Zack Stoner dedicated his life to documenting parts of Chicago that few outsiders with video cameras ever bother to visit. He uploaded his interviews to YouTube as ZackTV, so you could call him a vlogger—his channel, ZackTV1, has more than 175,000 subscribers. You could call him a journalist too, because he did tremendous work capturing local artists in their elements, sometimes before anyone outside Chicago knew who they were—Chief Keef, 600 Breezy, Rico Recklezz, Queen Key, FBG Duck. But neither “journalist” nor “vlogger” adequately describes him. He pursued his work with an activist zeal that bordered on the missionary.

Stoner began uploading clips to the ZackTV1 channel in July 2009. The next year, drill originator Larry “Pac Man” Johnson was shot to death, and with his passing the genre grew into a Chicago phenomenon. When it broke out nationally in 2012, Stoner was at the center of the action. In February 2012 he uploaded one of the first interviews with Chief Keef, who was under house arrest at his grandmother’s Washington Park apartment and still a month shy of releasing his breakthrough mixtape, Back From the Dead. Around the time of that interview, Stoner met Merk Murphy, who was working with Keef’s management (he now manages Ty Money). “Zack always had a reputation of knowing who the artists were and having a leg up on getting content on them,” Murphy says.

Amaris and Stoner became friends four years ago, after running into each other at a DTLR shoe store—they ended up sitting outside and talking for several hours. “He listened more than probably anybody in the city,” Amaris says. “If you was telling a story, he’d want to know A through Z and what happened, and he gonna ask you every time you say something, ‘How did this happen?’ ‘Why did this happen?’ ‘How did you feel about that?’ And if you say something dramatic he’s gonna say, ‘Whoa, are you serious?!’”

Stoner’s brief career was full of such mutually beneficial collaborations. “Me and Dave were doing mixtapes, and any artists that came through us, we had Zack do an interview with them,” Amaris says. “Any artist that came through Zack for an interview, he pushed them our way to get their music heard or mixtapes hosted, or just simply dealing with us to get their music out here.”

Zack Stoner’s funeral will be held at Gatling’s Chapel (10133 S. Halsted) at noon on Saturday, June 9, preceded by a wake at 11:30 AM.