For 50 years, the essential writing — fables, comedies, diaries; adventure, memoir, porn — about young Black life in this country has been happening in hip-hop. Songs about feelings, fantasies, dilemmas, confessions, fantasias. What else is Notorious B.I.G.’s “Ready to Die” and its grueling, knowing, melodic re-creation of moral decay and sexual congress other than a triumph of literature? It is but one title on a shelf buckling with scores of comparable powerhouses. That’s one masterpiece set in New York.
What eventually brews in Houston and Atlanta, Miami, New Orleans and Memphis, in Virginia and California, deepens hip-hop, takes it into freaky, funky, bouncy, hilarious, mischievously brewed realms, dark, dreamy, unstable landscapes. Frailty, paranoia, trippiness, Afrocentrism and minimalism emerge. It’s music mining the past but potently about the present, often about itself. Hip-hop kids didn’t know a national struggle for civil rights as more than lore or part of a lesson plan. They had experienced personal strife — the struggle for food, shelter, safety, stability, jobs and respect. How many of these artists came of age in or adjacent to public housing and the criminal-justice system? Plight was in the art.
Hip-hop represents a break with the past because it exploded out of something that broke: this country’s promise to its Black citizens. And unlike aspects of jazz and Motown, this new music wouldn’t be arguing for its resplendence, worthiness and incomparable ingenuity. Salves, appeasement, subtlety, civility, love — those evidently didn’t work because here we are. Bring the noise.
Its practitioners may have attended church, but there’s little church in this music, especially during its first waves, just communal jubilation and the streets. “La di da di, we like to party” alongside “I never prayed to God, I prayed to Gotti.” Hip-hop arose from want. It thrived in gain. The average love song culminates in consumption, brandishing what has been consumed. Capitalism has been trying to turn its back on Black America and to break Black America’s back. Hip-hop is Julia Roberts after being written off in “Pretty Woman” by that snooty sales lady: Big mistake. Big. Huge.
You can read Wesley’s full celebration here.
Lives Lived: Sixto Diaz Rodriguez, who performed as Rodriguez, recorded two albums in the early 1970s that went virtually unnoticed in the U.S. But he developed a devoted following abroad, and was the subject of a 2012 documentary that won an Academy Award. He died at 81.
SPORTS NEWS
Women’s World Cup: Spain faces the Netherlands in a quarterfinal match tonight at 9 p.m. Eastern.
124 pitches: In his first home start, Michael Lorenzen threw a no-hitter for the Phillies.
Henry Ruggs: The former wide receiver for the Raiders was sentenced to at least three years in prison for his role in a crash that killed a woman in Las Vegas in 2021.
Inside a downfall: Read about the “chaotic” final days of the Pac-12.
ARTS AND IDEAS
Commanding the stage: Even Taylor Swift’s fans admit that her dance moves are a bit stiff. Onstage during this summer’s Eras Tour, though, she has shown an innate ability to connect with her audience, often electrifying the crowd with a simple point or glance. “It makes sense, then, that she moves the way anyone might move,” the critic Brian Seibert writes. “So that anyone might imagine being her.”