Editor’s note: This story is part of That’s My Word, KQED’s year-long exploration of Bay Area hip-hop history.
B
efore Ryan Rollins became Ryan D of the rap group 51.50 Illegally Insane, he was a kid from a musical, churchgoing household in tiny Marin City, just north of San Francisco. His mother taught piano lessons, and he sang in choir. “We always had pianos in the house, I was always around music,” says Ryan, who today lives in Fairfield. “But as soon as the breakdance era hit, I was breaking.”
Breakdancing soon led to rapping, and Ryan bought a Roland TR-808, the drum machine whose percussive possibilities catalyzed the development of hip-hop. He soon linked up with one of the only other kids in Marin City with an 808: Darren “Klark Gable” Page, with whom he’d start the greatest rap group ever to come out of Marin City.
51.50 never hit it big, but they existed at an important time at the crossroads of East Bay and North Bay rap. Some members launched a group with Tupac Shakur, one of the world’s most legendary rap artists, who lived in Marin City for a time. And throughout the 1990s, 51.50’s raw, honest street anthems sold consistently at independent stores in the Bay Area and beyond, putting their small, predominantly Black city on the map.
From a Rich Tradition
Marin City, a community of 3,000 just north of the Golden Gate Bridge, was built in 1942 to accommodate workers at the WWII-era Marinship shipyards in Sausalito. Many current residents are descendants of those workers, some of whom moved from the South as part of the “Great Migration” of African Americans throughout the 20th century. An outlier within white, affluent Marin County, Marin City still has a disproportionately high percentage of Black residents today: 25%, compared to 3% in the county overall.