It was a Saturday in May 2025, and Rahim “V Knuckles” Muhammad was en route to the grand opening of a dispensary in Allston. He was on the team that brought the business through a punishing license approval process, and it was time for celebration. But though his many friends and relatives and colleagues showed up, he never made it to the party. On a major occasion years in the making, Knuckles landed in the hospital after a car crash.
As he documented on the wrenching “MRI” with Gio Dee and Phoniks in September: “Let me sit you down and explain/How I got to MGH and what they found in my brain/Was about to drop a new strain and hit the ground like a plane/Then woke up with a concussion from the sound of a bang … I’m stitched up, now I’m about to leave the ER/The doc said, No, now do one more test when they see scars/Now here’s the scary thing, some would think it’s a rumor/The MRI results came back, my brain had a tumor, damn.”
The fact of Knuckles passing nearly one year to the day of dropping that single is devastating for his closest friends and relatives, who are queasy with grief, reeling for his son Kaimani. It’s also an unfathomable nightmare for the Massachusetts music scene. For those who worship elevated, heady street rap from Boston to Berlin, this loss is especially incalculable. It ends the earthly reign of one of the genre’s most gifted and enduring underground duos.
Complementing his cousin in rhyme and flesh E’Flash, Knuckles was half of the group Natural Born Spitters, often abbreviated N.B.S.. Though well known as proud Cambridge stalwarts, both members were born on the Boston end of Massachusetts Avenue in Roxbury, with Rahim and his folks leaving the Madison Park Village townhomes to resettle in The Coast neighborhood in the ’90s. There, in what’s also known as Riverside between a culturally thriving Central Square and Memorial Drive, he found community that would nurture and shape the young athlete, scholar and artist. More knowledge came from opportunities at Concord Academy and then Howard University in Washington, D.C., for college, but it was music that would ultimately fly Knuckles to five other continents and inspire the tributes ringing around the globe in his untimely wake.
In an industry of narcissists compelled to hog the mic and spotlight, N.B.S. consistently exemplified creative selflessness toward a common goal. Like all unforgettable duos, they are stylistically distinct in tone and cadence, Flash pitching a naturally smooth whistle and Knuckles contrasting with his signature sandpaper vocals. Finishing each other’s rhymes and tag-teaming tough East Coast beats with the brutality of foundational dyads such as Mobb Deep or M.O.P., together they forged a single magnificent rap instrument, racking up millions of streams and touring outside of America several times.
In addition to the solo projects and guest features with hundreds of other artists that Knuckles and Flash cut over the course of 25 years in the booth, N.B.S. put out more than two dozen albums and mixtapes since 2003, mostly on the Cambridge indie label Big Bang Records. The group’s themes spanned flashy hustle fare to smoke-filled marijuana braggadocio, but some of the duo’s most staggering output was also its most sociopolitically charged, namely the internationally hailed “Trapped In America” series. A joint project with German rap production powerhouse the Snowgoons, its first installment in 2015 captured the stymied disillusionment of the Obama twilight years, while the 2020 sequel sorted through the rubble of Donald Trump’s first attempt at tyranny. They’re two of the best Massachusetts hip-hop LPs of all time, even if they are by way of Deutschland.
With that wide range of themes and breadth of rhyme experience, it is no surprise to see tears streaming from all corners of the rap map. Collaborators such as Onyx and Planet Asia have shared stories of touching down in Europe with N.B.S., adding to the tapestry of memories posted by Boston contemporaries. It’s a proper ongoing homage for a lost friend and rapper who was known to have the magnetism and charisma to get love in any room. With Knuckles gone, all those rooms seem empty, even if his voice, the Louis Armstrong rasp next to Flash, will always be remembered.
Information about Knuckles, with tributes from the family and N.B.S. music, is here.