Rap music can break your heart over and over again if you let it. Don’t get it twisted and think I mean you should become an emotionless robot who never feels shit. You should love hip-hop music and culture with your whole heart, chest out, and even if you wind up scarred for life it beats never feeling anything at all. You can’t know pleasure without pain.

Rufus Lee Cooper III knew a lot of pain in his life, but that’s not his name to a rap fan — you knew him better as Young Noble. His bi-coastal childhood bouncing between New Jersey and California prepared him well for friendship with 2Pac, who also started out on the East coast before claiming Westside to the whole world. Young Noble made his debut on “The Don Killuminati” two months after Shakur’s death, and legend holds that Noble was the last man Tupac added to The Outlawz before his demise.

The story goes like this — fellow New Jerseyite rapper Yaki Kadafi had already appeared on Pac’s 1995 album “Me Against the World.” If you didn’t know he was from the East you would have figured it out when he said “I’m from N-E-W Jerz where plenty murders occurs” on the infamous Biggie diss track “Hit ‘Em Up.” Anyway when he came to Cali the two linked up, Kadafi introduced Cooper to Shakur, and the rest was history. Tragically Kadafi was murdered before he could even hear his homeboy Noble’s appearances on “Hail Mary” and “Bomb First.”

For the rest of his career Young Noble would be inextricably linked to 2Pac and The Outlawz. There’s no doubt the death of two people so close to him, so foundational to him having a rap career, left the kind of deep emotional scars I talked about in the opening paragraph. To have both deaths happen in less than a year’s time span on top of that is tragedy I can barely comprehend. Time was not kind to their mutual friends either. Hussein Fatal passed in 2015. Big Syke a/k/a Mussolini passed a year later. The weight of carrying the memories of so many people close to him may have been too much to bear. On July 4th of this year Cooper made a choice he can’t live to regret.

It’s at this point I’d like to remind you that there’s always a choice. You can dial 988 or visit this website to find resources that will help. I’ve experienced this tragedy in my own life. My grandfather-in-law and father-in-law both made the decision Young Noble did. I’ve lost close personal friends who did the same thing — ones I went on road trips with, ones I went to conventions with, they were people who I talked to every week who never gave me any indication of their dark thoughts.

That’s why I find it even scarier when people DO give me warning signs. I have one friend I won’t name who routinely posts things like “the world wouldn’t miss me if I was gone” on social media. Now you might be cynical and say it’s attention seeking behavior, but I take it seriously every time, and I think you should too. If you’re feeling this low please talk to a friend, counselor, loved one, or even a stranger. Don’t hide your pain. Let the tragedy of Young Noble’s passing remind us that in a cold world, we hurt and we can be hurt, but we can ALSO help and be helped. No one has to suffer alone. RIP Rufus Lee Cooper III.