Cover of The Slauson Crenshaw Lot, a biography of Nipsey Hussle

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3,336 words · no email, no account

No. 055 · Music · Hip-Hop

The Slauson Crenshaw Lot

a biography of Ermias Joseph Asghedom

Written by Solomon Treadway · Published 2025 · 64,205 words

What the book is

On a Sunday afternoon in March 2019, a man stood outside his own clothing store on Slauson Avenue, in the Crenshaw neighborhood where he had spent his whole life. He was thirty-three. He had just been nominated for a Grammy. Within minutes he would be dead on the pavement of the corner he had refused to leave.

Ermias Asghedom — known to the world as Nipsey Hussle — spent more than a decade building something the music industry could neither categorize nor contain. The son of an Eritrean refugee and a Black American mother, he came up through the Rollin' 60s, sold his debut mixtape out of the trunk of a car for a hundred dollars a copy, and turned a strip-mall storefront into a blueprint for neighborhood ownership. He called it the marathon. The pace was the point.

Solomon Treadway traces that long run from its first mile: the South Central of the eighties and nineties, the cousins lost and the cousins still here, the Eritrea trip that rearranged a young man's idea of what a Black man could inherit, the slow construction of Marathon Clothing and the Vector90 co-working space, the deals signed and the deals walked away from.

What emerges is a portrait of a particular kind of American ambition — patient, communal, rooted to a single intersection — and an accounting of what was built, and what was taken, in the space of one short life.

At a glance

Subject: Ermias Joseph Asghedom
Shelf: Music · Hip-Hop
Written by: Solomon Treadway
Chapters: 19 across 184 pages
Narrated by: Nadia Kerr
Editions: Paperback · Hardcover · EPUB · Audiobook
Authorisation: Unauthorised — no subject, estate or label had approval over the text.
Content notes: gun violence · homicide

Contents · 19 chapters

01The CornerRead free
02Ermias2,266 words
03The Rollin' 60s3,205 words
04Eritrea1,936 words
05Slauson Boy2,361 words
06Epic2,681 words
07Crenshaw $1002,941 words
08The Brand2,737 words
09Lauren2,320 words
10Buying Back the Block4,415 words
11Victory Lap3,523 words
12The Smart Store2,172 words
13The Day Before1,506 words
14Sunday Afternoon2,699 words
15The Snitch Word3,242 words
16Staples Center2,121 words
17The Trial5,291 words
18The Marathon Continues5,340 words
19The Marathon3,451 words

The opening chapter is published in full — read it here.

Editions

Paperback · $19.99: 6 × 9 in · 184 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · perfect-bound paperback
Hardcover · $24.99: 6 × 9 in · 184 pp · 60# uncoated cream, black ink · case laminate on the same text block
EPUB · $3.99: EPUB 3 · DRM-free · reads on Kindle, Kobo and Apple Books
ISBN 979-8-90470-036-2
Audiobook · $5.99: Unabridged · measured from the masters · read by Nadia Kerr
ISBN 979-8-90623-017-1

The printed edition has no ISBN registered yet. It affects library and retail listing, not your order.

Questions

Who is The Slauson Crenshaw Lot about?

Ermias Joseph Asghedom. The title never carries the subject's name: it names one concrete thing out of the life — in this case The Slauson Crenshaw Lot — and the name goes on the line underneath.

Is this an authorised biography?

No. No subject, estate, label or foundation had approval over the text, and none paid for a word of it. The cost of that independence is that no new interviews were conducted for the book; it is built from the public record, and it says on the page where a scene is reconstructed rather than documented.

Can I read some of it before buying?

Yes — the whole opening chapter and the writer's foreword, free and in full, with no email address and no account. That is 3,336 words of the book.

How long is it?

About 64,000 words, 19 chapters, 184 pages in the paperback.

What is the printed book like?

6 × 9 in, 60# uncoated cream, black ink, perfect-bound paperback, matte laminate. Every title in the series uses the same specification, so they line up on a shelf.

Does this book carry content warnings?

Yes: gun violence; homicide. They are listed before you buy rather than discovered afterwards. The material is handled as evidence, not as spectacle.

The writer

Solomon Treadway

Solomon Treadway is a Chicago-born culture critic whose biographies focus on Black American writers, intellectuals, and the post-war public sphere. His research utilizes deep archival investigations to reconstruct the social circles, political struggles, and literary debates that shaped mid-century American thought.

In works like The Chairman, Passing the Torch, and The Papers, Treadway traces how ideas move from private correspondence into the broader cultural consciousness. His writing emphasizes the everyday realities and collaborative networks behind major intellectual shifts, avoiding dry academic jargon in favor of clear, character-driven narrative history.

This book deals with

gun violence
homicide

Listed before you buy, not after.