”, a skeptical narration song about deception, was a success in itself and had a robust afterlife as sample material, especially in Nas and Lauryn Hill’s “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That)” .
“Five Minutes of Funk” – which would become even better known as the theme song for the hip-hop video show “Video Music Box” – implanted a smart countdown motif woven through the lyrics. “When creating this song,” Mr. Fletcher told HipHop40, “we imagined it shrill from the project windows as we walked through it on a summer day.”
As hip-hop was starting to gain global notoriety, Whodini was consistently close to the center of the action. The group was run by rising entrepreneur Russell Simmons and appeared on the inaugural tour of Fresh Fest, the first hip-hop arena package.
But while Run-DMC was taking hip-hop into more daring territory, Whodini remained committed to smoothness. “We were the rap group that kind of bridged the gap between bands and rappers,” Fletcher told HipHop40, adding that he and Hutchins were aware that hip-hop was still struggling to gain acceptance among radio programmers, and wrote songs accordingly: “We wanted to curse, but we couldn’t curse.”
Mr. Fletcher was also a key innovator in introducing the melody to rap. “Ecstasy was the lead singer on most of Whodini’s songs because anything we played he could rap straight to the pitch,” said Hutchins in an interview with hip-hop website The Foundation.
“Escape” went platinum and Whodini’s next two albums, “Back in Black” (1986) and “Open Sesame” (1987), both went gold. In “One Love” (from “Back in Black”), which had tracks of the sound that soon merged into a new jack swing, Mr. Fletcher was reflective, almost gloomy:
The words ‘love’ and ‘like’ have four letters
But these are two completely different things
Because I liked many women in my time
But just like the wind, they all blew
Havelock Nelson and Michael A. Gonzales, in their book “Bring the Noise: A Guide to Rap Music and Hip-Hop Culture” (1991), described Whodini as “a beautifully maintained building in the middle of Brooklyn’s ghetto paradise, personal characters floating smoothly through a turbulent sea of radical attitude and crushing madness. “
Largely because of the group’s style. Whodini dressed elegantly: leather jackets, sometimes shirtless; flowing pants or short shorts; moccasins. Most importantly, Fletcher’s flat-brimmed leather hats, which became his signature look, inspired by a woolen gaucho he saw in a store on Brooklyn’s Myrtle Avenue, which he remade in leather. Before long, he had several.
“He had them in red; he had them in white; two in black, one with an African helmet, ”said Hutchins in a 2013 interview with Alabama’s AL.com website. “He had different ones, but the original was his favorite.”
Whodini was also one of the first hip-hop groups to use dancers in their shows. Young Jermaine Dupri had one of his first opportunities as a dancer in the group. He later returned the favor by hiring Whodini for his label, So So Def, for which he released his final album, “Six”, in 1996. Whodini continued to perform frequently in the 2000s.
Information about Mr. Fletcher’s survivors, in addition to his daughter, was not immediately available.