New American Songbook

Scrolling through the end of year “best of” lists is a great reminder of how much music I don’t listen to--the lists could just as easily be titled “music you missed”. It’s easy to become insecure-- the absence of familiar names on the list could indicate your once cool and edgy tastes becoming irrelevant. Worse, unfamiliarity with the current fashion in music could be a symptom of ossifying preferences: not just becoming out of touch, but becoming set in ways. A web search for “best hip hop 2018” returns a gajillion results, but what it will never answer is the first question: “says who?” Hip hop has always been an art that is simultaneously high- and low-brow, global and hyperlocal, punk and establishment, and, as such, comparisons should always be contextualized, certainties are always subjective and rankings rarely reflect reality. This is all to say that hip hop is vast, and the search for the best of it is unending and ultimately futile. A list of all the albums merely released

Those close to me know that I am not a fan of the sequel or, even worse, the series, and that I consider the contemporary franchising of narrative a cultural malady of the same sort as the uselessly iterative paintings of Thomas Kincaid, or the entirety of the Oriental Trading Company catalog. It’s just capitalist overproduction and we’d be far better without it. So you’d think it might follow that the recent release of "The Miseducation of Eunice Waymon" would be easy for me to dismiss. The album, by producer Amerigo Gazaway, is a mashup of songs by Fugees emcee and hip hop legend Lauryn Hill, and the jazz and soul icon Nina Simone — nothing new here, just repackaged, right? Wrong. Sewn together with clips from interviews with each musician, the album elevates them to new heights, putting them in conversation with each other and making it sound like the collaboration was always meant to be. Gazaway is a master at this, with several mashup albums already in his catalog, but this is

Chicago emcee Mick Jenkins has been at the top of my favorite list since his debut release, "Water[s]." He’s a highly competent rapper and musician, but more importantly, he’s a fantastic writer. His latest release, called "Pieces of a Man," is maybe his most literary composition. He takes the title from a Gil-Scott Heron piece and, in case you didn’t catch that association, he includes two skits of spoken word work, complete with a backing jazz band, just to make it a little more obvious. "Pieces of a Man" continues Jenkins’ style of interweaving profound introspection with trenchant observations, and sometimes reprimands, of society. He’s trying to grow, to find his spot beyond the bare minimum of survival. Where many people may not relate to common hip hop themes of a particular kind of street life, Jenkins’ strategy relies on articulating universal interior dramas that underlie his specific external situation. You can dig it, is what I’m saying. Jenkins is an expert at constructing

The new album from Vince Staples, ‘FM!’, picks up pretty much where he left off three albums ago with ‘Summertime ‘06’. Back then, summer was a malevolent season, at times even Lovecraftian--the heat of the season was an alien occupation, inspiring desperate acts. On ‘FM!’, a kind of truce has been achieved. Summertime and its corresponding themes aren’t quite as hostile, and while Staples’ narrative continues to brilliantly interweave abject tragedy with humor and moments of credible humanity, he seems like he’s having a little more fun, even if qualified. Fittingly, the album begins with the premise that because it feels like summertime all the time, we should behave as if it were summertime all of the time. ‘FM!’ isn’t quite a manifesto for the age beyond our current slow-motion climate change apocalypse, but it does convey a sense of global-warming-chic that will only become more common as the deserts grow and the seas begin to boil off. The album was released right around the

The debut novel from Angie Thomas, The Hate U Give , takes its title from an extemporaneous monologue delivered by rap icon Tupac Shakur. In it, he expands his interpretation of gangsta rap’s main trope: the criminal and revolutionary identity he calls ‘thug life’. As he sees it, thug life is a response to the inherent racism and classism of American politics and culture. The novel explores this concept over the course of the plot, which centers on a police shooting witnessed by the protagonist, a young black woman named Starr. The book most resembles the events in Ferguson, Missouri, after the killing of Michael Brown, but the book’s city, Garden Heights, is fictional-- which is to say, this resembles what happens everywhere so much so that we don’t need to imagine a specific city at all. The novel avoids becoming a polemic by situating the bulk of the conflict and driving action in Starr’s interior experience. The story is really about how this particular young woman navigates the

The Chicago emcee Noname says that she writes lullaby raps, but maybe that’s a Midwest-humble way of saying that her music is deadly, just at a lower volume. Her first album, Telefone , played like a summer afternoon hanging out with your best friend; on Room 25 , her recently-released follow up album, much of the sound has stayed consistent, but the tone is more grim and sharply political in parts. Noname avoids digging too deep into politics, largely through her skill as an orator, but she’s also helped by the distinctive instrumentation of her band, which relies on R&B chords, wandering keyboard lines and introspective melodies. It’s not groundbreaking, but it is a different sound than the highly produced hip hop that dominates the genre. It’s extremely easy to go adrift with Noname as she follows her own trains of thought, and it’s wonderful, too.

Twenty years ago, Talib Kweli and Mos Def released ‘Black Star’, an album that was as much monumental celebration of everything hip hop as it was a signal achievement of an era on its way out. That era, the Golden Age of hip hop, gets dated from the late eighties to the mid to late nineties, and was a time of incredible diversity in hip hop: gangsta rap aired alongside conscious hip hop; Outkast had a couple of hit songs, but so did the Fresh Prince. There seemed to be room for everybody. What makes ‘Black Star’ stand out, even twenty years later, is it’s intentional historicity. You can feel a certain amount of de Tocqueville and certainly Whitman in the observational and literary skill from each of the emcees, but that’s not quite right. Better is how the album evokes--and often quotes--James Baldwin, Angela Davis and Toni Morrison to craft a vision of hip hop and America that gives it the curious, and rare, quality of being in its time, but not of it.

The philosopher Timothy Morton has observed that poetic imagery, like light, is delivered in discrete, quantized packets, one after the other after the other. There are convenient coincidences along with this: our eyes see at a certain number of frames per second, our ears can only hear so much at any given moment. There are both limitations to our perception of reality, and to the communication of reality itself.

The West, and America specifically, has a long-standing problem of confusing the vast and diverse continent of Africa for a homogeneous country called Africa. There are, of course, reasons for this, many of them racist, but some are more literary. African American narrative has often used “Africa” as a device to indicate and imagine both an inspirational past and aspirational future, and in hip hop there are many notable examples of this: Nas’ “If I Ruled the World”, for one, and more recently, the fantastic 2017 track from southern rapper CyHi the Prynce called “Nu Africa.” I first heard this song a few weeks ago, just after President Trump tweeted a racist canard about eminent white genocide in South Africa. Like so many things in America, our greatest aspirations always seem to carry with them the stain of a bleak and unforgivable past. My pairing of CyHi’s song and Trump’s tweet isn’t arbitrary: the dark double of positivist diasporic imagination is the racist paranoiac fantasy of

The emcee Action Bronson recently released a cookbook — I can’t say the real title in polite company, but let’s just say that it’s the less kid-friendly version of “Holy moly, that’s delicious.” While Bronson makes his figurative bread and butter in music, a large part of his persona as an emcee is regaling his audience with as many tales of his culinary exploits as with other similarly Bacchanalian pursuits.

There’s a moment in ‘Spa 700’ where you find your bearings, just barely: the tempo solidifies, a melody emerges and stanzas form. Then you realize that only four minutes have passed since the beginning of this fourteen-minute release from Philly musicians DJ Haram and Moor Mother.

There are cloth mesh barriers lining the steel girders underneath the railroad bridge in downtown Wichita. The bridge, nicknamed the ‘pigeon bridge’, was a home to a roost of the birds--a few weeks before the mesh went up, live traps were placed, pocketed between beams, and the birds’ numbers dwindled. That the pigeon has a pedigree more noble than its circumstances is a fact often overlooked in discussions that center on what to do about the bird. The species is amazingly versatile, and even as a metaphor, the pigeon is a capable ally. The pigeon is the bird of the working poor, as described by Vast Aire in this song by Cannibal Ox, called ‘Pigeon’: It’s difficult to avoid comparison between the eviction of the pigeons from the Douglas Street bridge, and the renovation of Naftzger Park just across the street, which has resulted in the eviction of the unhoused or working poor that visited the park. It’s unclear where the remaining pigeons will relocate now that their flock has been

"The Hip Hop Way" originally aired December 16, 2016. There’s a scene in the 1997 documentary "Rhyme and Reason" where the emcee Taz demonstrates how to hand someone a hat. It isn’t enough to merely give someone a hat, he explains, you have to hand it to them in a hip hop way. As he performs the difference, you can see he knows this is over the top, but you can also see there’s a part of this that’s true: There is a hip hop way to hand someone a hat, and it’s a little funkier than any other way. I think about this scene nearly every time I put on a ball cap—a slight tilt of the brim to one side is standard, and like Taz, I know this is both over the top and also, at the same time, serious. Culture is quilted together by the threads of these small gestures; the daily performance of the incidental trains our minds to see reality in a certain way. In other words, the vocabulary of hip hop culture is expressed in more than raps on tape, or ciphers on the corner, although it’s expressed

Scientific concepts have long existed in hip hop music, sometimes expressed in the mathematics of Five Percenter ideology, or in more procedural ways, like referring to the recording studio as a laboratory, suggesting the crafting of music is akin to the creation of a science experiment. And while these themes are widespread, my guess is that if you ask a hip hop fan which emcee they most associate with science, 9 out of 10 of them will answer with the GZA of the Wu-Tang clan.

I’ve been really impressed with the hip hop coming out of Chicago lately--emcees like Mick Jenkins, Noname and of course Chance the Rapper have developed a wonderful and distinct sound and emotional range that feels rare in contemporary hip hop.

In 1992, the rap-metal group Body Count released one of the more infamous songs that you’ve probably never heard. The song, "Cop Killer," generated a ton of controversy--even then-President Bush chimed in--and it was eventually removed from the album, but not necessarily for the reason you might think. When asked about it, Ice-T explained that he removed the song because “it got out of hand...let’s get back to real issues, not a record, but the cops that are out there killing people.” The reaction to Childish Gambino’s new release “This is America” has been similar insofar as it’s missed the forest for the trees. The speed with which the conversation about the video became more about how many times a person watched it, or how many Easter eggs they could decode, was remarkable, especially for a video and song that is stunningly straightforward in its message. Spoiler alert: It’s about white supremacy and police brutality. A common refrain online is that the video rewards multiple views,

Hip hop has always been fascinated with itself--one of the music’s unique and endearing qualities is its constant self-reflection and self-assessment. This is great for true fans--there’s nothing an enthusiast loves more than to constantly talk about their enthusiasm--but it’s often difficult for casual or first-time listeners to get into it.

In 1989, the first year that rap music was included as a category in the Grammy Awards, half of the winning duo boycotted the show altogether. The winning act, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince, felt slighted by the exclusion of the category from the television broadcast. The emcee, Will Smith, along with several other nominees, declined to participate. The rap group Salt N Pepa put it succinctly, saying “if they don’t want us, we don’t want them.” If the 1989 Grammys indicated the acceptance of hip hop into a certain level of popular culture--acknowledged, but still marginalized--then the 2018 Pulitzer Prize award for music could be taken as a culmination of a 30-year journey from outlier to absolute cultural hegemony. Even if you’ve never listened to Kendrick Lamar’s winning album, DAMN , you have likely heard its songs in movies, NBA commercials, video games and more. This is a good thing. But, while Pulitzer is, I’m told, a venerable institution, I want to be careful to keep Salt

A term that is gaining more popularity over the past few years is the Anthropocene.

Bad Boy Records, founded by Sean “Puffy” Combs in 1993, was a cultural force in the mid-90’s.