Tone Capone, the Bay Area producer who turned Luniz’s “I Got 5 On It” into one of the most recognizable records in West Coast hip-hop, has died at 59.
Capone, born Anthony Douglas Gilmour, died Saturday, September 12th. Close family members shared news of his death the following day, according to KQED, which first reported his passing. No cause of death has been announced.
Although “I Got 5 On It” became the record permanently attached to his name, Capone’s production catalog ran through decades of Northern California rap. He worked with E-40, Mac Dre, Celly Cel, 3XKrazy, Andre Nickatina and others before carrying his slow-rolling production style into Houston sessions with Scarface and Devin the Dude.
His records could be melodic without losing their weight. Soul and funk references sat against firm drums, low bass and keyboard parts that gave some of the Bay Area’s hardest rap records an unexpectedly musical center.
“I Got 5 On It” Started at Capone’s House
The record that defined Capone’s career began before Luniz had a national audience.
Yukmouth and Numskull were still young Oakland rappers when they brought Capone an idea built around Club Nouveau’s “Why You Treat Me So Bad.” Capone already knew the record from his years as a DJ and began rebuilding its recognizable musical foundation for the duo.
Michael Marshall became another essential piece. The former Timex Social Club singer had known Capone since their Berkeley High School days, and Capone brought him into the session when Luniz needed someone to turn their rough hook into something more melodic.
“Originally, we rapped the hook but Tone Capone wanted a singer on it,” Yukmouth recalled in The Guardian’s oral history of the song.
Marshall reshaped and sang the hook, while Capone’s production gave it the dark, immediately recognizable groove underneath.
The combination transformed a local concept about friends pooling money for marijuana into a crossover record. Released in 1995, “I Got 5 On It” reached No. 8 on the Billboard Hot 100 and became Luniz’s defining hit.
For Capone, its success created something larger than one production credit. The sound of the record became an international introduction to a style of Bay Area rap that had largely grown through its own independent ecosystem.
Capone Rebuilt the Groove Instead of Copying It
The production story is more complicated than saying Capone simply sampled Club Nouveau.
“Why You Treat Me So Bad” supplied the recognizable musical idea, but Capone later said he replayed that central material rather than lifting the passage directly from the original master recording. In practical terms, he created an interpolation, reconstructing the musical idea with different sounds while preserving what listeners recognized.
In a detailed interview about the song, Capone described his approach: he pushed the bass higher and doubled it with electric piano, while bells replaced the strings heard in Club Nouveau’s arrangement.
Listen closely and those choices help explain why “I Got 5 On It” feels both familiar and slightly unsettling. Its bass moves with deliberate weight while the chiming keyboard figure hangs above the drums, giving the groove a darker character than its source material.
Capone said the experience encouraged him to continue replaying musical ideas rather than relying exclusively on direct samples. Reconstructing a part gave him control over the individual sounds, allowing him to retain a recognizable melody without inheriting every drum hit, vocal or instrumental element surrounding it on the original recording.
Actual samples still appear elsewhere in “I Got 5 On It,” including material from Audio Two’s “Top Billin’” and Kool & the Gang’s “Jungle Boogie.” The famous melodic foundation, however, involved Capone rebuilding the groove himself.
That combination of recognition and reconstruction helped make the beat durable enough to survive well beyond 1995.
His Sound Became Part of Bay Area Rap
Capone’s career did not begin or end with Luniz.
Born in Berkeley and raised largely in North Oakland, he learned to DJ while attending Berkeley High School. He played college and house parties with friend and future producer Nick Peace before moving more deeply into studio work.
By the 1990s, his productions were appearing across a Bay Area rap scene developing largely outside the traditional centers of the record industry.
The Los Angeles Times highlights Mac Dre’s “Fire” and “Not My Job,” E-40’s “Ring It” and 3XKrazy’s “Keep It on the Real” among the records carrying Capone’s production.
His credits also included Celly Cel, Dru Down, Andre Nickatina, Seagram and other artists tied to Northern California’s independent rap network.
Those records placed him within the Bay Area’s mobb music tradition, where thick bass, funk-derived keyboards and slower tempos could create a heavy groove without simply duplicating the brighter G-funk associated with Southern California.
Capone brought his own version of that approach. His productions often left enough room for a rapper’s voice to sit clearly in the center while melodic details gave the beat an identity that could survive without the vocal.
“I Got 5 On It” became the largest example, but records such as “Keep It on the Real” and his work with Mac Dre show that the sound was not a one-song accident.
Scarface Took Capone’s Sound Beyond California
Oakland eventually led Capone toward Houston.
His work with Seagram, an Oakland rapper signed to Rap-A-Lot Records, helped connect him with Scarface. Capone subsequently became part of the production team surrounding Scarface’s 1997 album The Untouchable.
The record opened at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 and was certified platinum. Capone contributed production alongside a team that included Scarface, Mike Dean and N.O. Joe, Stereogum notes.
The Untouchable also contained “Smile,” Scarface’s collaboration with Tupac Shakur and one of the album’s defining singles. Capone’s role was part of the album’s wider production team rather than a claim to that specific track.
His connection with Houston continued beyond the album. Capone worked repeatedly with Scarface and also produced for Devin the Dude and Z-Ro, extending a Bay Area sensibility into another regional rap scene built heavily around independent labels, funk and bass-driven production.
Later credits stretched farther still, including work with Lloyd Banks and Black Moon, but Northern California and Houston remained the clearest geographic threads running through his catalog.
The crossover made musical sense. Neither scene required rap production to move quickly. Capone could let a bass line, keyboard phrase and drum pattern sit in place long enough for the rapper to control the movement.
“I Got 5 On It” Found Another Life in Us
More than two decades after its release, Capone’s most famous production became unsettling in an entirely different context.
Jordan Peele used “I Got 5 On It” prominently in his 2019 horror film Us, first allowing the original to play as familiar ’90s nostalgia before transforming it into the ominous orchestral “Tethered Mix” associated with the film’s darker imagery.
The placement exposed how much unease had always existed inside Capone’s beat.
The chiming melody and low bass that made the original hypnotic could become threatening when slowed down and rearranged. A song widely remembered as a weed anthem suddenly sounded like horror music without losing its identity.
Yukmouth joked in The Guardian that the slowed version was “spooky,” while Capone saw a more tangible effect from the revival.
In 2019, he estimated that payments connected with the hit had risen dramatically following its use in Us. TheWrap documented how the film renewed attention around both the song and the musical lineage behind it.
The record also appeared in another 2019 Bay Area film, The Last Black Man in San Francisco, reinforcing its status as something more enduring than a mid-’90s crossover hit.
By then, “I Got 5 On It” had become a piece of Northern California musical shorthand.
One Beat Should Not Obscure the Rest
Capone’s death has understandably returned attention to the record most listeners know.
Yet reducing his career to “I Got 5 On It” misses the network of regional music surrounding it. His catalog connects Berkeley and Oakland house parties, the independent Bay Area rap business of the 1990s, Mac Dre and E-40 records, Rap-A-Lot sessions in Houston and a Scarface album that reached No. 1 nationally.
KQED’s remembrance places him squarely within the mobb music tradition and emphasizes how many of his productions remain in regular Bay Area rotation.
That regional footprint matters because producers can disappear behind the artists whose names appear on the record. Capone’s biggest beat became universally recognizable while his own name remained considerably less famous outside hip-hop circles.
His career also captured a period when Bay Area rap could build its own language without waiting for national approval. Independent labels, local radio, regional slang and producers with distinctive drum and keyboard choices created records that sounded geographically specific.
Capone was one of the people behind that sound.
Tone Capone Leaves a Groove That Kept Traveling
No cause of death had been disclosed as of September 18th, and public memorial arrangements had not been announced.
Capone had been living in the Las Vegas area since 2021 after spending most of his musical life connected to Northern California.
His catalog leaves several ways to hear what he contributed: the thick pulse of a Mac Dre record, the slower menace of his Scarface work, the funk underneath Bay Area mobb music and the bells that make “I Got 5 On It” identifiable within seconds.
That record traveled farther than anyone involved initially expected. It became a Top 10 single, a permanent piece of West Coast rap and, decades later, the musical centerpiece of a major horror film.
The song survived because its parts were strong enough to change context without losing their identity.
Tone Capone built the part that still hits first.