Saturday night at the IBEW Hall on Freeport Street in Dorchester, Cekret Society’s Tek.MP found himself in an unfamiliar situation. Instead of a crowd of excited partygoers, he had an audience made up of mourners. These people knew him not as Tek but simply as Tyrone from State Street, a close friend and co-worker of Stacey Nestor. In December, two days after her 30th birthday, Nestor was diagnosed with an aggressive form of colorectal cancer, and the family had rushed a benefit concert into production. But Nestor passed away before it came to fruition, and on Saturday, Tek was in Dorchester to say goodbye the only way he knew how: through hip-hop.

So often, the mainstream media cite hip-hop music and its attendant culture as being harsh, violent, and uncompromising. Hip-hop deaths make the headlines only when they’re garish and sensational. Last Saturday, there was a lesson to be learned from a tribute to a girl who lived a good life, loved hip-hop, and died far too soon.

Pictures of Stacey in happier times invited people into the hall. The mood was somber. A couple hundred of Stacey’s closest friends and family members were in attendance. As a DJ spun Top 40 hip-hop, family members spoke about Stacey and the positive impact she’d had on their lives. Tek told fellow Boston rapper DL (a/k/a Daniel Laurent) that he’d lost his father and his uncle to cancer recently. Then Tek gingerly picked up the microphone, started to move to the beat, and, with DL at his side, tactfully put his tribute into high gear. He performed “Main Squeeze,” one of the hottest tracks off Top Cekret Mixtape (Cekret Society Records). “Let’s party for a minute, for Stacey,” he said. He seemed almost in a trance, ripping into a song that’s a touching tribute to his better half.

Tek and DL came center stage for a rendition of their “Headlines.” Then DL addressed the crowd, telling us he’d written a song for the event — in fact, he’d written it only three hours ago. It was called “Answers,” and he asked Tek to sit next to him on the corner of the stage while he performed it. “Looking at the world for some answers,” he rapped while Tek got the crowd to clap along with him. “Stare at the sky/Look at the ground but nobody answers/Got a million questions, I need some answers/What goes around comes back ’roun.” For a moment, people in the crowd smiled. By the end of the night, they’d raised $11,000 toward the Nestor family’s medical bills.

Editor’s note: Two weeks ago, this column noted that some attendees at Harpers Ferry’s “Paper” dance night looked as if they were under 21. We did not mean to say that they actually were under 21, or to suggest that the management of Harpers Ferry had been lax in enforcing the age requirement for admission to a club that serves alcohol. The Phoenix is sorry for any confusion that may have resulted.

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Matthew M. Burke: mmbjournalism@yahoo.com