Peter Forrest, original ‘front-man’ of the pioneering rap-rock band 24/7 Spyz and known as P.Fluidhas been found beaten to death inside the ambulance he was driving on a street in the Bronx neighborhood of New York.
The 64-year-old musician’s co-workers had last spoken to him at eight in the morning and, after he missed some pickups and stopped answering the phone, they began to worry and used GPS to locate his vehicle. When they arrived they found the front door window broken and Forrest lying face down in the back of the vehicle.
According to the police report, he had been beaten to death, since the coroner indicated “multiple traumas” as the cause of death and the case is being investigated as a homicide. After hearing the news, neighborhood residents who did not want to be identified told ABC News that the driver was tied inside the ambulance and that they had seen signs of having been stabbed. “We are cooperating with the authorities to clarify what happened, it is a tragedy terrible for the family and our hearts go out to them,” an anonymous friend of the artist told the New York Daily News.
Founded in 1986, the band 24/7 Spyz was part of a cultural movement with a clear premise: white people stole rock’n’roll from black people (something they couldn’t with rap), so they would reclaim the blackness of their origin and would even create an organization, the Black Rock Coalitionof which other emblematic groups such as Living Color, Fishbone or Banzai Kik were part and which still continues to operate today and support black musicians in the face of “institutionalized racism in the recording industry.”
24/ Spyz defined themselves as ‘heavy metal soul’, in their first two albums, ‘Harder Than You’ (1989) and ‘Gumbo Millennium’ (1990), they fused hardcore, metal, rap and funk and their biggest success was a cover from ‘Jungle Boogie’ by Kool and the Gang, although their singles ‘Don’t Break My Heart’, ‘Grandma Dynamite’, ‘Stuntman’ and ‘Break the chains’. His concerts were known for the wild style of P. Fluid, who “would not stop jumping, climbing the rafters above the stage and singing screaming and screaming, as his guitarist Jimi Hazel (whose name combined that of two black heroes) described. of rock, Jimi Hendrix and Eddie Hazel of Parliament-Funkadelic).
The group was chosen by Jane’s Addiction as the opening act for the tour of the album ‘Ritual de lo Habitual’ in 1990, but by then irreconcilable differences had already emerged between the group and P. Fluid, who wanted to give more political content to his lyrics. . At the last concert of the tour, already in 1991, without his colleagues knowing anything, the singer announced from the stage that he was leaving the band.
His next project, P. Fluid Foundation, did not even release an album. In 1995 he briefly returned to his old band to record ‘Temporarily Disconnected’, but that same year he left on his own again to form another group, BlkVampires (Vampires Negros), with which he released an album in 2005 and two EPs in the 2010s. “I always had the idea of a BlkVampires concept long before the movie ‘Blade!’ But we have not been able to even get close to the level of influence and recognition that I would have liked,” he lamented in 2018.
24/7 Spyz continued their career without him, recording four more albums, ‘6’ (1996), ‘Heavy Metal Soul by the Pound’ (1996), ‘Face the Day’ (2006) and ‘The Soundtrack to the Innermost Galaxy’ (2019) and has continued to give concerts to this day, but Forrest’s career was more irregular. In 2008 he started a side project called AFC with Corey Glover and Angelo Moore of Living Colour, but they only released the single ‘Election Day’. And his journey with BlkVampires ended in 2019, when he decided to leave the group and embark on his first solo project, BlkVampiresX, with which he only released the single ‘Bike Ride in Manhattan/La Flaca Negra’ in 2022.
“What an interesting guy he was,” Hazel said to say goodbye to her former bandmate. «I am grateful to him because if we had not met on the street in 1986, 24/7 Spyz would not have existed. You either loved him or hated him, but if you loved him, you loved him unconditionally. “He was a son of a bitch, but he was a good son of a bitch.”
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