Rising rapper and model Chynna Rogers dead at age 25

Chynna, a rising Philadelphia-born, Brooklyn-based rapper and model affiliated with A$AP Mob, has died, according to her manager, John Miller. “Chynna was deeply loved and will be sorely missed,” read a family statement released Wednesday evening in conjunction with Miller’s email confirmation of the tragic news. Chynna, whose full name was Chynna Marie Rogers, was 25 years old. A cause of death was not revealed at press time.

Chynna began her career as a fashion model at age 14, after she was discovered by a scout from Ford Models at the Six Flags Great Adventure amusement park in Jackson, N.J. A year later, she struck up a friendship with A$AP Yams (real name: Steven Rodriguez), founder of the New York hip-hop collective A$AP Mob, after she tweeted him asking to be his intern. Instead, she became Yams’s mentee, as he encouraged her to write her own rhymes.

Eventually, Chynna released solo singles like 2013’s “Selfie” and 2014’s “Glen Coco,” which received critical praise and millions of spins on Spotify and SoundCloud. She also began performing with A$AP Mob, including at the South by Southwest festival in Austin, Texas, in 2015. She released her first EP, This Isn’t Happening, that same year.

Chynna frequently addressed the subject of death in her music — which she once described to Pitchfork as being “for angry people with too much pride to show how angry they are” — like on her 2016 EP Music 2 Die 2 and her final release in December 2019, in case i die first. Inspired to speak out after Yams’s overdose death in 2015, she was also brutally honest in both her lyrics and interviews about her struggles with opioid addiction. In 2016, on the three-month anniversary of her sobriety, she celebrated by dropping the psychedelic mixtape Ninety, and in a 2017 interview with Vibe, she opened up about her decision to get clean.

"I felt crazy. I didn't want to be a statistic. I didn't want to go out that way and people be like, 'I told you so,’ or glamorize [drug use], because I don't feel like that,” Chynna told Vibe. “It was nerve-wracking to be open, but when you see how many more people who are dealing with the same thing, it's good to have some kind of example of someone you didn't expect to be going through it."

Chynna’s final Instagram post, on the day before her death announcement, included a video clip of a 2016 interview in which she said, “I think there’s too many soundtracks to our lives. I need music to die to.”

Chynna is survived by her father, Michael Magness, her brothers, Jeremy Payne and Michael Magness, and her sister, Nala Magness.

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