Her career shifted into another dimension starting in 1974 with the album Caught Up, produced by Brad Shapiro. The musical content, still cut with the Muscle Shoals heavyweights, remained unchanged, but the entire record was structured to tell a story—that of a love affair between a woman and a married man. The first side, built around an extended version of the classic “(If Loving You Is Wrong) I Don’t Want to Be Right,” broken up by a long monologue, presents the mistress’s point of view; the second gives voice to the betrayed wife, both embodied by Jackson, whose impassioned singing serves as the through-line. In narrative terms, the result lands closer to soap opera than Shakespearean tragedy, but the idea was new and the execution flawless. Success came immediately, on both the pop and R&B charts, and a second volume, Still Caught Up, was set in motion, with material largely co-written by Jackson, now credited as co-producer alongside Shapiro.

The conceptual dimension receded on subsequent records, but Jackson established herself as the voice of a Women’s Lib movement that stopped at neither the kitchen door nor the bedroom door, all of it carried by the impeccable groove of the Muscle Shoals crew, whom even the disco turn didn’t faze. The peak of this period came in 1979 with a live album, Live and Uncensored, whose rawness alarmed the more conservative segment of the African American public, still Jackson’s core audience. As late as the 2000s, a festival organizer might walk up to the singer and ask her to skip performing her none-too-subtle “Phuck U Symphony.”

With the closure of Spring and her signing to Jive, the 1980s proved less favorable for Jackson, who seemed to waver between chasing the pop respectability of a Tina Turner (Act of War, a duet with Elton John) and cultivating her status as a forerunner to hip-hop’s bad bitches. A handful of singles brought her back to the upper reaches of the R&B chart, but this era is most memorable for the gleefully tasteless cover art of Back to the S**t!. Now operating outside mainstream commercial circuits, she toured in the 1990s with a musical, Young Man, Older Woman, and became a recurring headliner on the lucrative nostalgia circuit, primarily for Southern African American audiences. A final self-produced album, Not for Church Folk!, came out in 2001.

Extremely rare on European stages—she appears to have performed in France only once, at Le Palace in 1978—she made a notable appearance at the legendary Porretta Soul Festival in 2004, delivering two nights with her band that left witnesses in awe. Now largely out of the public eye, she benefits from the loyal support of British reissue label Ace, which keeps her principal Spring albums in steady circulation, allowing new fans to dive deep into a body of work with very few equivalents.

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Flashback. In 1968, the name Maurice White was not yet known to the general public, but he was already hard at work in the Chess Records studios, where he served as the house drummer, as well as the drummer for the Ramsey Lewis Trio. Recorded two years after their hit “Wade in the Water,” Maiden Voyage—in addition to a delicious rendition featuring Minnie Riperton’s voice on “Les Fleurs” (sic), which the singer would re-record in late 1969 for her debut album (see “Earth, Wind & Women”)—showcased the arrangements of the future key figure of Earth, Wind & Fire, Charles Stepney. Even after leaving the Ramsey Lewis Trio, Maurice White always remained close to Lewis, notably supervising several of the pianist’s albums between 1974 and 1977, on which the kinship with the music of Earth, Wind & Fire is more than evident. The records featured soaring, lush, and psychedelic renditions of Herbie Hancock’s instant classic that gives the album its title (as well as the Beatles’ “Lady Madonna” and Bob Dylan’s “Mighty Quinn”).

As for the second album by jazz-fusion group Caldera, Sky Islands, it was co-produced by a prominent member of Earth, Wind & Fire, keyboardist Larry Dunn, alongside his colleague Eduardo (or Eddie) Del Barrio. Proud of his work, Dunn played the tapes for Maurice White. Deeply impressed by the music, White immediately invited Del Barrio to work on their new album, All ‘N’ All. The result? Read the credits of “Fantasy,” the solid-gold hit from All ‘N’ All, very carefully. (A young singer had also participated on Sky Islands: Dianne Reeves.)

Finally, one must revisit “And Then” by Weather Report, once “hidden” at the end of side two of the LP Mr. Gone—a truly extraordinary track, if only for the combined presence of the musicians who populate it: Joe Zawinul, composer of genius, master of polychromatic keyboards, judicious distiller of sweet, chiaroscuro melancholy; Wayne Shorter, as lunar and lyrical as ever; Jaco Pastorius, of course, his electric bass nothing but expertly contained feline rage; Steve Gadd, passing through, and flawless as usual; and then, surprise—the fairy-like voice of soulwoman Deniece Williams and the Joe Zawinul of Earth, Wind & Fire, so to speak, Maurice White, also on vocals. A fine assembly gathered for one and only one occasion within the four walls of a recording studio, which—with such dreamers inside—itself became an instrument in its own right.

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As early as 1965, the name Maurice White, then a drummer, was associated with a great voice: that of Fontella Bass, whose irresistible, gospel-tinged rhythm and blues hit “Rescue Me” was propelled by his drumming. Four years later, he crossed paths with another singular singer, Minnie Riperton, who inaugurated her solo discography with the magnificent Come to My Garden, a work of orchestral soul music illuminated by “Les Fleurs” (sic), of which Ramsey Lewis had already recorded an instrumental version in 1968. Maurice White was fascinated by her voice and deeply impressed by the arrangements of Charles Stepney, and when in 1976 he worked with Deniece Williams—who, like Minnie Riperton, had spent time in the group Wonderlove (Stevie Wonder’s backing vocalists)—he found those same atmospheres once again.

It was, in fact, at a Stevie Wonder concert that he discovered Deniece Williams. Backstage, he asked her: “Do you have any songs?” “Yes, several—I write my own...” Among them was the delicate “Free,” with its enchanting intro—Jerry Peters’s electric piano, those gorgeous chords, that soft, high-perched voice as touching as Minnie Riperton’s—its slow, sensual groove, plus White’s own voice in the backing harmonies: the whole thing produced by White alongside his alter ego Charles Stepney. The rest of the album is pitch-perfect: a classic of the 1970s.

In 1977, Song Bird, opening with “Time” and featuring the gospel gem “God Is Amazing,” was once again conceived with the “EWF team.”

That same year, Maurice White and the musicians of Earth, Wind & Fire worked with another magnificent singer, Valerie Carter—herself a backing vocalist for the greats: James Taylor, Little Feat (Lowell George was her mentor), Christopher Cross, Don Henley—and, like Deniece Williams, a songwriter in her own right (she would co-write a song with Maurice White on Earth, Wind & Fire’s Faces). “So, So Happy” and “City Lights” were nonetheless signed by the EWF team, stamped with the group’s signature pulse. Valerie Carter distinguished herself with subtlety, her multi-tracked voice and vocal arrangements reflecting her full command as a musician.

As for the three Hutchinson sisters—Wanda, Sheila, and Jeanette, a.k.a. The Emotions—they achieved worldwide acclaim by participating in Earth, Wind & Fire’s “Boogie Wonderland” (having begun their career on the Stax label under the guidance of Isaac Hayes and Maurice White’s childhood friend, David Porter). They also benefited from the talents of the indispensable Charles Stepney and Kalimba Productions (founded by Maurice White), recording several albums rich in soul ballads (”How Can You Stop Loving Someone,” written and composed by Wanda) and danceable tracks bearing the musical seal of their producers, such as “Best of My Love,” “Love Vibes,” “Smile,” and “Whole Lot of Shakin’” (which bears a strong resemblance to “September”).

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Peter Guralnick himself bestowed the title “Last Soul Company” upon Malaco. Flying that banner from their Jackson, Mississippi home base, the label remains active to this day. As the last bastion carrying the traditions of Southern soul and blues in the post-Stax era into a modern context, Malaco is a storied institution beloved by soul fans around the world. That said, because the label lacks the crossover name recognition of a Motown or Hi Records, it’s also true that its full scope hasn’t necessarily reached the wider public. This time around we’d like to revisit the label’s appeal by focusing on titles reissued since then alongside new releases arriving this month—including few albums receiving their first-ever CD editions anywhere in the world.

Malaco’s name originally combined the surnames of its two founders—Mitchell Malouf and Tommy Couch (Malouf and Couch). The company was established in 1962 as a booking agency. In 1967, they opened a recording studio at their headquarters. This approach—building their own studio and assembling a roster of house musicians—was modeled after Southern predecessors Stax and FAME. Between 1968 and 1970 they released a modest handful of singles through Capitol distribution, but the turning point came when they brought in Wardell Quezergue from New Orleans as an in-house producer. Wardell, whose résumé included work with Fats Domino among others, recorded King Floyd’s “Groove Me” (1970) at Malaco’s studio. The single hit No. 1 on the soul chart (No. 6 pop) and became Malaco’s first nationally charting hit. Better still, Jean Knight’s “Mr. Big Stuff” (1971)—cut during the same sessions—was released on Stax and crossed over even bigger (No. 1 soul / No. 2 pop). On the strength of those results, Paul Simon and others came to record at the studio, and demand for the Malaco facility kept growing. The label side, however, struggled to land hits and was driven to the brink of bankruptcy. Then Dorothy Moore’s “Misty Blue”—recorded in 1973 but shelved until they self-released it in 1975—climbed all the way to No. 3 pop (also cracking the Top 10 in the UK and Australia), delivering a miraculous comeback hit. From that point forward, the label transitioned into a steady release schedule.

Through the late ‘70s into the early ‘80s, Malaco showed a gradual expansionist streak. They struck a distribution deal with TK in Miami, and when their predecessor Stax collapsed, a wave of talented personnel—artists and behind-the-scenes figures alike—flowed into the company. The range of sounds and styles Malaco sent into the world broadened enormously. You can see it in the Japan-exclusive compilations in the “Free Soul” and “Light Mellow” series that are part of this latest catalog reissue campaign: their sensitivity to trends and modern sensibility meant the music they produced was too varied to be boxed in under any single “Malaco Sound.”

Still, once the ‘80s were underway, rather than chasing mainstream crossover success on a national level, Malaco shifted toward reinforcing its image as the conscience of Southern soul—centering its output around Southern soul, gospel, and blues. In 1982, Z.Z. Hill’s Down Home became a surprise long-running hit, and the label established a template for modern blues expression. After Z.Z.’s sudden death in 1984, Malaco recruited Johnnie Taylor as its new marquee act. From there the label also signed Latimore, Bobby “Blue” Bland, Shirley Brown, Denise LaSalle, Tyrone Davis, and others—functioning as a second-act home for major artists who’d already made their names elsewhere. In the end, that stability-first approach is what sculpted the unwavering “Last Soul Company” identity the label carries to this day. But it has always been two forces working in tandem—brand trust and an underlying modernist instinct—that have kept Malaco in motion for more than 50 years.

Through the ‘90s—when Johnnie Taylor produced what’s considered the label’s biggest seller, Good Love! (1996)—and beyond, right up to the present, Malaco has continued operating at its own pace. In 2011, a tornado destroyed the label’s offices and studio, but the warehouse housing the master tapes survived (the offices have since been rebuilt on the same site). The unshakable brand forged as the “Last Soul Company” will surely continue putting out quality records for years to come.

In the 2000s, local giants like Willie Clayton and Marvin Sease gathered at Malaco. For a time the label even distributed releases from Jermaine Dupri's So So Def imprint, and signed acts like Kelly Price and Q Parker of 112. Looking back over the past decade or so, what stands out is the especially large concentration of gospel artists. The roster spans contemporary names like Tina Campbell of Mary Mary and BeBe Winans alongside legacy Mississippi-based groups like the Mississippi Mass Choir and the Canton Spirituals. There's also Christina Bell—who landed the role of Twinkie in the biographical drama The Clark Sisters: First Ladies of Gospel (2020)—and gospel/blues guitarist Mr. Sipp, each bringing a different stylistic flavor. Last year, blues guitarist Mike Farris also released an album on the label, and the overall picture suggests a lineup steadily gravitating toward the deepest roots of the music.

The Handguide to Malaco Records

Dorothy Moore, Misty Blue

Jackson-born Dorothy Moore became Malaco’s flagship artist. After the title track—a ballad later covered by Monica among others—became a massive hit, this debut album was assembled around it. She wraps everything in her capacious vocals, from an Eddie Floyd composition (Floyd having migrated from Stax around this time) to a Willie Nelson cover. The earthy, mellow Southern warmth pulls you right in.

King Floyd, Body English

The New Orleans–born singer who wrote and sang “Groove Me”—the record that put Malaco on the map—delivers his second album on Chimneyville (fifth overall). Highlights include a funkier self-cover of “Baby Let Me Kiss You,” the breezy title track, and “Stop, Look and Listen,” which surges on a robust, sunny groove. The soulful, upbeat energy that answered the disco era is what stands out here.

Dorothy Moore, Once Moore with Feeling

Her third album opens elegantly with “Special Occasion,” penned by Sam Dees. Compared to the records flanking it, the lighter, more mellow atmosphere here blends with Moore’s supple vocals in particularly satisfying ways—it’s a genuine masterpiece, and the Malaco rhythm section’s tight backing is superb. “Girl Overboard,” later covered by Snowboy in the ‘90s, has a flowing beauty all its own, and the deep flavors concentrated across the second half are something special.

Fern Kinney, Groove Me

This debut from a Jackson-born singer with deep ties to Dorothy Moore takes a disco-oriented approach. “Groove Me” and “Baby Let Me Kiss You” are covers of King Floyd classics, and the electronic textures—laced with Caribbean elements—feel like a preview of the ‘80s. Kinney’s coquettish candy-coated voice, reminiscent of Anita Ward, is a perfect fit on her cover of Sylvia’s “Pillow Talk” as well.

James Bradley, James Bradley

The sole album by this Michigan-born singer. Entirely produced and arranged by Frederick Knight, the first half—including “I’m in Too Deep,” which also got a 12-inch release on TK Disco—finds his powerful high tenor tearing through flashy disco-funk. The Southern-flavored ballads and urban mellow grooves like “I Can’t Get Enough of Your Love,” on the other hand, expose a deep soul constitution underneath.

Natural High, Natural High 1

The sole album by this Mississippi-born band. Starting with “Dance to the Funk”—a boisterous opener built on a Sly Stone foundation—the record delivers one winning track after another: the breezy modern soul of “You Make Me So Very Happy,” the lazy-afternoon ballad “Trust in Me,” all powered by appealing vocal harmonies and tight musicianship. Even “Don’t Be Lonely,” which admittedly goes a bit too far in the EW&F direction, is polished to a high sheen. Enjoyable from corner to corner.

Sho-Nuff, Tonite

This second album comes from a band formed at Jackson State University who moved from Stax to Malaco. Driven by synths, claps, and bright bell sounds, the melodic, poppy disco-funk here sits close to Kool & the Gang’s work from the same period. On the flip side, slow numbers like “Let’s Love” and the falsetto-driven sweetness of “What Am I Gonna Do” carry the feel of a proper vocal group. Solid all around.

Dorothy Moore, Talk to Me

Moore’s fifth album overall and her final release from her first Malaco tenure. Produced by Carson Whitsett, it features breezy midtempo originals alongside covers of George Harrison’s “Something” and Chip Taylor’s “Angel of the Morning.” Moore sings country-leaning Southern soul with a voice that evokes Gladys Knight—deep, passionate, and fully committed. Her mellow take on the classic “It’s All in the Game” is another highlight.

Freedom, Changes of Times

The third album from a Jackson-based funk band whose members—including Larry Addison, who went on to become one of ‘80s Malaco’s key session players—keep the modern, open-air party-funk feel intact. “At the Party” brings back the kazoo that made their 1979 hit “Get Up and Dance” so distinctive, riding a Bar-Kays–style disco-boogie groove, while mellow midtempo cuts like “I Give You Love” and "You" channel Switch.

Fern Kinney, Sweet Music

Recorded with essentially the same crack in-house crew, Kinney’s third Malaco album shifts away from the disco workouts of her first two records and toward Dorothy Moore–style Southern ballads, including a cover of a Toussaint McCall classic. Her coquettish voice still shines on the midtempo and uptempo numbers, all of which carry an elegant touch, and a shuffling cover of Kenny Rogers’ “Sweet Music Man” hits at just the right temperature.

G.C. Cameron, Give Me Your Love

A Jackson-born singer who spent nearly a decade at Motown—counting his time with the Spinners—returns to his hometown label. The modern title track typifies the early-’80s Southern soul on offer, but Cameron also revisits a ‘70s new-soul sensibility, making for a rich and rewarding set. Covers of Marvin Gaye and Paul Kelly classics sit alongside a re-recording of his own “So Hard to Say Goodbye to Yesterday.”

Johnnie Taylor, Wall to Wall

Taylor’s second album for what became his permanent home. The title track—built on a bassline famously indebted to Michael Jackson’s “Billie Jean”—sets the tone, and the album’s real strength lies in how skillfully it pairs Taylor’s rich, bittersweet vocals with urban-contemporary production. From the dramatic slow jam “Can I Love You” to the contemporary ballad “Just Because” to nostalgic soul and blues cuts, the listening stays consistently rewarding. A fine album.

Freedom, Are You Available?

Another one from Freedom, this is the band’s fourth album. Three members carried over from the previous record joined three new faces—making it practically a different group—and outside singers handle leads on some tracks, which can be disorienting. But taken simply as a disco-funk production conducted by Benjamin Wright, it’s a blast. The breezy, Shalamar-esque “All for You,” the mellow “Rainbow,” and a cover of Prince’s “Do It All Night” sung by Sho-Nuff’s Freddie Young—cut into it anywhere and you’ll find something to enjoy.

Denise LaSalle, Rain & Fire

LaSalle’s fourth album for Malaco. Opening with a hefty blues-drenched soul number written by Phillip Mitchell, the record moves through brisk shuffles, Southern ballads, and a cover of the Shirley & Company disco classic, all delivered with seasoned ease and spoken-word interludes that exude the pride of a label marquee singer. On a spinoff track from her previous year’s hit “My Tu-Tu,” she pivots into electro-hip-hop territory and drops a full-fledged rap.

Bobbi Humphrey, City Beat

The woman flautist who recorded leader dates for Blue Note in the ‘70s alongside the Mizell Brothers surfaces on Malaco after a dormant stretch. The brit-funk–inflected uptempo title track was presumably the push single at the time, but listening now, the natural sweetness comes through more on the milder smooth-jazz numbers—her cover of Marvin Gaye’s “Come Get to This” and the male-female duet “Days of You and Me.”

Denise LaSalle, Hittin’ Where It Hurts

LaSalle’s sixth for Malaco includes blues tracks produced by Roger Hawkins and was partially recorded in Muscle Shoals. Bouncing funk workouts and self-penned elegant ballads carry a late-’80s heft while foregrounding a distinctly Southern feel, and LaSalle’s vocals are loaded with conviction throughout. A boldly reimagined cover of Sam Cooke’s “Bring It On Home to Me”—restyled in a go-go/Caribbean hybrid—is also on board.

Bobby “Blue” Bland, Midnight Run

Bland’s final album of the ‘80s holds the course of the modern soul-blues direction he’d established since joining Malaco. Backed by top-shelf players from Memphis and Muscle Shoals, he sings Frederick Knight’s “Take Off Your Shoes” (B.B. King’s version had come out the year before), plus covers of Bill Withers and Mel & Tim classics, deploying his famous phlegm-clearing shout amid that characteristically smooth, burnished baritone. The reggae-tinged title track, penned by Tommy Tate, has a modern feel of its own.

Dorothy Moore, Feel the Love

After a gospel album distributed through A&M and two releases on Volt, Moore returns to Malaco for the first time in roughly a decade. Tommy Couch produces, the Malaco and Muscle Shoals crews handle the playing, and the result connects seamlessly to her first-era Malaco work—a proper Southern soul record. Songs by Southern-affiliated writers and a cover of the O’Jays’ “Your Body’s Here with Me” anchor a set centered on elegant ballads delivered with settled, assured poise.

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In 2007, the Robert Taylor Homes are demolished. Open Mike Eagle, who grew up on those streets, wants to remember them. A boy looks out of his window with a melancholy expression, surveying a landscape now stripped bare. It feels like standing before a still life painted in urban tones. The silence is barely broken by the whistle of the wind as the mind snaps suddenly to the past. The world once looked like a black-and-white postcard, and those empty spaces were filled by towering buildings. That boy has grown up now. Feet planted firmly on the asphalt, his gaze fixed on the place that watched him grow. We are in the Robert Taylor housing project. From Chicago’s South Side, we see the surrounding landscape through the eyes of Michael Eagle.

The story of this sliver of Chicago is told by the man, now Open Mike Eagle, on Brick Body Kids Still Daydream. Released in 2017, it is a kind of memorial, and every bar brings back to life what no longer exists.

With Nas, we visited Queensbridge along his boulevard of memories. Common, in “The Corner,” described a glimpse of the violent neighborhoods where he was raised. Not far away, Mike gazes mournfully at streets now empty.

“We live in a space that should have never existed.”

Between the bars, the memory of the Taylor Homes comes back to life. Today, in their place, there is only a clearing as vast as it is desolate. With Mike, we wander through the ruins of the mind, traced over the places of his childhood. Tolstoy would say that time is a warrior. Here with us, though, it sets its weapons aside: it will be a simple spectator. By reconstructing the memories, we will uncover the story of the complex. Demolished in 2007, it gave birth to the man behind Open Mike: Michael.

Carried along by the beat, we are transported inside the complex. On “How Could Anybody Feel at Home,” nostalgia is our only companion. The places that watched a young Mike grow up are gone now. Looking back, the rapper reflects: he lived in places that should never have existed. He also sets the microphone aside, if only for a few moments. He puts on a mask, becoming Iron Hood. On “Brick Body Complex,” we meet a Superman of the ghetto, the sole guardian of those homes now destroyed. If “the body is a temple,” here it takes on a more familiar shape. Between the bars, brick by brick, the memories resurface. In the track’s official video, Mike faces a peculiar adversary. We are not in the fictional Latveria so often invoked by MF DOOM: this time, the enemy stands right in front of us. A man in a suit and tie charges at the buildings to reduce them to rubble.

“Can I make an impact if I strike the right tone
And keep saying words into microphone.”

Iron Hood has lost. The well-dressed man surveys the ruins of the complex in triumph. It no longer exists, but every bar sets the memories dancing. “Daydreaming in the Projects” is not just a track but a testimony laid down between kick and snare. Between the silence and the streets, what matters is survival. The rapper says it himself: this is a track for people like him. Close your eyes and imagine you can still hear those kids fighting dragons among the housing blocks. Mike is not just a rapper but an artist who commits nostalgia to canvas, or rather, to beat.

“Ghetto in the way I move
Watch me groove, I’ma sing my blues.”

What is the ghetto? That is the question echoing through the notes of “Breezeway Ritual.” With the rapper, we breathe the heavy air of the housing projects. The silence is broken by the carefree shouts of people who now see only the shadow of their home. “Ghetto” as in a mausoleum of dreams and memory. The story comes to life of those who, for a little warmth, can only turn on the stove burners. These are the monotonous days of people who simply survive. Mike collects memories and blood as he watches the world, trying to understand it.

“Ghetto,” meaning those streets Michael feels are home. He himself admits how difficult it is for him to identify as a “Los Angeles rapper.” The man behind the microphone grew up in the Chicago he describes in his verses. Every person he shared those streets with has something to tell. “My Auntie’s Building” lets their voices be heard again, voices otherwise scattered across the empty space left by the demolished complex. Mike describes the apathetic gaze of those who erect and destroy those apartments. And in the end, despite the rubble, those stories will go on living.

The ghetto he identifies with no longer exists: his own body has been uprooted from the earth.

“That’s the sound of them tearing my body down, to the ground.”

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The first factories in the Western Hemisphere were not textile mills or steel plants. They were sugar plantations in the Caribbean, and the laborers were enslaved Africans. A Johns Hopkins anthropologist named Sidney Mintz devoted decades to studying cane cutters in Puerto Rico before writing, in 1985, the most thorough account of how a rare spice consumed by European royalty became the cheapest calorie available to the English working class. His central finding was blunt: that transformation required kidnapping and forced labor, the invention of an industrial system on stolen land, and the systematic erasure of every human being who made the product possible. The consumer never had to see any of it. The design depended on that blindness.

On April 25, 2026, a track dropped whose second verse opens: “Anti-establishment, crackers on that shadiness.” White people watch him work and break his back and call themselves maniacs. They tap his pockets with taxes and claim they made him rich. Then: “Cracker jack the sound of soul, you’ll box me in and sell my shit.” A supply chain described in a single bar. Raw material gets packaged, sold; the person who made it gets cut out of the profits; and everybody acts confused when somebody reads the fine print.

The track is “Blackberry Marmalade,” produced by Mike Hector and Saint Mino, the lead single from Vince Staples’ seventh album, Cry Baby, due June 5 via Loma Vista Recordings. His first release as an independent artist after an entire career inside the Universal Music Group system. Def Jam, Motown, Blacksmith. He walked away. But Mintz died in 2015 after arguing for decades that you cannot separate consumption from production. The pleasure of the buyer is financed by the death of the supplier. The whole arrangement depends on the buyer never having to think about it. Staples grew up in Ramona Park, North Long Beach, Crip-affiliated, his father incarcerated, introduced to rap through Odd Future. He has never romanticized where he comes from; he has never performed his trauma so somebody in a conference room could feel like they understood the streets. And now, off the label for the first time, the opening thing he says on record is that empires are built on bloodstained ground.

Mintz catalogued sugar by grade: raw, refined, molasses, treacle, muscovado. All of it processed from identical cane, sold at varying price points to separate social classes. Staples does something structurally parallel in the final third of the track. He spells out N-I-G-G-A, letter by letter, then runs through the grades America has processed that word into: ghetto, gangsta, dangerous, famous, bougie, Louis, Prada, Gucci, artist, hardest, honest, smartest, scholar, proper, kill a, rob a, conscious, pompous, Obama, Kamala. A product line organized by market segment. One cane. “Who the fuck you calling nigga?”

Parliament debated whether to allow slave-produced sugar into Britain. The pro-trade faction won. Their argument, as Mintz detailed, went like this: we won’t eat it ourselves because we have consciences, but we’ll refine it and sell it to Germans, and if prices drop, we’ll eat it too. Colonies full of “negroes and colonists,” Parliament noted, had no right to consciences. They could consume as much slave sugar as the market would bear. That framing maps cleanly onto the American music industry’s recurring conversation about streaming royalties. That debate has not changed. Everybody involved knows the economics are exploitative, and everybody involved knows who collects and who doesn’t. But nobody stops streaming, the way nobody stopped eating sugar. The conscience keeps getting deferred to a meeting that never happens.

The chorus goes somewhere nobody can tax. Blackberry marmalade and sweet tea, beating the summer blaze. Something made by hand inside a Black home, consumed by family, never listed on any exchange. Mintz found the identical split across four centuries of sugar history: a home-preserved luxury in the 1500s became a mass-produced industrial calorie by the 1800s. That shift from domestic to industrial was also a shift from autonomy to extraction; from sweetness you owned to sweetness that owned you. Nana’s kitchen is the before picture. The tax bill, the stolen sound, the boxed-up soul is the after.

The music video, co-directed by Staples and Bradley J. Calder, is a first-person shooter. You are holding the gun. You kill Staples first, then walk into Frank’s Coffee Shop and Restaurant in Burbank (a location used exclusively as a film set since 2020, which means you’re killing people in a place that was already fake) and shoot the patrons while a security guard plays games on his phone and doesn’t look up. A red MAGA cap sits on the dashboard in the opening seconds. At the close, a Martin Luther King Jr. quote from “Letter from Birmingham Jail” appears: “So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be.” Seven consecutive “promise me you won’t gun me down”s follow. Addressed to the consumer. Not the gunman. The person watching, scrolling past the last shooting, playing the track, moving on to the next one.

After emancipation across the British Caribbean, Mintz found that the planter class tried to replace the discipline of slavery with the discipline of hunger. They imported contracted laborers from India and China to undercut freed Black workers; they cut off access to land so freedpeople couldn’t farm independently. Maximum labor, minimum cost. Staples recorded seven albums inside a major-label structure that operated on a version of that arithmetic: advance against future royalties, marketing spend against ownership percentage, the artist as a depreciating asset on a balance sheet. Cry Baby is his first record with no Universal money attached. The discipline changed shape but did not disappear. Staples just stopped agreeing to it.

Mintz’s epigraph came from a French writer in 1773: “I do not know if coffee and sugar are essential to the happiness of Europe, but I know well that these two products have accounted for the unhappiness of two great regions of the world.” Two hundred and fifty-three years later, Staples says the equivalent with different nouns and a production credit. The chorus closes twice with a parenthetical. The first time: “(say it).” The last time: “(they lying).”

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At home, Skipper (as the boy was nicknamed by the family) would fall asleep every night to the sound of his father playing the piano. His half-sister Sharon Nelson recounts how, defying the ban on going out at night, he would secretly watch John’s performances from the club’s entrance—taking care to slip away before the final set ended so as not to be caught. In the Nelson household, that same sense of prohibition surrounded the instrument itself. John had always warned his son: this piano was not a toy, but a sacred space—and jazz was a serious business. Nevertheless, the legacy is passed down; the boy is drawn to this world of harmony—music opens the doors to desire for him... and to frustration. This authoritarian and distant father—whom he admires when he doesn’t outright hate him—becomes his rival. When, at the age of seven, Skipper tries his hand at the piano, John shows him no mercy: neither compliments nor encouragement; he judges coldly, with exacting standards.

Soon, Skipper puts himself to the test: he will play, and he will play well. To earn his father’s love? To surpass him? The piano becomes a symbolic battlefield. It becomes a matter of learning outside the scope of the paternal gaze—by cultivating an intimate, almost secret relationship with the music.

And, even then, by associating creation with solitude. When his parents divorce, John leaves the family home... but leaves the piano behind. Prince is now ten years old; he discovers that he possesses an exceptional auditory memory, reproducing sophisticated harmonies he has absorbed without ever giving them a name. The piano becomes an emotional refuge amidst the family chaos—a place where the child manages to re-establish a sense of order and weave an invisible bond with his absent father. And while he inherits John’s taste for improvisation—for musical architecture that extends beyond mere melodies—he will also diverge from it just as fundamentally: by saying “no.” He would not be a jazz musician. He would be funk, rock, pop. In fact, he would begin by imitating popular culture—reproducing, by ear at the piano, the theme song of his favorite TV series: Batman (a premonitory impulse, given that in 1989 he would compose a memorable album for Tim Burton’s film). And he would be a multi-instrumentalist, so as to depend on no one, never again having to ask for permission.

First Movement: The Hidden Pianist

Prince would turn to the guitar, which quickly became the instrument through which he asserted himself. From his very first steps on stage, he forged an image of radical modernity and uninhibited sexuality. The piano, however, still reminded him of the wounds of childhood and his father’s judgment. From the late 1970s to the early years of the following decade, he was a guitarist performing for the public—and a great, hidden pianist. For the piano remained, in truth, the secret core of his creative work—the essential instrument behind numerous compositions. As early as his debut album in 1978, it served as the emotional engine of “Baby,” driven by its soulful, gospel-inflected chord progression. In 1979, it acted as the narrator in the starkly stripped-down “When We’re Dancing Close and Slow.” Thus, for Prince, while the guitar served as a shop window, the piano was his workshop.

The piano gems of that era lie buried within his discography—hidden there, too: tucked away on the B-sides of his 45-rpm singles, embedded within work sessions whose recordings circulated illegally at the time, or found in the extended versions of his legendary 12-inch singles. Thus, he recorded a distinctly jazz-funk keyboard solo—a performance that would remain quite unique throughout his career—within the instrumental section of “Sexy Dancer” (acting as a one-man band, he also contributed bass and guitar solos to the extended version released on the 12-inch single).

Released that very same month—October 1979—Patrice Rushen’s song “Haven’t You Heard” reveals striking similarities in inspiration to “Sexy Dancer,” particularly through its improvisational style: characterized by short, heavily syncopated phrases—often played against the beat—and its soaring, lyrical flourishes. Indeed, at just 20 years old, the multi-instrumentalist from Minneapolis was closely observing the musical currents flowing through the studios of Los Angeles, bound by a deep, mutual respect for the virtuoso pianist. No competition here: as he was forging his identity as a total artist, Prince viewed Patrice Rushen (herself a composer and producer) as a kindred spirit. Even then, the “Prince sound” belonged to him alone, and his approach to keyboards contributed significantly to it. At the moment of the synthesizer’s explosion, he sensed that it would serve as a tool to shape his artistic universe. Deciding as early as his debut album to forego a brass section—“We originally planned to use horns, but it’s really hard to sound different if you use the same instruments,” he observed in 1978—he invented a new kind of horn section by blending synthesizers and guitar. This would become the hallmark of the “Minneapolis Sound.”

Another gem, released quietly in 1982 (primarily as the B-side to the “1999” single), “How Come U Don’t Call Me Anymore” would go on to become an enduring piano-and-vocal classic, covered countless times on stage. Prince was only 24, yet he had already discovered his distinct identity at the piano. By 1983, Prince had only a few months left before becoming the colossal star behind Purple Rain. Yet his relationship with the piano remained a private affair, kept on the fringes of the major stages. One night in his home studio, he sat down at the instrument and recorded an improvisation and composition session onto cassette—a secret session that would eventually become historic, officially released in 2018 under the title Piano & A Microphone 1983.

If this recording moves us so deeply, it is because we hear Prince playing as if in the family living room—the son alone with the shadow of his father. He composes through exploration, testing out progressions, doubling back; the instrument is entirely at the service of emotion and doubt. Transcending the sadness of the lyrics, the music sweeps us away in a torrent of joy. An unfinished track, “Why the Butterflies,: resonates like an unconscious reenactment of childhood. With “butterflies in his stomach” and “swirling clouds”—his voice pleading for help (”Mamma!” chanted repeatedly)—he is surely reliving his childhood epileptic seizures: traumatic experiences undoubtedly linked to his hyperactive temperament. Only the piano—Prince’s intimate diary—could open up such a space for him.

Second Movement: The Liberated Pianist

In 1983, amidst the compositions for his film project Purple Rain, Prince unearthed a melody by his father, John—a piece that stood in stark contrast to the album’s usual grandeur and brilliance (and which would not be officially released until 2017). It possessed a gentle tone and slow, deliberate progressions—a piece played “straight,” as if by a student dutifully adhering to his lesson. By titling this track “Father’s Song,” Prince confronts his heritage head-on. Having reached a creative pinnacle—churning out one sonic masterpiece after another—he no longer needs to contend with that paternal figure. Instead, he steps into the spotlight to assert himself as an accomplished pianist.

Another symbolic milestone would be reached at the New Morning in Paris, one evening in August 1986. During a concert organized that very day, John L. Nelson was welcomed onto the stage of this legendary jazz club by his son, who invited him to join the band at the piano. Prince did not play “in John’s place”; rather, he “made room” for him. On stage, father and son stood as equals. And this concert would be one of the very first to take the form of the countless “aftershows” to come—those secret gatherings between the star and a handful of privileged fans. The club would become, for him, a place of experimentation—a laboratory where he would play, to the point of exhaustion, through every repertoire—soul, pop, rock, and more—mining them for unreleased material and new artistic directions.

In the studio, too, it was the piano that opened up new horizons for him—particularly at a time when he was giving more creative space to Lisa Coleman—a devotee of classical music and jazz—within the band The Revolution. Beyond the chords themselves, it was the space between the notes—the resonance, the textures, and the sonic atmospheres—that truly captivated them. When he performed his famous piano medley in 1988 on the circular stage of the Lovesexy tour, Prince was at the absolute peak of his confidence; he felt free to do anything he pleased. His piano playing became highly percussive—more rhythmic than lyrical—yet it never veered into mere showmanship.

Nevertheless, Prince never ceased playing keyboards on a daily basis. Mayte (Prince’s wife from 1996 to 1999) said that he kept his magnificent purple Yamaha in their home in Spain. He dreamed of owning a Bösendorfer but never actually possessed one; on tour, he traveled instead with a custom-built case that served as a piano—one in which he housed an electric keyboard that was far easier to transport and amplify. When Mayte suggested a program of covers drawn from his repertoire—rearranged through the lens of modern jazz—playing Prince’s songs on the piano felt like the most natural choice in the world. The phrasing, the intent—everything adapts so effortlessly to jazz. Is this due to the fact that he grew up with this music—that it served as the very structural foundation for his work as a composer, for his melodies? Mayte detailed that while they were living together, he would listen to Miles Davis’s Kind of Blue every single day. She knows the record by heart; she could sing you every single one of John Coltrane’s solos.

In 2002—the year of his father’s passing—Prince took a bold gamble: an acoustic album built entirely around the piano, titled “One Nite Alone.” On it, he strips away every element that defines his signature spectacular style—the groove, the guitars, the flamboyant production—retaining only the piano (often acoustic, occasionally lightly processed), his voice (fragile, at times whispered), and the silence—the very sound of his breathing. In “Avalanche”—the most starkly stripped-down track on the record—he doesn’t merely “play” the piano; he lets it speak for itself. Here, he communes intimately with the introspective jazz of Bill Evans and the contemplative spirit of classical music. ...serving a protest song with powerful lyrics: it depicts the snow blanketing Wounded Knee—where nearly 300 Native Americans of the Lakota tribe were massacred by the U.S. Army in 1890—a symbol of a nation built on violence, of a crime never redressed. Musically, the track moves at a slow pace; it offers no clear resolution and does not pander to the listener. It is a meditation on the fragility of a man who knows that everything could still crumble, yet chooses to go on living nonetheless.

When “One Nite Alone” was released, Prince had already endured several major ruptures: the premature death of his son Amiir, the failure of his marriage, his battles against the recording industry, and a genuine weariness regarding his own myth. Here, the piano becomes a space for prayer—for a grief that remains unspoken. It would be his final introspective album.

Third Movement: The Possessed Pianist

In the years that followed, Prince released album after album, yet the pianist receded into the background. It marked a return to funk—to the virtuosity and energy of the “guitar hero,” to groove as a form of self-affirmation. There was no longer any room for doubt; he thus distanced himself from that place of vulnerability he had reached in 2002, just as his spirituality evolved into an explicit discourse—a truth asserted with absolute conviction.

In the 2010s, another shift occurred. On stage, the artist remained incandescent—though, as we would only fully realize years later, he was concealing his physical suffering and chronic pain (primarily in his hips), finding in painkillers a fragile ally that allowed him to continue performing and creating. His demeanor changed; he began to open up freely, making frequent television appearances where he reminisced about the past and toyed with his own legend. He turned his gaze toward his history, even announcing his intention to write an autobiography.

This foreshadowed the profound impact of the Piano & A Microphone tour of 2016—less a concert than a real-time self-portrait. The staging was ascetic: a piano, a microphone, and a solitary man confronting his own memories. At several stops on the tour (particularly in Minneapolis, where the emotional intensity reached its peak), Prince spoke frequently of his father; he told stories—and, in doing so, told his own story. “I thought I would never be able to play like my dad—and he never missed an opportunity to remind me of it.” He was Skipper again—a ten-year-old boy—and the piano once more became his confidant, his instrument of survival. Alone on stage, in his hometown, he can finally bridge the gap between the intimidating father, the child playing in secret, and the global icon—without irony or mask. Thus, the piano—John L. Nelson’s piano—returns to center stage.

His passing, on April 21, 2016 (ten years ago now it’s crazy), lends this tour an almost unbearable dimension. Fleeing the instrument that shaped him, transforming it into a personal sanctuary, then returning to it—stripped bare, face unmasked: such is the story of Prince the pianist. With, at the end of the road—just as at the very beginning—a piano.

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A converted sunroom office in a house in Carson, California, around 1998. Three phones, a fax machine, a yellow legal pad with a fresh underline scored across the top of the page, and stacks of paper that doubled in volume by the week. The woman at the desk has her glasses pushed to the tip of her nose, the receiver pinned to her ear, and a pen tapping the line of a contract she means to revisit by lunch.

What she said into the phone, on one of the calls Brandy describes from the chair across the desk, was: “No, no, that’s not what we agreed to. The call time needs to be adjusted.” A few minutes later: “Listen, I appreciate that, but this is nonnegotiable. My daughter’s well-being isn’t something I’m flexible on.” Sonja Bates Norwood, the woman scribbling on the legal pad, had by then been managing her daughter Brandy’s career for five years and would manage it for nearly two more decades, which meant she was on that phone or one shaped like it for nearly every working hour she had.

Across the trade notices and tabloid items that ran from her daughter’s first record deal in 1993 through the Atlantic catalog disputes of the early 2010s, Sonja Norwood appeared as a difficult, pushy stage mom in trade reports, and as an aggressive one in the louder tabloids. That cluster of adjectives was an editorial choice, not a factual one. In the same window, inside those very same outlets, Mathew Knowles got called strategic. Tina Knowles got called regal. Kris Jenner trademarked momager (a single noun, monetized to seven figures) and turned it into the centerpiece of a TV empire. The split tracked across publications, quietly but consistently, with the race of the daughter whose career the mother in question was running.

Sonja Bates came up in McComb, Mississippi, a small pine-circled town in the southwestern corner of the state, and went on to study liberal studies and psychology at Southern University Baton Rouge. In her high school marching band, before any of that, she had been a baton twirler. The night she met Willie Norwood, his soul group, the Composers, was playing a packed Jackson club, and a few years later, when their oldest, Brandy, was four, the family moved to California so Willie could take a minister-of-music position at the Church of Christ in Inglewood. None of that biography, frankly, ever made it into the trade items that ran across her daughter’s career, and none of it would have shifted the adjectives anyway.

Phases, the memoir Brandy wrote with Gerrick Kennedy and published this March, is the first document out of the Norwood household that names the gap on the page. In the book, Sonja gets to be her own subject, apparently for the first time anywhere on the public record, with scenes she carries and a background that is sketched in rather than inferred from her child’s narration of her. The book is also where she gets to speak. Before the VIBE profile that became the most-read piece of journalism about Brandy in the late ‘90s, Sonja delivered a piece of counsel, practically in passing: “They’re not your friends, baby,” she said; “they’re doing a job.”

The Double Platinum negotiation described in that same chapter is where the two roles concentrate into one operating problem. ABC fast-tracked the made-for-TV movie under unusually compressed conditions, and Diana Ross had one nonnegotiable: she wanted to shoot in New York instead of the cheaper Toronto stand-in so she could be home in Connecticut with her kids in the evenings, and home with them for Christmas. A normal TV-movie shoot wants twenty days. The producers had seventeen, and Diana and Brandy’s schedules only overlapped for fourteen of those, which somehow had to absorb ninety percent of the film, including the choreographed musical numbers. Sonja’s job, that month, was to make those fourteen days workable for a teenager who was simultaneously still shooting Moesha five days a week. And the picture they were filming was a story about a singer who had chosen a music career over her own child and was paying for it twenty years later.

The chapter holding that scene lives inside the longest passage of self-accounting in the book. Brandy writes that her own pattern through her teens and twenties was to say yes to whatever landed at the door of the house in Carson—endorsements, film scripts, collaboration requests, brand campaigns, the constant traffic of a young pop singer whose face was on a Cover Girl billboard and a Mattel doll inside a single calendar year. She had not yet learned that no was a word she was permitted to use; the person saying it on her behalf was her mother. The labor of being the no, in an industry built on extraction from young Black girls, is its own job, and Sonja absorbed the retaliation for holding the line her daughter could not yet hold for herself.

When Sy’Rai was born in June 2002, Brandy and the baby’s father, Robert Smith, had publicly maintained they were married. Two years later, on Wendy Williams’s radio show, Smith claimed there had been no marriage at all. He laid it out for Williams: that Brandy had been the other woman, that he had reconciled with his actual girlfriend, and that Brandy’s mother had engineered the entire fabrication. The press cycle that followed, with trained reflex, turned Sonja into the architect of a hoax instead of the parent of a twenty-two-year-old who had panicked about the public’s reception of a Black pop star getting pregnant outside of marriage.

But Phases takes that cycle back. Brandy says, in print, that the lie was hers and the panic was hers. Sonja appears a few pages later on the night Brandy is sobbing in her kitchen after losing the Cover Girl deal, telling her that the noise does not matter and that the baby is what does.

The book’s dedication, addressed to Sy’Rai, is one sentence: “Continue to be a light.” Back in Carson, in the sunroom office where the conversation began, the phone is still ringing on the desk. Her receiver is still pinned to her ear. The legal pad, pages fanning onto the floor, sits open to a contract she meant to revisit before lunch. Brandy, age nineteen, curls up in the leather chair across the desk on her rare Tuesday off from Moesha, watching her mother. The call has not ended. Her mother, glasses pushed to the tip of her nose, has not hung up.

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In the prologue of E.A.R.L., Smokey D. Fontaine catches up with DMX on the shoulder of an Arizona highway. The engine is still running, the door flung open, and Earl Simmons is walking toward nothing. Just a desert sky going orange and red. Minutes earlier he’d been on an ATV, covered in reddish-brown dust, calling Tashera on a tiny black cell phone to tell her how beautiful the sky looked. Play-fighting with Phoenix, a three-month-old pit bull, cracking jokes about his security guard’s tight jeans. Then seven miles of highway and the mood flipped completely. He asks Fontaine if he has nightmares. Every night, he says, folks rock him to sleep whispering “We love you DMX!” and then pull out guns and shoot. “When am I ever going to be able to just relax and be me?” A good afternoon and a terrible one inside a single hour. That pattern followed him everywhere he went.

DMX built his code young, and he built it in a stripped room. His mother’s punishments in their Yonkers apartment escalated in stages over months: a weekend locked in, then a full week, then thirty days with every toy removed, the door shut, nothing permitted except meals and water. Earl memorized the cracks in his wall during those stretches, made the paint bubbles look like faces. The ceiling paint peeled off in long strips if you pulled slowly enough, and when that game ran out, the zipper on his pants became a fire engine (the top was the truck, the zip was the ladder). White Fang got read five times. The group home at Andrus had already trained him for solitary living before he turned ten; School Street just extended the sentence. “I became good at shutting everyone out,” he says in the book, “and everybody else in the apartment did the same.” Four closed doors in one apartment, four separate worlds. And the survival skill that carried him through childhood turned into the wall that blocked every relationship he tried to hold onto afterward.

A body that kept failing him taught the next rule. Bronchial asthma inherited from his father put Earl in the emergency room so often the hospital held him for weeks at a stretch. Doctors strapped him into a crib-like bed with a white net over it and pumped in medicated air while he lay pinned, breathing in and out for hours with no way to move. One attack was so severe the paramedics carried him out on a sit-up stretcher after his heart flatlined. His sister told him about that later; he was too young to retain it. Then a car accident: a small boy crossing Riverdale Avenue for a lollipop and a superball, hit so hard he skidded under a parked car. He healed. But afterward, an insurance man showed up at the apartment offering $10,000 in settlement money, and his mother refused it. “My family is Jehovah’s Witness and our faith teaches us to be self-sufficient.” Earl knew that cash was meant for him. Even as a child he understood the math. The adults responsible for you will choose their beliefs over your body. The state will net you to a bed and call it medicine. And the money you’re owed will be waved off by someone who figures God covers the remainder.

On the roof of his grandmother’s building, where he started keeping strays, Earl figured out dogs. “It seemed the more love I gave them, the more love they gave me back,” he writes. “And dogs didn’t know betrayal.” His pit bull Boomer became the most feared animal on the block. Earl’s favorite move was parking Boomer on top of the blue USPS mailbox outside his grandmother’s place, where half the street would cross to the other sidewalk rather than pass within range. Older kids who used to rough him up gave that up once the dog flanked him. Boomer was protection and reputation folded into a single animal. But in Baltimore, Boomer killed stray cats by the dozen, piling the bodies in an alley corner that nobody else dared touch. Earl raised him to be dangerous and smart, loved him for both qualities. He also bred fighters and threw pits together in the projects. His version of loyalty was the version he could command. Total devotion backed by the possibility of harm. The only bond he fully trusted was one where he also held the leash.

Ready Ron was from Brooklyn, and Earl thought he was the best rapper alive. Twenty-seven years old to Earl’s fourteen. The arrangement was simple: Earl beatboxed while Ron rapped at shows and small performances. In return, Earl got his first real picture of what an MC could do, five or six minutes of nonstop rhyming, a crowd eating out of your hand, words landing for the first time in a way that felt like being heard. But Ron also handed him a blunt laced with crack cocaine, a “woolie,” the new thing on the block. No warning about what it would do. “He didn’t tell me how differently it would affect my life,” Earl writes. “He didn’t tell me of the war that I would have to fight to kill my desire.” The man who showed him performance handed him the chemical that would chase him for three decades. After crack, the word “need” reorganized itself entirely. Earl had gone years hungry for food, for attention, for a room he could control. Addiction replaced all of those hungers with one craving that overrode every other instinct, and the doctrine absorbed its cruelest amendment: the person who lifts you and the person who wrecks you can wear the same face.

At Valhalla Correctional Facility, after spitting in a captain’s face and catching a year of solitary confinement in Lockdown Block 3K, Earl found X. “See, DMX was the rapper,” he writes. “But X, X was someone different.”

“X was hunger. X was rage. And when I found X locked up in that cell, I knew that I was losing Earl.”

The split was not a stage trick or a branding exercise. It was an operational decision. Earl could be hurt. X could not. X wanted no letters, no visits, no photographs from home. “Don’t send me pictures, don’t come see me, nothing. Just let me handle my bid.” In the cell, X wrote “Born Loser” while inmates banged on metal bars twenty deep for a beat, rapping until the COs showed up with billy clubs:

“The born loser, not because I choose to be
But because all the bad shit happens to me.”

Earl was the person who suffered. X was the engine that converted suffering into bars. Once X existed, though, Earl had to keep feeding him darkness to stay productive. And every audience he’d ever face would want X before they wanted Earl.

That first prayer came out of Valhalla too, months of cold and dark with nothing but his own thoughts groping above the ceiling. He wrote it in solitary:

“Lord, why is it that I go through so much pain?
All I saw was black, all I felt was rain
I come to you because it’s you who knows
You showed me that everything was black because my eyes were closed.”

None of that was the language of healing or gratitude. It was a status report filed to a commanding officer. DMX prayed the way he fought, with desperation and formality in the same breath. Every album that followed carried a prayer track, a conversation with God tucked at the tail end of records otherwise loaded with robbery stories and the sound of barking. But Black audiences purchased both halves (the aggression and the plea) with no visible need to square one against the other. It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot and Flesh of My Flesh, Blood of My Blood both went to number one in 1998, the only rapper besides Tupac to manage that inside a single calendar year. The public ate his pain as fast as he could produce it, and the industry packaged his code into a product cycle that required him to keep living at his worst. His faith was real. The audience treated it like a closing credit.

Fontaine asked where they should begin telling his story. “I don’t know, dog,” Earl told him from the shoulder of that Arizona highway, the sky gone purple and gray. “You’re just going to have to catch it without catching it.” And then he kept walking, past the convertible with the engine running, past Phoenix barking from the passenger seat, toward a horizon that was already darkening. Tashera was back in New York expecting their third child. The nightmares would come again tonight. Fontaine hit record anyway.

We still miss you, X.

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This has been the rhythm of Cole’s entire Fall Off press run. Four interviews across six weeks, each one reshaping the last. With Nadeska, he admitted the backlash to his Dreamville apology hurt him, that people were calling and texting to check on him, that there were moments where he thought he was “fucking done.” With Cam’ron, he was “disgusted both ways” by the beef’s tribalism. With Lost in Vegas, he said nothing about any of it. That conversation ran ninety minutes of warmth: writing drills, Erykah Badu’s wisdom about time-traveling into your future self, how he had to shed the “purist mentality” he absorbed from his Fayetteville mentors. Nobody asked him about Drake or Kendrick; nobody followed up on the apology, the pulled track, or any of the landmines he’d planted in the two interviews before it.

And then on Carmelo Anthony’s 7 PM in Brooklyn, he revealed that Drake was supposed to perform at the 2024 Dreamville Festival, the same festival where Cole apologized to Kendrick onstage. Drake reportedly told Cole he didn’t want to come and “put you in a situation on that stage and say something that you would have to stand behind.” Cole’s response: “Thank God that you didn’t, because it left the space for me to receive what I was supposed to do.” So the apology Cole framed as a private moral epiphany, the one he told Nadeska hit him “about an hour before” his set, was partly contingent on whether Drake showed up. A man following his conscience doesn’t need the other party’s travel plans to clear first.

Cole spent five years between 2018 and 2023 running features the way a boxer trains for a title fight he keeps postponing. The 2018–2019 stretch had him on 21 Savage’s “a lot,” Young Thug’s “The London,” Gang Starr’s “Family and Loyalty,” Jay Rock, Royce da 5’9”, 6LACK. All of them chosen, all of them winnable. He rapped on “a lot” about how nobody wanted to rap with him anymore—he kept bodying their records. By 2022, he was on Benny the Butcher’s “Johnny P’s Caddy” declaring himself “on God the best rapper alive.” By 2023, the pace accelerated; Lil Durk’s “All My Life” peaked at No. 2 on the Hot 100, and on wax Cole was telling Durk he just wanted to “show up and body some shit.”

Then came “First Person Shooter” with Drake, the “Big Three” concept, the line Kendrick heard and rejected on “Like That” with the phrase “Motherfuck the Big Three, nigga, it’s just big me.” Cole’s own account of hearing that verse, recounted to Cam’ron: “That shit is hard. It’s a hard-ass verse, undeniably. He went crazy.” His second thought: “Not now, nigga! This is inconvenient for me.” He fired back with “7 Minute Drill.” And then, within days, he yanked the song, apologized at Dreamville Fest, called the diss “the lamest, goofiest shit” he’d done, and went quiet. Five years of going bar-for-bar with rappers who respected him too much to fire back, and the moment someone actually could, he folded the hand mid-deal. The Lost in Vegas interview gives this a convenient gloss. Cole talked about maxing out his potential, about Kobe Bryant’s refusal to settle for just making the league, about writing drills designed to “fight gravity” against a rapper’s natural decline. But gravity didn’t beat him. Kendrick did, and Cole chose to exit before the answer came.

On 7 PM in Brooklyn, Cole also disclosed that “First Person Shooter” was originally supposed to feature Kendrick—that Drake wanted the track to be a him-and-Dot song, but Kendrick didn’t move fast enough, so Drake pivoted to Cole. He’d been trying to get Kendrick to perform at Dreamville Fest alongside Drake before the beef: “I was trying to get Kendrick to come, too. It’s crazy because when we was on tour, I’m like, ‘It’d be crazy if both of y’all came out for Dreamville Fest.’ It’s silly now to say.” These aren’t small details. Cole was brokering a summit. He had coordination with Drake’s camp about festival logistics. He was in communication with Kendrick about appearances. And still, his public posture across every interview is that he was a bystander who got clipped by a stray. He wrote the “Big Three” bar. He lit the match.

Meanwhile, Cole is defending Drake’s honor on camera while Drake is in court trying to get Kendrick Lamar’s lyrics treated as defamatory statements of fact. Drake lost his lawsuit against Universal Music Group over “Not Like Us.” Judge Jeannette A. Vargas dismissed it in October 2025, ruling that calling someone a “certified pedophile” in a rap battle is “nonactionable opinion.” Drake filed a 117-page appeal in January 2026. UMG responded on March 27 with an 83-page brief calling his arguments “astoundingly hypocritical,” pointing out that Drake himself signed a 2022 petition opposing the use of rap lyrics as factual evidence in court, calling the practice “un-American and simply wrong.” He is now arguing the exact opposite. Cole, who griped to Cam’ron about the culture’s treatment of Drake, who professed love for both men to Nadeska, has said nothing about the lawsuit, the loss, the appeal, or Drake’s attempt to establish a legal precedent that would let courts treat diss track bars as actionable defamation—which would gut the genre Cole claims as home. Four interviews, hours of footage, and not one mention. The selective outrage tells on itself.

On Talk With Flee, Cole declared that he despises the word “culture,” that he considers it a buzzword, an “algorithm” fueled by “campaigns, positive or negative.” He’d been praying for the culture to fail in its campaign against Drake and was glad to see the effort stalling. This is a particular thing to say. Kendrick rapped on “euphoria,” “I’m what the culture’s feeling”—and the public agreed with him, loudly. The culture chose Kendrick during the battle in a way that left both Cole and Drake on the outside looking in. Cole’s discomfort with the word isn’t philosophical. It’s personal. And it gets worse when you notice who else uses that framing. A specific faction of Drake’s online defenders—OVO loyalists, blog comment sections, podcast reply guys—have turned “the culture” into a slur the same way “woke” got hijacked, a shorthand for dismissing Black consensus as mob behavior. When they complain that “the culture turned on Drake,” what they mean is Black people rejected Drake, and they resent it. Cole telling Cam’ron that the culture runs on campaigns and algorithms and that he hopes it fails puts him shoulder to shoulder with a crowd that says the same thing for uglier reasons.

He confirmed the long-rumored fight with Diddy after the 2013 VMAs, then declined to give details, citing Diddy’s current legal situation. Diddy is facing federal sex trafficking charges. Cole acknowledged the altercation exists, banked the headline, and used someone else’s criminal case as a shield against having to say a single specific thing. The Lost in Vegas sit-down operated on the same principle. That conversation spent ninety minutes in warm territory: reaction channels, Soulja Boy epiphanies, the fracturing of the music industry, and a long riff about “listening with your heart” versus “listening with your mind” where Cole argued that if you consume music through someone else’s opinion first, your experience is “automatically tainted.” In his telling, the mind is “the most susceptive to manipulation” but “your heart can’t be manipulated.” The implication is hard to miss. If you didn’t like The Fall Off, you were listening wrong. You let the internet poison your reception. The music wasn’t the issue—your spiritual bluff was. Nobody on that couch pushed back on any of it.

Joe Budden, of all people, called the entire press run “disingenuous.” Cole’s pattern of “at first, I felt like this, and then I felt like this” repeated too many times across too many subjects—the Cam’ron lawsuit, the Kendrick diss, the features—for any of it to land as honest, Budden argued. “Everything he says sounds like a lie to me.” It’s a blunt read, and nothing in the four interviews contradicts it. Cole claims brotherhood with Kendrick but pulled two Kendrick features from The Fall Off after the beef. He calls the anti-Drake campaign disgusting but won’t acknowledge Drake’s lawsuit against his own label. He spent ninety minutes on Lost in Vegas talking about chasing his maximum potential, and then his entire public record shows he retreated the moment that chase meant losing. Four interviews, four different rooms, four versions of the same story, and not one of them can survive contact with the others.

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The first known pairing of the words “rock” and “roll” belongs to a blueswoman, Trixie Smith. Born in 1895 in Atlanta, she followed the standard path of her contemporaries, moving from vaudeville troupes to the stages of Harlem by way of the TOBA circuit. She signed her first contract in 1922 with the Black Swan label and recorded a song called “My Man Rocks Me (With One Steady Roll)”; the lyrics paired the words “rock and roll” as a clear evocation of the sexual act. Her subsequent career crossed paths with Fletcher Henderson and Paramount, with whom she released several tracks in 1924, then with Louis Armstrong on “Railroad Blues” in 1925, and with John Hammond in the 1930s. She also tried her hand at cinema, where she met no more success than in her music career. She died in September 1943 in New York without having left a lasting imprint on posterity. Only the expression “rock ‘n’ roll” survived her. It had gained popularity by the late 1930s, transcending its sexual connotation without ever fully shedding it, coming to denote a dance and, soon enough, a wild style of music.

Ella Fitzgerald

Here again, an influential woman played a role in its popularization: the unlikely Ella Fitzgerald, diva of jazz and luminous rival of Billie Holiday. The young singer from Newport News, Virginia, was twenty years old when she recorded “Rock It for Me,” a song written by Kay and Sue Werner:

“But today the rage is rhythm and rhyme
So won’t you satisfy my soul
With the rock and roll?”

Nineteenth on the Billboard chart in 1938, “Rock It for Me” ranks among the singer’s earliest successes. At this point she was still under the wing of Chick Webb, who had hired her for his orchestra after she won an amateur contest at the Apollo in 1934. Raised by her mother, whom she lost at fifteen, Ella had originally dreamed of becoming a dancer, but her vocal range, spanning three octaves, opened more doors in music. Fleeing the abuse of her stepfather and the reform school where she had been sent, she saw singing as her only chance to escape the streets. It was at the Apollo showcase that Webb spotted her. She learned everything about the craft at his side, within the walls of the Savoy, and recorded her first compositions, including “A-Tisket, A-Tasket,” which captured the public’s attention. When Chick Webb died in 1939, Ella Fitzgerald took over the orchestra and became the first woman to lead a big band. She continued as a solo artist on Decca starting in 1942, where she was produced by a certain Milt Gabler, who had supervised Bessie Smith’s final recording session and the session for Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” Placing herself in their lineage, Ella was nonetheless drawn to modern forms of jazz: swing, then bebop, the modernist movement she had described as “rock ‘n’ roll” in “Rock It for Me.”

Rock ‘n’ roll would not define itself as a standalone musical genre until the first half of the 1950s, around the time Fitzgerald moved to the Verve Records stable and established herself as the “First Lady” of jazz. Faithful to the genre, she was served by Dizzy Gillespie, Louis Armstrong, and Duke Ellington, some of the greatest composers and musicians of her time. The smoothness of her voice, her innate sense of rhythm and improvisation, bursting forth in her inimitable scat passages, made her one of the timeless figures of contemporary music. After an incredibly rich career spanning no fewer than sixty albums released over thirty years, from 1954 to 1986, she stepped away from the studios and died of a heart attack in 1996.

After his work in jazz, Milt Gabler turned his attention to rock’n’roll, that derivative of the blues blended with rhythm ‘n’ blues and country influences. By championing the young Bill Haley and His Comets, he freed the genre from the race records category and handed it to white musicians. These musicians, fascinated by African American productions, did not hesitate to plunder the classic repertoire, including its female contributions. Case in point: Ma Rainey’s “Jealous Hearted Blues,” in which she had already used the words rock and roll—“It takes a rocking chair to rock/A rubber ball to roll”—was repurposed by Bill Haley to become “Sundown Boogie,” a pure piece of rock‘n’roll.

Women did not merely inspire the style or give it a name; they shaped it directly. Just like the blues, rock ‘n’ roll counts several pioneering women of considerable influence, though they have often been overshadowed by the memory of men. Indeed, alongside the Big Joe Turners, Roy Browns, Arthur “Big Boy” Crudups, and Wynonie Harrises stood several women who played a foundational role. The first, and without question the most influential of all, is Sister Rosetta Tharpe.

Rosetta Thorpe

Born in March 1915 in Cotton Plant, Arkansas, Rosetta Nubin grew up in the cotton fields where her parents worked and within the walls of the Baptist church where her mother, Katie Bell Nubin, known as “Mother Bell,” played and sang. Steeped in religious music, “Little Rosetta” displayed an extraordinary facility with the guitar from the age of four, a path her mother encouraged her to pursue. Trained in gospel singing, she accompanied Mother Bell in an evangelist troupe that performed across the South for several years. Then, around 1925, mother and daughter settled in a church in Chicago. Around the same time, the blues was traveling up the Mississippi and taking root in the city, and it certainly influenced the young girl’s trajectory. She would never stop moving closer to secular music.

Rosetta married the preacher Thomas Thorpe in 1934, transforming his name to become “Sister” Rosetta Tharpe. Her refined style made her an attraction throughout the city; she was even invited to perform in churches across the country, launching her first tours with her mother and husband. However, Rosetta stirred debate within the religious community: by facilitating contact with the secular world, she drew criticism from purists who denounced her use of the guitar and her tendency to corrupt sacred gospel with blasphemous blues. Sister Rosetta did not fear her opponents and refused to distinguish one music from another. She disregarded conventions, despite her attachment to the Church.

In 1938, she divorced and moved to New York, still accompanied by her mother. She played at the Cotton Club and grew close to the major figures of the local jazz scene, including the omnipresent John Hammond, who introduced her to Bessie Smith. At the same time, she signed a contract with Decca and began recording her first songs. With a stroke of genius, she blended gospel with blues, jazz with popular music. She evolved musically in an up-tempo register dominated by a guitar-voice pairing that contributed directly to the emergence of rock ‘n’ roll. In her songs, religious references mingled with blues themes, testimonies of faith with heartbreak. In that regard, “Rock Me,” one of her first singles, is explicit:

“But, oh, if you leave me I will die
You hold me in the bosom
‘Till the storms of life is over, oh
Rock me in the cradle of our love.”

Sister Rosetta wielded the blues culture of double meaning, here conflating God with a probable lover. She exploited every ambiguity of the word “rock,” at once sexual and religious in connotation. “Rock Me” triggered the fury of religious conservatives nearly twenty years before Ray Charles would provoke them again with “I Got a Woman.” The favorable reception from the general public, which propelled “Rock Me” and “This Train” toward the top of the charts, reinforced Tharpe’s artistic choices. She recorded titles as devout as the gospels “How Far From God” and “Precious Lord,” while openly presenting herself as an heir to the iconic figures of female blues, capable of singing carnal love. Conducting her private life with the same spirit of independence, she took liberties with the traditional model, carrying on multiple romantic relationships, marriages, and divorces. The “Sister” was no moral exemplar, as the English jazzman George Melly recalled: “It turns out that Sister Rosetta, on stage, practically had a halo over her head, but backstage, she loved her booze and her good times [...] and behaved very badly.”

Rosetta helped invent both a musical style and a way of carrying oneself, both of which came to be called rock ‘n’ roll.

During the war years, her popularity was such that one of her songs, “Strange Things Happening Every Day,” was selected to appear among the “V-Discs,” a selection of songs sent to American troops fighting overseas. The track, recorded in 1944 with Sammy Price, was built on the combination of a boogie rhythm and a guitar melody—the musical structure at the root of rock‘n’roll. It was a smash hit with both the boys overseas and civilians, reaching number two on the African American charts.

In 1946, while other singers were asserting themselves in the gospel register, Mahalia Jackson among them, Sister Rosetta continued her work of de-demonizing secular music in partnership with Marie Knight, a gospel singer from Sanford, Florida, who had also divorced a preacher. Around this time, reinforcing her singular identity, Sister Rosetta made the bold and forward-looking choice to abandon acoustic for electric guitar, marking the shift with a new recorded version of “That’s All.” The instrument, deemed diabolical, only further offended puritanical sensibilities. Sister Rosetta could not have cared less and made a habit of punctuating her singing with electric solos. One must hear her versions of “Didn’t It Rain” or “Up Above My Head,” which she played armed with a Gibson Les Paul plugged into a Hammond B3 amp. A true innovator, she embarked on a musical revolution that made her a reference point for the vast majority of rock icons, from Elvis Presley to Eric Clapton. She played a decisive role for the young Little Richard when, in 1945, she invited onstage a boy who was still nothing more than a small-time church choir singer. In 1970, Little Richard would return the favor by inviting her to record a joint, self-titled album.

Rosetta Tharpe’s influence extended beyond the sphere of rock’n’roll and reached the British rock of the 1960s. In the spring of 1964, she participated in the European tour of the Blues and Gospel Caravan alongside Muddy Waters, Otis Spann, Reverend Gary Davis, and several others—all monuments of the blues with whom she competed for the spotlight. Her success brought her to BBC television in 1964, and it was a tremendous surprise for Britain’s youth to discover this woman with the powerful voice, dressed like a society lady, moving with equal ease along a Manchester train platform and across the neck of her white Gibson. The blues revival of the 1960s was kind to her, and Sister Rosetta released no fewer than ten albums during this period, most of them recorded live. Her final record, Singing in My Soul, dates from 1969. The following year, at fifty-five, she suffered a stroke and had a leg amputated due to diabetes. She was forced to retire from the stage before passing three years later, in 1973, following a second stroke. A trailblazing artist, Sister Rosetta Tharpe stands as both an exception and a model in the American artistic landscape; yet she was not the only woman to actively participate in the birth of rock ‘n’ roll. Around the same time, Big Mama Thornton was also making herself heard.

Big Mama Thornton

Ten years younger than Sister Rosetta, Willie Mae Thornton was born in December 1926 in Dale County, Alabama, and grew up in Montgomery. Her father held a position in a local Baptist church; her mother sang there every Sunday. It was on those pews that Thornton, like Sister Rosetta and most Black artists of her generation, first encountered music. Early on, she followed in her mother’s footsteps and sang gospel hymns. When her mother died prematurely in 1941, Willie Mae Thornton was only fourteen. Already an accomplished and determined singer, she left town and joined a troupe, the Hot Harlem Revue, which toured the South. Over the course of about eight years, she honed her style there, drawing directly from the blues tradition. She quickly set herself apart through the power of her voice, the quality of her tone, her taut singing, and her vibrato. Through contact with the other artists in the company, she learned to play the harmonica and, remarkably, developed a passion for the drums. She was thus one of the first known female artists to take a seat behind the instrument.

A figure of imposing build and brash personality, she quickly earned the nickname “Big Mama,” the stage name under which she signed a contract with Peacock Records in 1951. Based in Houston, Texas, she performed at the Apollo and grew close to the producer Johnny Otis, with whom she recorded a cornerstone of rock’n’roll history in 1952: “Hound Dog.” The lyrics reprised the posture of traditional blues feminism, denouncing the cowardice of male behavior; as for the arrangement—electric, rhythmic, driven by Pete Lewis’s guitar—it made the track one of the first authentic rock’n’rolls in history. Young America danced, and “Hound Dog” held the number one spot for seven consecutive weeks. Other artists hoped to ride the wave and launch their careers nationally. In 1953, Little Esther Phillips, a singer close to Johnny Otis with whom Big Mama performed in the late 1950s, recorded a more rhythm’n’blues-flavored version. In 1955, Freddie Bell & The Bellboys covered “Hound Dog” with a country influence before Elvis Presley released a rock ‘n’ roll version that sold five million copies between July and December 1956. By then the lyrics had changed. They no longer featured a woman criticizing her lover but a young man scolding a friend for not being a proper “hound dog.” Between the two interpretations, rock ‘n’ roll had become the music of teenagers and young boys preoccupied with girls.

On the B-side of “Hound Dog,” Thornton sang “They Call Me Big Mama,” a song in which she defied prevailing beauty standards while repeating with force, “I can rock and roll, baby,” despite her obesity:

“They call me Big Mama
‘Cause I weigh 300 pounds
I can rock and I can roll them
And I can really go to town
Satisfy you this morning
If you take me home with you.”

Through these lyrics, Big Mama adopted a flirtatious stance. Like her blueswomen predecessors, she inverted gender assumptions and turned every meaning of the term rock’n’roll into a feminine exercise. Through Thornton’s voice, women reclaimed the upper hand in matters of sexuality, social relations, dance, and above all music. The image of the dominant, independent yet desired woman also appeared in several of her other songs, with titles as explicit as “Let Your Tears Fall Baby” and “Stop a Hoppin’ On Me.”

By the late 1950s, Big Mama Thornton had settled in the San Francisco Bay Area and was touring with Muddy Waters, Buddy Guy, Eddie Boyd, and other heavyweights of African American rock. In 1965, she crossed the Atlantic with them and performed in several European cities. This was the occasion for her to release her first album, a live record simply titled In Europe, on her new label, Arhoolie. Enjoying undiminished popularity, particularly among the younger generation, she secured a contract with Mercury, where she released Stronger Than Dirt in 1969, an album with an emblematic title that achieved striking success and allowed Big Mama to reaffirm her sovereignty over rock’n’roll. Two songs attracted particular attention from the public and the artistic community: “Ball and Chain” and her cover of George Gershwin’s “Summertime.” Both tracks profoundly influenced Janis Joplin. Joplin’s fame reflected back on Thornton to some degree, and she released four more albums between 1969 and 1973. But heavy alcohol consumption took a toll on her health and career in the years that followed. Deeply gaunt, she nonetheless continued to perform live, with the same fire. These concerts provided the occasion for two live albums on Vanguard in 1975: Jail and Sassy Mama!. She died in July 1984, at the age of fifty-seven.

Erline Harris

If Big Mama built her career on the success of “Hound Dog,” Erline Harris made her name with “Rock and Roll Blues,” a foundational track from 1949 and the first to contain the term rock’n’roll. An original composition by this young singer born in Arkansas in April 1914, it caught the interest of the DeLuxe Records label, which gave its author the chance to record the song and step out of obscurity. Since fleeing family poverty, Erlyn Eloise Johnson had traveled the country without success, from New York to St. Louis, before settling in New Orleans with her dancer husband, Ike Harris, taking on occasional contracts in local theaters. A lively jump-blues number, “Rock and Roll Blues” drew heavily from the female musical tradition. Reviving the liberality and sexual appetite of the blues pioneers, it flouted propriety: “I really want some more, we’re gonna rock and roll all day long.” Passing the baton of transgression, the woman now nicknamed “Rock‘n’Roll” Harris went on to record “Jump and Shout,” which contested the title of “first rock ‘n’ roll in history” with “Hound Dog” and “Strange Things Happening Every Day.” The diminishing success of subsequent singles on DeLuxe did not prevent the Chess label from offering her a new single in 1951, “Pushin’ My Heart Around,” which fared no better. With no new contract forthcoming, she retreated to the clubs of Georgia, performed there for two years, then put an end to her artistic career to devote herself to family life.

LaVern Baker

The year 1953 proved kinder to another face of early rock‘n’roll: LaVern Baker, who was then enjoying her first solo successes on the young Atlantic label. Rooted in the jazz and swing tradition, she began performing at seventeen in the clubs of her native Chicago in 1946, under the name Bea Baker. After a brief stint at Okeh Records, she signed with Atlantic and released “Soul on Fire,” an up-tempo song that set her apart, followed by “Tweedlee Dee” and “Jim Dandy,” which reached the top of the rhythm ‘n’ blues and pop charts. Flirting with rock ‘n’ roll, LaVern Baker also chose to maintain blues themes; however, aware that she was addressing the general public, she preferred to promote the image of the devoted woman over the sexually liberated rebel, as demonstrated by “Hey Memphis,” her demure response to Elvis Presley’s “Little Sister.” “I Cried a Tear,” “I Waited Too Long,” and “Saved,” all of which entered the top ten between 1958 and 1961, exploited the same clichés.

In 1961, the lyrics of “I’ll Never Be Free” were more explicit still: LaVern Baker openly declared herself a slave to her boyfriend—“I’ll never manage to break free from your gentle smile.” That same year, with the complicity of Jimmy Ricks, she recorded the torrid “You’re the Boss,” a more ambiguous text in which the two lovers mutually attributed authority to each other. When she recorded an album of Bessie Smith covers, the most politically charged lyrics were carefully set aside. Her career sputtered out by the late 1960s, then bounced back at the end of the 1980s with new projects and concerts. One final studio album even appeared in 1992 under the title Woke Up This Morning. She died in March 1997 of a stroke.

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On March 14, the Vallejo rapper LaRussell posted a video of himself performing “Heaven Sent,” a track from his February project Father God, Guide Me, to Twitter. Before the song started, he recounted to the crowd that his engineer had called him with a warning. “He say, ‘Man, you probably shouldn’t put this out... You talking about Epstein, it’s a lot of shit going on,’” LaRussell recounted. He grinned. “I said, ‘Thank you for calling me. I’m finna drop this.’” He captioned the clip with three laughing emojis and a brag about defying the advice. The post collected six million views and over 1,100 replies, most of them asking him to reconsider. He did not reconsider, but quadrupled down.

The lyrics that detonated the backlash are blunt: “I ain’t perfect and neither is the president/What’s guiltier than a nigga hiding evidence/Can’t be upset when they heated if you don’t let them vent/Even the devil was heaven sent/Even Kanye was heaven sent/Even Hitler was heaven sent/Even Martin was heaven sent/We all heaven sent, Donald too/We all heaven sent, Epstein too/We all heaven sent, Malcolm too/We all heaven sent.” LaRussell sang these words over a choir. He performed them with the posture of a man delivering a sermon. His audience, judging by the clip, received it with the energy of people who showed up to support a local hero and were now trapped in an obligatory standing ovation.

Six weeks before this, LaRussell had announced on The Breakfast Club that he’d signed a deal with JAY-Z’s Roc Nation, making official what had been rumored since photographs surfaced of him and Jay in January. He performed at the Super Bowl LX tailgate outside Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara on February 8 and curated the in-stadium house band, a first for an artist of his profile. He assured the Breakfast Club hosts he still owns his masters and considers himself independent, with Roc Nation providing infrastructure he couldn’t obtain alone.

This came after years of cultivating a reputation as hip-hop’s most committed grassroots independent, a man who constructed a recording complex and performance venue in his parents’ backyard in Vallejo, organized free field days for neighborhood families, and bought out a local restaurant to run a pay-what-you-want menu. Kyrie Irving once paid $11,001 for an album during a livestream. LaRussell distributed his records through a direct-to-fan platform where supporters could contribute whatever they could afford, a model borrowed from the late Nipsey Hussle, and maintained a pace of 100 shows and 40-plus albums since 2018. None of this is trivial. LaRussell earned actual loyalty from actual people who invested in him with their time, their money, and their physical presence at his Vallejo pergola shows. That loyalty is what made the Roc Nation partnership possible.

It is also what makes “Heaven Sent” so reckless.

The song dropped February 26. It sat quietly for two and a half weeks until LaRussell staged the live performance and weaponized the engineer’s caution as a marketing hook. His defense, uploaded the following morning: “What do y’all think I’m saying in this song? Is it the truth that’s bothersome or is it what YOU think I’m saying? I’m saying every human was made by God. Even the evil ones. Even the niggas going to hell alongside some of yall uncles, daddies, and favorite rappers.” A day later, he added: “WE ALL HEAVEN SENT!!! NOT HEAVEN BOUND. ARGUE WITH YOU MOMMA OR BARACK OBAMA.” And in a five-minute video posted on March 17, he reiterated: “The same God, who created Martin Luther King and Malcolm X who did so many great things, is the same God that created Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein who did so many evil things.”

Take the theology on its own terms. Plenty of religious traditions hold that God created all human beings, including the ones who commit atrocities. The Calvinist tradition contains debates about predestination and evil that have occupied scholars for centuries. Islam holds that all souls originate from Allah’s will but are accountable for their choices. If LaRussell wanted to wrestle with that paradox, he had the room. Father God, Guide Me is a seven-track project that includes a song called “Lord I Pray” and features a gospel choir throughout. The groundwork for real theological confrontation was already in place.

But “Heaven Sent” doesn’t contend with anything. It lists names, then flattens Martin Luther King Jr. and Adolf Hitler into the same syntactic slot. It treats Malcolm X and Jeffrey Epstein as interchangeable occupants of the same bar. The song offers no distinction between the man who organized the March on Washington and the man who trafficked minors on a private island. LaRussell’s post-hoc defense supplies the distinction he failed to build into the lyric: he knows these figures aren’t morally equivalent, he clarified afterward. But a song has to do its own arguing. If you need an explanatory thread the next morning to clarify that you weren’t praising a child trafficker, the writing failed.

Several commenters clocked a more basic theological error. One wrote that the devil, in Christian scripture, was banished from heaven, making the song’s opening premise shaky even within its own framework. LaRussell’s rebuttal was a joke: “ARGUE WITH YOU MOMMA OR BARACK OBAMA.” Others asked what the correlation was supposed to be. One person warned him he’d burned “damn near all the goodwill you’ve garnered as an independent artist” on a single clip. Producer Chuck Inglish weighed in, prompting LaRussell to double down further.

This is the second time in weeks that LaRussell has torched his own news cycle. In February, a clip from The Truth Hurts podcast went viral after he criticized Lil Wayne’s substance, saying he’d “grew a disdain for Wayne” as he matured and realized “this nigga wasn’t talking about nothing for a long time.” He pitched this as an honest reckoning with influence and harm in Black communities, pointing to Wayne’s gun bars and their downstream effects. When it blew up, he shared the full eight-minute clip and accused media outlets of editing him for clickbait. The fuller context softened the take somewhat. He’d called “Tie My Hands” one of the greatest records ever made and acknowledged Wayne as a formative influence. But the viral clip was already gone, and LaRussell’s name was trending for the wrong reason.

The Wayne controversy carried a secondary charge because LaRussell had just signed to Roc Nation. For years, an unfounded but persistent conspiracy theory has circulated on deranged Stan Twitter that anyone affiliated with JAY-Z’s orbit is obligated to take shots at Young Money artists, including Wayne, Nicki Minaj, and Drake. LaRussell’s timing made the theory louder, even if the substance of his critique was more nuanced than the clips suggested. And then the Epstein file releases landed. On January 31, the Department of Justice published its largest batch of Jeffrey Epstein documents under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by President Trump in November 2025. Among the millions of pages were unverified FBI tip-line submissions naming JAY-Z and Roc Nation artist Pusha T. The DOJ was explicit: these tips were raw, unsubstantiated public submissions that did not result in investigations or charges. JAY-Z’s name had also appeared in a December 2024 civil lawsuit alleging sexual assault, which was voluntarily dismissed with prejudice in February 2025 after the accuser’s account fell apart. None of this constitutes evidence of wrongdoing. But the cultural atmosphere was already charged, and LaRussell, weeks into his Roc Nation deal, recorded a song name-checking Epstein alongside a choir.

LaRussell has spent years building something rare in hip-hop. He stayed in Vallejo when most artists in his position would have relocated to Los Angeles or New York, invented a performance economy out of his parents’ backyard, and turned down a Def Jam deal in 2023 because the terms weren’t right. He bankrolled his career out of his own pocket for nearly a decade. His community showed up for him in ways that most independent artists can only imagine, filling his pergola shows, buying his self-published book, contributing what they could afford to his pay-what-you-want campaigns. When he joined Roc Nation, he described it as the next step for a man who’d exhausted the infrastructure available to him at his level. “I’ve gotten to a point of so much success independently where I’m from that I lost my guides,” he said on The Breakfast Club. “I surpassed a lot of people who did what I’ve done.”

The people who built that foundation with him are the people he’s now asking to co-sign a song where Jeffrey Epstein and Adolf Hitler share a section with Martin Luther King Jr. The grandmother bouncing a baby on her lap at the pergola show. The kid who paid two dollars for the album. The restaurant owner who let LaRussell take over his café for a pay-what-you-want experiment. These are the people whose trust LaRussell mortgaged for six million views and a trending topic, and the defense he offered them amounted to laughing emojis and a dare to argue with Barack Obama’s mother.

His engineer told him not to drop it. That phone call might be the most honest moment in the entire Father God, Guide Me project. Somebody in LaRussell’s circle heard the song, understood what it would cost, and said so plainly. LaRussell treated that honesty as proof that the song needed to exist. If your definition of bravery is doing whatever people advise against, you’ll eventually confuse recklessness with courage, and provocation with substance. LaRussell crossed that line somewhere between the laughing emojis and the five-minute explainer video. His community deserved a harder question than “we all heaven sent.” They deserved a song that actually reckoned with why some of us aren’t.

But since he deactivated socials, LaRussell didn’t stand on any business.

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Born Yvette Marie Stevens on March 23, 1953, in the Chicago suburb of Great Lakes, Illinois, Chaka Khan arrived into a household saturated with sound. Her father Charles worked as a photographer; her mother Sandra was a financial assistant. Both were music heads. Yvette took her name from a song by jazz drummer Max Roach, and the family kept a constant rotation of records spinning at home—opera like Madame Butterfly, plenty of King Curtis, and the album that would lodge deepest: Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin. It was Chaka’s grandmother Maude Page who put Billie in her ear, and from the opening lines of “The End of a Love Affair”—that restless confession of recklessness—the girl found something she recognized in herself. Later, she would half-joke about being Chaka “Overkill” Khan. But it wasn’t really a joke. That fuse was lit early.

At 11, her great-grandmother Naomi—half Native American, half French—read her palm: “One day, many, many people will know your name.” Maybe that prophecy shook something loose. Yvette formed her first group, The Crystalettes, with neighborhood friends. They sang nothing but Crystals and Pips songs (every member pretending to be Gladys Knight), performed at local talent shows in little dresses their mother had sewn, and more than once, the kid with the impossible pipes got tagged “Little Aretha.”

The teenage years burned fast. She joined the Afro-Arts Theater, a music and drama troupe that toured with Motown’s Mary Wells. She sang with Shades of Black, a group rooted in African rhythms along the lines of Miriam Makeba. And she started shedding skin. Through volunteer work with the Black Panthers’ breakfast program, she met an African shaman who gave her the name Chaka—meaning, in a certain dialect, “woman of fire.” Her sister Yvonne became Taka and eventually released records under the name Taka Boom, collaborating with the likes of Bootsy Collins and The Chemical Brothers. Chaka’s full African name is Chaka Adunne Aduffe Yemoja Hodarhi Karifi. The surname Khan stuck from a brief marriage at 17 to a bassist named Hassan Khan. She once told Essence Magazine she married him for the stage name. Chaka Karifi wouldn’t have hit the same.

She wanted to be a nurse, a Peace Corps volunteer, a nun. She made it one year in high school before dropping out in 1969 to chase the music. A short stint with a group called Lyfe, then a run with The Babysitters, a popular Chicago outfit fronted by the local soul figure Baby Huey. They landed on Curtis Mayfield’s Curtom label. But the money wasn’t there yet, so by day she filed papers at the University of Chicago, a gig her mother arranged.

The apartment she shared with Hassan and eight other people was a house of free spirits—everyone looking and living however they wanted. Every night she was behind a mic at some local club, and the word was traveling. One night in 1971, while she was singing with the band Lock and Chain at The Poker Room on 71st Street, record producer Bob Monaco walked in. He was floored by what he heard but had no interest in the backing band. Instead, he wanted to pair Chaka with Ask Rufus, another Chicago group that had risen from the ashes of The American Breed (who’d scraped a minor hit with “Bend Me, Shape Me”). Ask Rufus took their name from a column in Popular Mechanics. The band’s original singer, Chaka’s friend Paulette McWilliams, had just left, and the door swung open.

“She had the biggest breasts in the world, so I already had a fan base thanks to that,” Chaka told Rolling Stone in 1985. Whether it was anatomy or vocal cords, the crowds came regardless, and they didn’t thin out when Chaka arrived. The band, now simply called Rufus, worked Sly Stone covers and Top 40 material. They loved Chicago, but Monaco convinced them that the road ran shorter through Los Angeles. By early 1972, Chaka Khan—eighteen years old—was in the studio cutting what would become the debut album. (A footnote worth knowing: Curtis Mayfield sued her for breach of contract when she left for the West Coast. The dispute eventually settled amicably.)

The self-titled Rufus landed in 1973 on ABC Records to modest reception. But it contained a cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Maybe Your Baby” that pleased the man enough to offer the band a custom-written song for the follow-up. That song was “Tell Me Something Good.” It powered Rags to Rufus (1974) into the Top 5 on Billboard, pushed the album to gold, and brought home a Grammy for Best R&B Performance. By the time Rufusized dropped later that year—now credited to Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan, with hits like “Once You Get Started” and “I’m a Woman, I’m a Backbone”—her voice was everywhere. Anita Baker, speaking to Billboard in 1995, laid it bare: “We were all Chaka’s doubles back then. Throats all across America were shredded as we tried to imitate her voice.”

And the voice. If there is a single reason Chaka Khan has remained a fixture of respect for over five decades, it is not the hit count or the sales figures. It is the instrument. Writers have reached for the obvious analogies—Coltrane’s saxophone, Miles’s trumpet—but they land because they’re accurate. Her voice is a paradox engine: velvet restraint and volcanic force occupying the same phrase, sometimes the same syllable. She lures with tenderness, then detonates. She has sung funk, soul, R&B, jazz, rock, gospel, disco, classical, and rap, and it has always sounded right. For Chaka Khan, singing is as involuntary as breathing. A New York Newsday writer once nailed it: her voice “refuses to acknowledge any setting other than full blast.”

The classic Rufus lineup crystallized—Chaka on vocals, Tony Maiden on guitar, Kevin Murphy and David “Hawk” Wolinski splitting keyboards, Bobby Watson on bass, John “JR” Robinson on drums—and the albums kept coming: Ask Rufus (1977), Street Player (1978), Masterjam (1979), all gold or platinum. But the unity was a mirage. The other members resented Chaka’s gravitational pull. She was bewildered; she’d always been comfortable in the band and never imagined going solo. But the friction planted the seed, and when Warner Bros. offered a solo deal, there was nothing to deliberate. Her debut, Chaka (1978), yielded “I’m Every Woman” and outsold everything Rufus had done recently. The solo star was born.

The early eighties were a tug-of-war between solo ambitions and lingering contractual ties. Naughty (1980) and What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me (1981) established her on her own; the latter contained “And the Melody Still Lingers On,” a reworking of Dizzy Gillespie and Charlie Parker’s “Night in Tunisia” for which Chaka wrote lyrics tracing the jazz lineage from bop through Coltrane to Stevie Wonder. Old Dizzy was so flattered he played on the track. Meanwhile, Rufus cut three records without her—Numbers (1979), Party ‘Til You’re Broke (1980), Seal in Red (1981)—and none of them moved. The reunited Camouflage (1981) didn’t satisfy anyone, but it confirmed what everybody already knew: the Rufus chapter was closing. What they left behind was Live: Stompin’ at the Savoy (1983), recorded at the legendary New York club in February 1982, expanded with horns, backup singers, and extra percussion. From that session came “Ain’t Nobody,” a Grammy winner and arguably the single most definitive expression of Chaka Khan’s vocal architecture.

Jazz had been calling since childhood, and Chaka picked up the phone. Echoes of an Era (1982) placed her alongside Chick Corea, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Clarke, and Lenny White. She has said she gravitates toward jazz because it demands she feel a little lost, that she actually think about what she’s doing.

Then came the commercial peak. The label wanted a smash. Chaka had long wanted to cover Prince’s “I Feel for You,” which the Pointer Sisters had already taken a run at. Chaka’s version was harder, aimed straight at the floor, and Arif Mardin—her longtime producer—slipped in a rap by Grandmaster Melle Mel without telling her. The first time she heard it, she blushed. But she understood its power, and she understood in that same moment that this song—however unrepresentative of her range—would trail her for life. I Feel for You (1984) remains her best-selling album. The title single won two Grammys and entered the permanent lexicon. (A word of advice passed down from those who know: if you ever meet Chaka Khan, do not, under any circumstances, walk up to her and start rapping “Chaka, Chaka, Chaka.”)

She refused to chase the formula. Destiny (1986) and C.K. (1988) underperformed commercially. Warner Bros. pushed out the remix compilation Life Is a Dance: The Remix Project (1989) without her input and accidentally scored a UK hit with a reworked “I’m Every Woman.” Chaka was talked into filming a new video and rode the momentum through a European tour. But behind the scenes, she was unraveling. The drug years—at their worst through the mid-eighties—had taken a visible toll.

The escape route ran through London. After the tour, she packed up her children Milini and Damien and settled into a small red brick house on an ordinary street in one of the city’s better neighborhoods. “I needed to get away from America to find myself again,” she told Jet Magazine in 1996. “And here I get to be left in peace.” She also bought a cottage in southern Germany, near the studio, in a village where church bells rang every fifteen minutes. In that quiet, she got clean and made The Woman I Am (1992), her strongest work since What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me. It won her a seventh Grammy, for Best R&B Album.

The mid-nineties were deliberately still. She became a grandmother at 39. She played drums. She took a lead role in the off-Broadway musical Mama, I Want to Sing in London. She cut an entire album with producer David Gamson that Warner shelved for not sounding modern enough. (Tracks from those sessions—the so-called Dare You to Love Me recordings—have since leaked onto soundtracks and bootlegs.) The compilation Epiphany: The Best of Chaka Khan, Volume One (1996) served as a truce between artist and label, but by 1997, after nearly two decades together, Chaka walked away from Warner Bros. for good.

Come 2 My House (1998), released on Prince’s NPG Records, was the first record on her own terms. Written and recorded in three weeks, it moved over a million copies worldwide without any real promotional push. With total control of her business, she made more money from it than she ever saw at Warner. That math should unsettle anyone paying attention.

Then came five years without a solo album—an eternity in the industry, though Chaka herself never stopped working, averaging 70 to 80 shows a year. “I love performing live,” she has said. “It’s the interplay with the audience and their response that keeps me singing.” The biggest hit of this “quiet” period was “All Good?” with De La Soul in 2000. That same year brought The Jazz Channel Presents Chaka Khan, a DVD of pure jazz performance that proved what devotees already knew: the woman was as formidable in that idiom as anyone breathing.

Classikhan (2004) made the case more ornately. Recorded at Abbey Road with the London Symphony Orchestra, produced and arranged by Eve Nelson, the album ran through jazz and swing standards—”Stormy Weather,” “’Round Midnight,” “Teach Me Tonight”—alongside unlikely choices like Patsy Cline’s “Crazy” and a pair of James Bond themes, “Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever,” that gave Shirley Bassey something to think about. Joe Sample sat in on piano; Sheila E. handled percussion. It was Chaka in recital mode, her voice leashed to a whisper when needed, unleashed when the strings swelled. The title was clever, but it may have hurt the record: at a glance, it looked like another greatest-hits repackaging. It wasn’t. It was a woman proving she could inhabit any room.

Funk This (2007) swung the pendulum hard the other way. Produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis—Janet Jackson’s architects, longtime fans who understood instinctively what made Chaka tick—it was loose, live-sounding, and unapologetically funky. Covers of Prince’s “Sign o’ the Times,” Joni Mitchell’s “Ladies Man,” and Jimi Hendrix’s “Castles Made of Sand” sat alongside originals like the autobiographical “Angel” and the gorgeous “One for All Time.” Mary J. Blige showed up for “Disrespectful,” a duet that burned with mutual admiration. Michael McDonald traded grit on “You Belong to Me.” The record debuted at number 15 on the Billboard 200—her highest chart position since I Feel for You—and swept two Grammys: Best R&B Album and Best R&B Performance by a Duo or Group for the Blige collaboration.

Twelve years of silence followed before Hello Happiness (2019), a seven-track sprint produced by Switch (of Major Lazer lineage) and singer-songwriter Sarah Ruba Taylor. At 27 minutes, it was a pocket album, a dancefloor dispatch that mined the disco and funk textures of Chaka’s seventies and eighties prime and filtered them through modern production’s maximalist tendencies. “Like Sugar,” with its chopped-up bongos and broken beats, was the standout—an irresistible groove that crossed over to DJ sets and playlist rotation alike. The reception was split: some heard a vital, contemporary-sounding record from a 65-year-old legend still chasing the floor rather than the podium; others felt the production buried the very voice it was supposed to celebrate. Both camps were probably right. The album peaked at number 18 on the UK Albums Chart, her highest showing there ever.

Through it all, the voice has only deepened. The vibrato has settled. The register has dropped and grown huskier with age. But the range has expanded, not contracted. And unlike some of her peers—who compensated for diminishing power by pushing harder and louder—Chaka learned the inverse lesson. She figured out when to burn and when to hold still. Less is more. She has always worked on instinct, deciding a fraction of a second before a note which direction to take it, and that unpredictability is the whole point. It’s why no two performances sound the same. It’s why the imitators never catch up. It’s why Anita Baker knew, and Whitney knew, and Mary J. knew, and Erykah knew: there is only one.

She has been, by her own accounting, “to hell and back in a limousine.” She kicked drugs. She raised children and grandchildren. She ran a foundation for battered women, women with addiction, women with HIV. She sold luxury chocolates called Chakalates and funneled every cent of profit into that foundation. She moved between London and Los Angeles and New Jersey and southern Germany like a woman who understood that restlessness wasn’t a flaw but a fuel source.

Who is Chaka Khan? Fans have tried: “Primal Wailer,” “Her Royal Wildness,” “The Mother of the Clan of No Bad Notes.” She doesn’t love any of them. She especially hates “diva.” That word, to her, means someone who isn’t kind.

She is what she is. She does what she does. And she does it when she wants to.

The Handguide to Chaka Khan

Rufus (1973)

The debut. Modest on impact, but Chaka’s presence was already unmistakable. A cover of Stevie Wonder’s “Maybe Your Baby” caught the great man’s ear and set the next chapter in motion. The raw materials—churning funk, Top 40 instincts, a frontwoman who sounded like nobody else—are all here, waiting to ignite.

Rags to Rufus (1974)

The ignition. Stevie Wonder rewarded the band’s loyalty with “Tell Me Something Good,” a slinky, sinister groove that went Top 5 and won a Grammy. The album sold gold. Rufus went from a Chicago bar band to a national act in the span of a single.

Rufusized (1974)

Billing change, same engine. “Once You Get Started” and “Stop On By” kept the momentum rolling, but the real declaration was “I’m a Woman, I’m a Backbone”—a title track that might as well have been Chaka’s business card. The band chemistry was locked in, and the country was learning her name.

Rufus Featuring Chaka Khan (1975)

The self-titled centerpiece of the Rufus run. “Sweet Thing” is the crown jewel—a timeless, aching ballad that remains a live staple to this day. The band was firing on every cylinder: pop hooks, funk muscle, jazz instincts, and a vocalist operating on a plane none of her peers could reach.

Ask Rufus (1977)

Tighter, more refined. The songwriting stretched, the arrangements thickened, and the grooves got slicker without losing their sweat. A gold-selling record that deepened the band’s catalog without any single track overshadowing the whole. Rufus at cruising altitude.

Street Player (1978)

The funk turns sleeker, more urban. By now the internal tensions were simmering—Chaka’s solo debut was months away—but you wouldn’t know it from the music. The title track rides a strutting bassline that belongs in any serious funk collection. A transitional album, but a potent one.

Chaka (1978)

Solo debut, and it arrived fully formed. “I’m Every Woman,” written by Ashford & Simpson, became an anthem that transcended its era. The album outsold recent Rufus releases and announced that Chaka Khan was no longer just a band singer. She was a franchise.

Masterjam (1979)

Quincy Jones behind the boards. The production is glossy and enormous, the grooves immaculate. “Do You Love What You Feel” was the big single, but the deeper cuts reward repeated visits. The last Rufus studio album made with real collective momentum before the fractures became irreparable.

Naughty (1980)

Looser and more playful than the debut, with Chaka settling into solo life and pushing her voice into new corners. Not the commercial juggernaut the label wanted, but a record with personality to spare. She was figuring out who she was without the band, and the search itself was compelling.

Camouflage (1981)

The reluctant reunion. Nobody involved was thrilled with the results, and the album plays like exactly what it was—a contractual obligation. There are moments of the old Rufus fire, but the spark had emigrated. Most valuable as a marker of an ending.

What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me (1981)

One of the great Chaka Khan records. “And the Melody Still Lingers On” reimagined Gillespie and Parker’s “Night in Tunisia” as a love letter to jazz history, with Dizzy himself showing up to play. The title track swings, the ballads burn, and the album stands as proof that she was more than capable of sustaining a solo career on pure artistry.

Chaka Khan (1982)

The second self-titled entry. Arif Mardin produced again, and the grooves leaned toward the sophisticated end of early-eighties R&B. “Got to Be There” carried the album commercially, but the deeper pleasures are in the phrasing, the way Chaka was learning to do more with less even as the production grew more layered.

Echoes of an Era (1982)

A jazz detour with an all-star band: Chick Corea, Joe Henderson, Freddie Hubbard, Stanley Clarke, Lenny White. Chaka traded the safety of funk arrangements for the open water of straight-ahead jazz standards, and she swam beautifully. She has said she loves singing jazz because it forces her to feel a little lost. This album is the sound of a vocalist thriving in that uncertainty.

Live: Stompin’ at the Savoy (1983)

The farewell, and what a way to go. Recorded at the Savoy in February 1982, augmented with horns and extra percussion, the live tracks crackle with a band that knew it was playing for the last time. The four new studio cuts include “Ain’t Nobody”—the Grammy-winning single that may be the single most complete distillation of what Chaka Khan does to a song. Essential.

I Feel for You (1984)

The commercial peak. Prince’s title track, retrofitted with Grandmaster Melle Mel’s iconic rap intro (added by Arif Mardin without Chaka’s knowledge), became one of the decade’s defining singles. Two Grammys. The best-selling album of her career. A whole new generation discovered her through a song she knew would follow her forever. She was right.

Destiny (1986)

The post-I Feel for You hangover. Chaka refused to repeat the formula, and the charts punished her for it. But the record has aged better than its sales suggested—there are textures here, quiet experiments, evidence of an artist who would rather lose commercially than creatively. A cult object for the faithful.

C.K. (1988)

Another commercial underperformer, another album that rewards patience. The production leans into late-eighties R&B—drum machines, synth pads, slick arrangements—but Chaka’s voice cuts through all of it. Not her finest hour, but hardly the dud the charts made it seem.

Life Is a Dance: The Remix Project (1989)

Warner Bros. released this without Chaka’s involvement—a double-LP compilation of her solo and Rufus-era hits reworked by house and hip-hop producers including Frankie Knuckles and David Morales. The remixed “I’m Every Woman” became a surprise UK smash. The remixed “Ain’t Nobody” hit number 6 in Britain. As a document of late-eighties dance culture meeting seventies funk royalty, it holds up surprisingly well.

The Woman I Am (1992)

The comeback that actually delivered. Made after Chaka relocated to London and got clean, recorded partly in a tiny German village where church bells rang every fifteen minutes. Her most consistently strong album since What Cha’ Gonna Do for Me—mature, assured, emotionally present. Won her a seventh Grammy, for Best R&B Album. The sound of a woman who’d come through the fire.

Come 2 My House (1998)

Released on Prince’s NPG Records. Written and recorded in three weeks. Over a million copies sold worldwide with virtually no marketing. Her first album with total creative and business control. She made more money from this record than from anything she did at Warner Bros., which tells you everything about the economics of major-label deals in the nineties. The music itself is uneven—Prince’s production aesthetic doesn’t always serve Chaka’s strengths—but the principle behind it was liberating.

Classikhan (2004)

Chaka at Abbey Road with the London Symphony Orchestra, draping her voice across jazz standards, Broadway numbers, and James Bond themes. “Goldfinger” and “Diamonds Are Forever” are thrilling; “’Round Midnight” and “Stormy Weather” are tender. Joe Sample guests on piano, Sheila E. on percussion. The misleading title—it sounds like a best-of—may have cost it an audience. Underneath the packaging sits one of her most elegant performances.

Funk This (2007)

Produced by Jimmy Jam and Terry Lewis, and it was a long-overdue pairing. Loose, live-sounding, unashamed of its retro-funk backbone. Covers of Prince, Joni Mitchell, and Hendrix sit next to originals that feel lived-in and urgent. The Mary J. Blige duet “Disrespectful” is volcanic. Two Grammys. Debuted at number 15 on the Billboard 200. Her best album in years, and the closest thing to a Rufusized-era throwback she’s ever made as a solo artist.

Hello Happiness (2019)

Seven tracks, 27 minutes, produced by Switch and Sarah Ruba Taylor. A dancefloor record, built on disco strings, broken beats, and thick funk bass. “Like Sugar” is the headliner—a chopped, percussive groove that crossed over everywhere. The production occasionally threatens to swallow the voice, and critics debated whether the maximalist approach served or smothered her. But at 65, Chaka Khan was still making records aimed at the floor rather than the mantelpiece, and that refusal to play elder stateswoman is its own kind of statement.

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As the Civil Rights Movement gained momentum, violence against the Black community grew ever more frequent. As historian Thomas Holt emphasized, “the message was clear: every step forward in the quest for the human dignity of Black Americans would be met with a murderous response.” Because they challenged the racial barrier and because their successes nurtured hope, Black artists, whether officially involved in the struggle or not, were among the preferred targets of white supremacists. Touring in the South was therefore particularly dreaded. “Lord, it was hard: we were often scared to death,” confessed Fred Cash of the Impressions. Mahalia Jackson left us a testimony of the difficulties endured by African American musicians when they traveled the roads of the Deep South:

Intimidations, verbal and physical violence, death threats: such was the lot of tours in the South, and few musicians, like Duke Ellington, had the means to protect themselves even slightly from the humiliating effects of segregation. “To avoid any trouble, we chartered two Pullman sleeping cars and a twenty-one-meter-long baggage car. Wherever we went in the South, we slept in our Pullmans.”

Touring the Southern states was all the more grueling because many musicians of the new generation had grown up in the North and were therefore unfamiliar with the complexity of the Jim Crow laws in effect on the other side of the Mason-Dixon line. “While traveling through the South in 1951, I suddenly saw the divisions: there were White restrooms and Black latrines, White restaurants and Black dives, White hotels and Black flophouses,” observed Ray Charles in this regard. In the lands of Dixie, Black musicians were constantly subjected to the hostility of the white population. Emma Patron, one of the singers of the group The Bobettes, known for the hit “Mr Lee,” recounts that during a tour with Elvis Presley and Paul Anka, she went into a Woolworth’s in Georgia to buy toiletries. “Everyone in our group had a fifty-dollar bill, and the saleswoman said to us: ‘You all must have picked a whole lot of cotton, huh!’ We didn’t know what she was talking about, because we grew up in New York.”

The reception at theaters and concert halls was much the same. Solomon Burke had to go on stage with a blindfold over his face because the promoters did not know he was Black, and during the 1963 tour organized by the Motown label to promote its artists, young Stevie Wonder tells us that “once in Macon, Georgia, there was a Confederate flag hanging from the front of the stage. One of our guys, Gene Shelby, told the promoter: ‘Our star Marvin Gaye is not going to appreciate that flag.’ The guy answered: ‘Boy, you see how that flag is swinging in the wind? You better take your tail and get out of here, or it’s going to end up at the top of a tree swinging just like that flag.’” The humiliations did not end there, since the simple act of needing to use the restroom became an ordeal. “You could drive for hours without ever finding a gas station that would let us use the restroom,” testifies Ray Charles. “If you stopped by the side of the road, you ran the risk of being arrested.”

One of the greatest fears of Black musicians traveling the roads of the South was being stopped by the police. “Back then, they didn’t need charges. They’d rough you up if they felt like it. They’d call you nigger, bastard, or whatever else struck their fancy. Trying to explain yourself, to defend yourself, trying to reason with them: that was all the excuse the cops needed to beat you down. If you didn’t want to get beaten, you just had to keep quiet and bite your tongue.” Since musicians were most often paid in cash, they were easy prey for officers looking to supplement their income. On the roads of the South, shakedowns were in fact commonplace, as this testimony from Tina Turner attests: “I don’t know how many times I witnessed the following exchange. We’d be crossing, say, Mississippi, when a white cop would signal us to pull over. ‘Well, boy,’ he’d say, provocatively, to Jimmy Thomas, one of the backup singers who also served as our driver, ‘you were going a little fast, weren’t you?’ Jimmy would reply in his most polite tone: ‘No, sir, I was obeying the speed limit.’ And the cat-and-mouse game would begin. [...] Of course the officer would drive off a little richer, and we’d continue down the road... until another officer ordered us to stop.”

This same sense of impunity existed in the North, where the police were just as violent. In August 1959, Miles Davis was attacked and arbitrarily arrested by an officer in front of the Birdland, where he was playing that evening. “I hadn’t done anything except help a friend hail a cab. She happened to be white, and the white cop didn’t appreciate a Negro doing that. In East St. Louis, I would have expected that kind of garbage about ‘resisting arrest,’ but not in New York, which was supposed to be the most liberated, most hip city in the world. But once again, I was surrounded by white people, and I learned that when that happens and you’re Black, there is no justice. None. [...] That incident changed me forever, made me far more bitter and cynical than I should have been.”

These lawful aggressions were not isolated cases but rather reflected a deliberate effort to force African American musicians to abide by the rules of the racist system in place.

This campaign of terror orchestrated across the country nevertheless failed to discourage Black artists from joining the ranks of the Civil Rights Movement. At the dawn of the 1960s, more and more of them demanded contractual clauses prohibiting segregation at the concerts they gave in the South, which allowed them to cancel the engagement if there was any racial discrimination, whether in the audience or on stage. At the same time, saxophonist Cannonball Adderley, Nina Simone, and Thelonious Monk sponsored the SNCC, while Nat King Cole, Harry Belafonte, and Mahalia Jackson supported Kennedy’s electoral campaign, hoping that once elected, he would confront the racial question. For her part, Odetta Holmes reinterpreted the repertoire of Leadbelly, convinced that singing the message of social justice emanating from the bluesman’s compositions had meaning at a time when the Black community was preparing to deliver the final blow to Jim Crow. Charles Mingus composed the piece “Fables of Faubus” following the events at Little Rock in 1957. The piece was a frontal attack against the governor of Arkansas, Orval Faubus, who had tried by every means to prevent the end of school segregation.

Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em shoot us!
Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em stab us!
Oh, Lord, don’t let ‘em tar and feather us!
Oh, Lord, no more swastikas!
Oh, Lord, no more Ku Klux Klan!
Name me someone who’s ridiculous, Dannie. Governor Faubus!
Why is he so sick and ridiculous? He won’t permit integrated schools.
Then he’s a fool!

A first instrumental version of the piece was released in 1959 on the album Ah Um, Columbia having refused to endorse the lyrics. A year later, Mingus recorded “Fables of Faubus” again, this time in a vocal version. The track appears on the album Charles Mingus Presents Charles Mingus, released on the Candid Records label.

However, nothing illustrated the radicalization of Black musicians better than the trajectory of crooner Nat King Cole. Cole was born in 1919 in Montgomery, Alabama. In 1923, he followed his parents to Chicago, like many African American families fleeing the harshness of the Deep South. With his velvet voice and his perfect son-in-law demeanor, he managed very early on to win the hearts of white America, all the more easily as he then turned a blind eye to the injustices that the Black community endured daily. Closer to the thinking of Booker T. Washington than to that of Du Bois, Cole was the embodiment of that Black bourgeoisie that favored gradualism. Two events that occurred in 1956 would make him change course. On April 10, as already mentioned, he was savagely attacked on stage in Birmingham. A few months later, NBC entrusted him with his own talk show.

Launched in October on NBC, the Cole’s Show was the first televised program hosted by a Black man. The production’s choice was far from incidental for anyone aware of how little political involvement Cole had shown until then. Although it attracted many viewers early on, the show did not last a year. The blame lay with sponsors who refused to invest in a show hosted by a “Negro.” It was these two traumatic experiences that drove Nat King Cole to invest himself in the struggle. Harry Belafonte recounted that after that, he “truly understood the harshness of the United States. And then he realized he could no longer remain silent.”

Breaking free from the norms imposed by the record industry and producing direct social commentary in one’s music was not without risk. As Charles Mingus’s experience at Columbia had demonstrated, there was no question of Black artists using their position to criticize the United States in general and racism in particular. Things were even worse when an artist managed to break free from the major labels. Thus, Ray Charles’s arrest for heroin possession and use was perceived by many African Americans as a replay of Sam Cooke’s assassination, a means of silencing a Black man displaying triumphant success. As Peter Guralnick notes in his essay on soul, “Ray Charles had ended up winning what Sam Cooke fought for at RCA (and what James Brown would later define as Black Capitalism): a measure of independence, not only artistic but also financial, sufficient economic power to become a buyer on the record market.” The media coverage of Ray Charles’s arrest was unprecedented for such a minor offense, attesting to a desire to destroy him publicly. “Many white musicians were also shooting up (Stan Getz, Gerry Mulligan, Red Rodney, Chet Baker), but the press acted as if only Black musicians did,” Miles Davis remarked ironically.

While many artists participated in the struggle, the commitment shown by Harry Belafonte deserves a moment’s attention, so deeply did this actor and singer become one with the Civil Rights Movement. Born in 1927 in Harlem to a Jamaican mother and a Martinican father, Belafonte began his singing career in the aftermath of the Second World War, supported in his endeavors by Max Roach and Charlie Parker. In 1954, he recorded his first album, a collection of folk songs that included a tribute to one of the legendary figures of blues culture, the miner John Henry, already encountered in our narrative. “When I sing ‘John Henry,’ I project myself to the very roots of the song,” Belafonte confided. “I overflow with pride at the thought of what John Henry represents for all Black people.” Two years later, in 1956, he achieved worldwide success with his rendition of “Banana Boat (Day-O),” a work song about the grueling working conditions in the banana plantations of Jamaica.

At the risk of losing his white audience, which represented at least half of his following, Belafonte decided that same year to put his fame and his money at the service of the Civil Rights Movement. Politically, he was influenced by the activism of Paul Robeson and by the thought of W.E.B. Du Bois. His militancy drew the wrath of the Ku Klux Klan, triggered a smear campaign from the reactionary media that dominated in the United States, and he was blacklisted by Hollywood throughout the 1960s.

Belafonte chose to put his voice and his money at the service of the SCLC. It was during a meeting for the Montgomery bus boycott campaign that he struck up a friendship with Martin Luther King, whose principal adviser he became. This closeness did not prevent him from supporting, discussing with, and working with the other Civil Rights organizations such as the SNCC and CORE. He was thus one of the few within King’s organization to support Stokely Carmichael, the rising new figure of the SNCC, an eloquent man who frightened white America and the Black bourgeoisie with his radical speeches.

Belafonte was also among those who scolded the government for its lack of courage when it came to investing in the fight against racial inequality. In 1960, when Kennedy approached him hoping for his support in the electoral campaign, Belafonte retorted that rather than meeting African American stars, Kennedy would do better to talk with the political leaders of the Black community. Three years later, he was at the forefront of the struggle in Birmingham, where he was one of the key players in the campaign to desegregate public places and promote the hiring of Black personnel in downtown businesses. Martin Luther King recounts that, from the beginning of the crisis in the spring of 1963, Harry Belafonte immediately organized a committee: “That very evening money was raised. During the three weeks that followed that meeting, Belafonte, who always throws himself wholeheartedly into whatever he does, spent his time unstintingly to mobilize people and raise funds. [...] One can never overstate the role that this great artist played in the Birmingham crusade.”

Harry Belafonte was also one of the initiators of the famous March on Washington of August 28, 1963. The idea had taken shape a few months earlier, in December 1962, under the impetus of the trade unionist and pioneer of direct action A. Philip Randolph and his comrade in struggle, the tireless activist Bayard Rustin, King’s mentor. As with the aborted yet victorious march of 1941, the goal was to pressure the American government into ending once and for all the economic and political segregation that still afflicted the Black community. As the event took shape and support grew ever more numerous, Kennedy was forced to grant official endorsement to the march. As Malcolm X remarked ironically, “when the white man realized he couldn’t stop it, he joined it.” From that point on, the marchers had to accept all of the authorities’ conditions or risk seeing the event canceled. Radical slogans and speeches were banned, and Black leaders abandoned many of their demands for fear of offending white churches and liberals. Regarding the co-opting of the march by the latter, Malcolm X observed that “they went there too. They infiltrated it. They became part of the march and then ran off with the whole thing. And since they were running it, the whole thing lost all its militant energy. No more anger, no more pressure, no more radicalism.”

Many musicians lent their artistic and financial support to the March on Washington. Lena Horne and Sammy Davis Jr. actively promoted the event, and Nat King Cole spared no effort to ensure that all African American political organizations, from the NAACP to CORE, were represented on this historic day. Concerts were organized to fund the march, including one on August 5 in Birmingham, where three months earlier the police had committed the barbaric crimes that had moved the international community.

On the day of the concert, however, the city’s mayor refused to deploy that same police force to protect the audience and artists from an attack that the Ku Klux Klan was plotting. This threat did not prevent the public from turning out en masse. The organizers expected around 5,000 people; more than 20,000 came. That day, they had the pleasure of seeing Ray Charles, Nina Simone, Clyde McPhatter, and the Shirelles, among others, take the stage one after another, interspersed with speeches by Martin Luther King and appearances by the author James Baldwin and boxing champion Joe Louis. For his part, Harry Belafonte convinced his friend Marlon Brando and the actors Burt Lancaster and Charlton Heston to participate in the march, and Martin Luther King entrusted him with organizing the musicians’ appearances upon arrival in Washington. “The struggle for civil rights was instilled in me from the cradle,” he declared that day. “I got it from my parents, who got it from their parents. If we are in Washington today, it is thanks to several generations of Black Americans who tried to appeal to the conscience of white supremacy.”

The March on Washington was an immense success and constituted the apex of the nonviolent movement initiated by Martin Luther King. By attracting international attention, it managed to place civil rights at the center of the American political agenda. Around 250,000 demonstrators participated in the event, predominantly Black, though white supporters came in significant numbers as well. People flocked from across the country to the Lincoln Memorial, in front of which a podium had been erected for the occasion. “Washington is a city of spectacles,” King enthused. “Every four years, the festivities of the presidential inauguration bring together the great and the powerful of this world. For a hundred and fifty years, all manner of kings, prime ministers, heroes, and celebrities have received the ovation of an administrative crowd.

But never, in the course of its splendid history, had Washington witnessed a spectacle as grandiose as the one that took place within its walls on August 28, 1963. Among the approximately 250,000 people who came to the capital that day, there were many dignitaries and a host of celebrities, but those who stirred the deepest emotion were the ordinary, anonymous people who, clothed in majestic dignity, had come to bear witness to their intense determination to achieve, here and now, true democracy.” Throughout the day, trade unionists, artists, and Black activists took turns at the microphone, supported by numerous rabbis, deeply invested in the Black struggle, and white clergymen. More than 500 cameras filmed the event, relaying the distorted image of an America that had finally exorcised its demons.

That day, as during the Emancipation a century earlier, music was everywhere and freedom songs were on everyone’s lips, with demonstrators improvising topical verses. On stage, Odetta performed alone on guitar the gospel “I’m On My Way and I Won’t Turn Back,” the Freedom Singers, accompanied by Joan Baez, delivered a stirring rendition of “We Shall Overcome,” Bob Dylan sang “Only a Pawn in Their Game,” a song dedicated to the activist Medgar Evers, who had been assassinated in June, while the actor Ossie Davis followed them at the microphone to pay tribute to W.E.B. Du Bois, who had died the day before in Accra, Ghana. For her part, the opera singer Marian Anderson had the privilege of opening the festivities with the national anthem, a song deemed inappropriate by many CORE and SNCC activists.

Another source of unease, and by no means a minor one: only two women spoke during the demonstration, even though women had been at the forefront of the struggle from the very beginning. They were Josephine Baker and the head of the Arkansas NAACP, Daisy Bates, whose speeches were dismayingly brief. Nothing better illustrates the erasure that women suffered than the story of the activist Prathia Hall, a pastor by calling. Raphael G. Warnock, senator from Georgia since 2021, recounts: “One day, King attended a large rally, and that is when Prathia began to pray aloud to God, confiding her desires for the world, repeating several times ‘I have a dream!’ [...] People need to know that before it was Martin’s dream, it was Prathia’s prayer.”

On August 28, 1963, Martin Luther King delivered one of the most momentous speeches in the history of the United States. Before taking the floor, he invited Mahalia Jackson to join him on stage to perform a stirring rendition of “Take My Hand, Precious Lord” by Thomas A. Dorsey. When the song ended, the Queen of Gospel remained at his side, encouraging him by shouting: “Tell them about your dream, Martin!” King’s speech was far more than a mere rhetorical feat. By choosing to speak in the American capital, steps away from the White House, he issued a genuine challenge to white America to break with its racist past and choose a multiracial future.

Far from tempering the revolutionary unrest rumbling within the Black community, he demanded that the civil rights law promised by Kennedy be passed, that the federal government fight endemic unemployment, that it raise the federal minimum wage by two dollars, and that it end segregation in schools, which was still the norm despite the law passed in 1954. “There will be neither rest nor tranquility in America until the Negro is granted his citizenship rights. The whirlwinds of revolt will continue to shake the foundations of our nation until the bright day of justice appears.” The very next day after this prophetic speech, Hoover, the head of the FBI, called King “the most dangerous Negro to the future of this nation from the standpoint of communism.”

While the government sought to buy time and the prisons of the South filled with peaceful demonstrators, more than 20,000 of whom were incarcerated over the course of the year, eighteen days after the March on Washington, a bomb exploded in a Baptist church in Birmingham, killing four young African American girls. “I was in my den on September 15,” Nina Simone recounts, “when the radio announced that dynamite had been thrown inside the 16th Street Baptist Church in Birmingham, Alabama, where Black children were attending Sunday school. Four of the girls (Denise McNair, Cynthia Wesley, Carole Robertson, and Addie Mae Collins) had been killed. Later in the day, during the riots that followed, the Birmingham police had shot another Black child, and a gang of white men had knocked a young Black boy off his bicycle and beaten him to death in the middle of the street. [...] I suddenly understood what it meant to be Black in the America of 1963.”

This new act of barbarism perpetrated in the name of white supremacy did not seem to move the government. As Martin Luther King lamented the day after the funeral, “no official white person attended. There were no white faces to be seen, apart from a few courageous clergymen, pitifully few in number. That day, the city was not only in mourning for the loss of those children; it had also lost its honor and dignity.” In the wake of the tragedy, John Coltrane composed “Alabama” in memory of the four victims, basing it on the rhythm and melody of the eulogy that King delivered at their burial.

However, the trauma that Nina Simone felt following the murder of the four little girls of Birmingham would shape her career for the seven years that followed. Born in 1933 in Tryon, North Carolina, to a mother who was a Methodist pastor, she became the official pianist of her church at the age of six. Because of her talent, she was also confronted with Jim Crow laws from an early age. “At eleven, I was asked to give a recital at the town hall. I was seated at the piano, with the appropriate bearing, while a white man introduced me to the audience. When I looked up, I saw my parents, dressed in their finest, being expelled from their front-row seats in favor of a white family I did not know. [...] The day after that recital, I felt as if I had been flayed alive [...] but the skin grew back, a little tougher, a little less innocent, a little more Black.”

Thanks to the help of Muriel Massinovitch, a wealthy white woman she affectionately nicknamed Miss Mazzy, Nina Simone had the opportunity to pursue the classical piano training she dreamed of, but her undeniable talent could not open the doors of the exclusive circle of concert pianists. “You’re Black. No matter how talented you are, you’ll never make it in classical music,” Charles Mingus remarked sardonically, having lived through much the same experience when he tried to learn the cello. “If you want to play, play a Black instrument.” In 1950, at seventeen, Nina Simone tried in vain to gain admission to the highly esteemed Curtis Institute:

The injustice experienced by Nina Simone was the norm in the world of American classical music. “I had a good friend from St. Louis, Eugene Hays, who was studying classical piano at Juilliard with me,” Miles Davis recounts. “He was a genius. If he had been white, he would be one of the greatest classical pianists in the world today. But he was Black and ahead of his time. They gave him nothing.”

The obstacles that Jim Crow placed in her path are at the root of Nina Simone’s political engagement. She was notably very close to the SNCC, whose radical actions she supported, believing them more likely to make the government yield than King’s nonviolent philosophy. But it was only after the murder of the four little girls of Birmingham that this young, talented, and Black woman made the decision to denounce systemic American racism through her art. “My only weapon was music. So I sat down at the piano, and an hour later I came out of my studio with the fresh score of ‘Mississippi Goddam.’ It was my first civil rights song, and it burst out of me faster than I could write it down. I knew from that moment that I would devote myself for as long as necessary to the fight for Black people to obtain justice, freedom, and equality before the law, until the final victory.” “Mississippi Goddamn” paid tribute to the courage of African American activists who were fighting in the racist states of Alabama, Tennessee, and Mississippi, while denouncing the indifference of the authorities.

Alabama’s gotten me so upset
Tennessee made me lose my rest
And everybody knows about Mississippi goddam
This is a show tune, but the show hasn’t been written for it yet
Hound dogs on my trail
School children sittin’ in jail
Black cat cross my path
I think every day’s gonna be my last.

“They made it into a 45 that sold well, except in the South, where we encountered distribution problems. The pretext was the sacrilegious title, but the real reason was plain to see. A retailer in South Carolina sent back to our office a full crate of unsold copies, all snapped in half. I laughed about it, because it meant the message was getting through. [...] My music now had a purpose greater than the pursuit of classical perfection; it was dedicated to the fight for the freedom of my people and their historic destiny. [...] Even if it brought me nothing else, it brought me self-respect.”

References

● Holt, Thomas C. The Movement. 2021.

● As early as 1934, Langston Hughes, in Return, a short story from his book A History of Whites (2023), highlighted this hatred, compounded by the fear Southern whites felt toward Black musicians who displayed their success.

● Mayfield, Todd, and Travis Atria. Traveling Soul. 2016.

● Lerner, Gerda. From Slavery to Segregation: Black Women in White America. 1975.

● Ellington, Duke. Music Is My Mistress. 2016.

● Charles, Ray, and David Ritz. Ray Charles: The Blues in the Skin. 2005.

● Ward, Brian. Just My Soul Responding: Rhythm and Blues, Black Consciousness and Race Relations. 1998.

● Wonder, Stevie. Confessions of a Child of Soul. 2011.

● Charles, Ray, and David Ritz. Ray Charles: The Blues in the Skin. 2005.

● Turner, Tina. Autobiography. 2018.

● Davis, Miles, and Quincy Troupe. Miles: The Autobiography. 2017.

● Guralnick, Peter. Sweet Soul Music. 2016.

● Marable, Manning. Malcolm X: A Life of Reinventions (1925–1965). 2014.

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Last Monday, Spotify’s RapCaviar account posted a declaration on Twitter. “New superstars are essential to the health of the genre,” it announced, alongside billboards planted in major U.S. and international cities bearing the phrase “Hip-Hop Needs New Leaders.” The campaign named eight artists—Baby Keem, GloRilla, Doechii, Central Cee, Sexyy Redd, Rod Wave, Lil Tecca, BigXthaPlug—and invited fans to vote inside the Spotify app on which of them would carry hip-hop’s next generation. The accompanying copy cited Drake, Nicki Minaj, Kendrick Lamar, and J. Cole as the dominant stars of the 2010s and argued that a decade later, fresh faces needed to step forward. An $18 billion company diagnosed a vacancy in a genre that has never stopped producing talent and offered its own handpicked roster as the cure.

Look at that list of eight. Baby Keem records through pgLang and Interscope. GloRilla is on CMG and Interscope. Doechii signed to Top Dawg Entertainment. Central Cee records through Since 93 and Columbia. Rod Wave has Alamo and Geffen behind him. Lil Tecca operates through Galactic and Republic. Sexyy Redd distributes through Gamma, Larry Jackson’s billion-dollar venture backed by Eldridge Industries, Apple, and A24. BigXthaPlug runs with UnitedMasters. Six of the eight have traditional major-label deals. The remaining two have distribution partnerships with heavily capitalized companies that function like labels in all but contract structure. Spotify did not scour open mics in Baton Rouge or comb through SoundCloud uploads from the Southside. Spotify looked at its own data, cross-referenced it with existing commercial infrastructure, and printed what it found on vinyl banners above traffic.

Hip-hop generates roughly 30 to 32 percent of all streams on Spotify—the single largest genre share on the platform. When Spotify says the genre “needs” new leaders, the company is talking about its own supply chain. The word “health” does a lot of heavy lifting in that sentence. A healthy hip-hop, by Spotify’s accounting, means a handful of artists consolidating enough listener attention to drive playlist engagement, keep subscribers locked in through album cycles, and give advertisers a short, legible roster of faces to buy space around. A fragmented hip-hop, where dozens of regional stars pull modest but loyal audiences and no single name commands Drake-level stream counts, works fine for listeners. It does not work for a company that reported over $18 billion in trailing twelve-month revenue by mid-2025 and posted its first profitable year in 2024. Consolidated attention is the product. The eight billboards are the pitch deck.

RapCaviar carries 15.8 million followers. A placement on that playlist can spike an artist’s stream count overnight, and removal can quietly flatten momentum just as fast. The playlist has been called “the new Hot 97” for good reason—it inherited the gatekeeper function that once belonged to terrestrial radio programmers, MTV’s video selectors, and magazine cover editors. The difference is that Hot 97 never also owned the record stores. Spotify runs the distribution channel, manages the editorial playlists that determine visibility inside that channel, and now, with this campaign, produces the billboard advertisements declaring which artists matter most. The old gatekeepers were compromised in familiar ways: payola, personal relationships, regional bias. Spotify’s gatekeeping carries a corporate efficiency those older systems lacked, because the data that identifies who to promote and the platform that does the promoting are the same company.

In 2025, Spotify paid out $11 billion to the music industry—the largest annual disbursement from any single retailer. That figure earns the company goodwill and enormous leverage. When the entity writing the checks also curates the playlists that dictate which artists earn royalties at scale, the relationship between patron and beneficiary gets tangled. Spotify benefits from framing itself as a neutral distributor that simply gives fans what they want. The “New Leaders” campaign punctures that framing by making the promotional machinery visible. You cannot name eight artists on a billboard, place them on hometown posters, build an in-app voting mechanism around them, and then claim you’re just observing a cultural shift. You are manufacturing one.

Audiomack cofounder Brian “Z” Zisook pushed back against the campaign’s premise directly. “The old superstar era is over,” he posted. “You’re Spotify, you should understand this. Our fragmented media landscape makes reaching the level of artist you mentioned impossible.” Trapital’s Dan Runcie drew a parallel to basketball’s perennial “face of the league” conversation, noting that the 2000s and 2010s stars remain the biggest names not because of talent gaps but because media fragmentation made that kind of consolidation harder to reproduce. Both responses pointed to the same problem. Spotify cast fragmentation as a crisis. Fragmentation is actually the natural outcome of a streaming economy Spotify helped build, where niche audiences sustain careers that never need to cross over. The company created the conditions, then complained about the weather.

The voting mechanism deserves its own scrutiny. Fans choose from eight candidates Spotify pre-selected, inside an app Spotify owns, with results Spotify tallies and presumably deploys in future marketing and advertiser conversations. The ballot is fixed before the first vote. Write-in candidates and independents were excluded by design, because artists without significant corporate backing don’t serve the campaign’s commercial purpose. The vote gives fans the feeling of participation while Spotify retains every meaningful decision: who gets nominated, where the billboards go, which playlists amplify the winners. Strip the fan-engagement language away and the structure is a promotional focus group.

GloRilla moved 69,000 units first week with Glorious in 2024. Doechii won two Grammy awards. Central Cee commands massive European streaming numbers. Rod Wave fills arenas. Nobody disputes their ability. So why did a Swedish technology corporation with 696 million monthly users and 276 million premium subscribers appoint itself the body that decides when hip-hop’s leadership has gone stale and who ought to step in? Hip-hop picked its own leaders for decades without a billboard budget from Stockholm. It selected them through mixtape runs, radio spins, club play, regional word of mouth, battle circuits, and the slow accumulation of respect that no algorithm can replicate or accelerate. Spotify’s campaign skipped all of that and went straight to the coronation.

The sharpest response to the campaign didn’t come from an industry executive or a media analyst. It came from La Reezy, an independent rapper, who posted on Twitter the day the billboards went up: “spotify saying hip hop needs new leaders just pissed me off. we out here spending our last dime to make a name for ourselves, losing relationships, sacrificing life memories to be heard and be great. it felt more discouraging then empowering, idk am i trippin?” The post pulled 38,000 views and over a thousand reposts. La Reezy wasn’t trippin. When a corporation worth $18 billion announces that the genre needs saving, the artists grinding without corporate infrastructure hear something specific: you don’t count.

Spotify could spend its billboard money on something the genre actually needs instead of launching ICE ads and funding drones. Restructure a pay-per-stream model that still compensates most rappers in fractions of a penny. Stop bundling hip-hop into genre-agnostic playlists that flatten regional distinctions into one undifferentiated feed. Fund the kind of A&R work that requires leaving the dashboard and going to actual cities where artists perform for 200 people in rooms that don’t have Spotify logos on the wall. The company cleared $18 billion and paid artists $11 billion, a number it trumpets in press releases while individual rappers with millions of streams still struggle to cover rent. If Spotify wants to talk about the health of the genre, the conversation starts at the pay window, not on a billboard.

And Spotify is not the only party milking this. Hip-hop media has chewed on the “who’s next” conversation for years now, recycling the same four or five names that already feed algorithms and generate reliable traffic, running the same debate in slightly different packaging every quarter. Outlets that should be digging through local scenes in Milwaukee and Shreveport and Albuquerque, finding the artists who haven’t been pre-approved by a playlist editor, instead keep serving up the same consensus picks because consensus picks guarantee clicks. The question was never whether hip-hop has new talent. Talent is everywhere, in every city, recording on laptops and performing at open mics that no editorial playlist will ever surface. The question is whether anyone with a platform (Spotify, media, labels) is willing to do the tedious, unprofitable work of actually finding it, or whether they’d rather keep debating which already-famous artist deserves a bigger crown.

Somewhere in Dallas or St. Petersburg or Tampa, one of those eight artists woke up on a Monday and saw their face on a poster they didn’t commission, above a slogan they didn’t write, promoting a contest they didn’t design, for a company that will collect the ad revenue. Spotify called it leadership. The artist called it Tuesday. And somewhere else entirely, in a city with no billboard, no hometown poster, no in-app voting mechanism, somebody recorded a verse that nobody with purchasing power bothered to hear. So before you comment on which rappers should lead the next generation, the answer is down below.

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During the Dream Academy competition in 2023, the other trainees froze Manon out of their group chat after she ranked high in early evaluations. Fellow contestants complained on camera that she drew attention without matching their effort. The program manager, Missy, said flatly she would not have selected Manon based on her attitude. When Manon missed non-mandatory rehearsals—absences later attributed to illness—the word that stuck was “lazy.” A white trainee named Adéla, who did not make the final cut, griped that Manon was favored purely for her looks. Nobody called Adéla lazy when she checked out. The vocabulary gets deployed selectively, and the selection criteria are obvious.

The Netflix documentary aired in August 2024 and confirmed what fans had tracked in real time. By July 2025, supporters had compiled evidence that Manon had been scrubbed from promotional materials—missing from a Glossier billboard, her face blocked by another member in group photos, absent from a Hypebae feature. Fans compared her treatment to two women who had endured the same machinery: Normani in Fifth Harmony and Leigh-Anne Pinnock in Little Mix. During a November 2025 BBC Radio 1 interview, the host confused Manon with Samara, another contestant from the Dream Academy show. The two women share a skin tone and nothing else. The segment was quietly deleted from YouTube and BBC’s channels.

Normani spent five years inside Fifth Harmony absorbing a version of this that cut deeper than being left off a billboard. She was the group’s only Black member. In the studio, she sang background while Cabello recorded leads, and during the sessions for “No Way,” she cried. She told Billboard in 2019 that the relegation corroded her from the inside, wondering whether the hierarchy came down to talent, to skin, or to something she could not name. When a subset of fans decided Normani had disrespected Cabello by calling her “quirky” in an interview, the retaliation was medieval. Trolls Photoshopped images of Normani’s face onto bodies being lynched. They sent death threats. Cabello took days to publicly acknowledge what was happening. Her racist Tumblr posts—the n-word used casually, anti-Black memes reblogged as a teenager—resurfaced in December 2019. Normani penned a careful email to Rolling Stone: “It was devastating that this came from a place that was supposed to be a safe haven and a sisterhood.” She chose written words because she knew hers would be dissected in ways Cabello’s never were.

Across the Atlantic, Leigh-Anne Pinnock weathered the British edition. When Little Mix filmed the video for “Wings,” choreographer Frank Gatson pulled her aside and told her bluntly that as the Black girl, she would need to work ten times harder than everyone else. She was a teenager. Nobody sat down the other three and told them the same thing. For the first three years in the group, Leigh-Anne broke down regularly to her manager, unable to locate the reason she felt surplus. At fan signings, people walked past her to reach Perrie Edwards, Jade Thirlwall, and Jesy Nelson. In a 2020 Instagram video, she recalled the accumulation: “I never in my life had someone told me I would need to work harder because of my race.” Her 2021 BBC documentary, Race, Pop & Power, aired the receipts, including a roundtable with singer Alexandra Burke, who said she was told after winning The X Factor in 2008 that she needed to bleach her skin because she wouldn’t sell records otherwise. Keisha Buchanan, a founding member of the Sugababes, described being branded a bully and pushed out of the group she cofounded in 2009 after the label needed someone to blame for a flopped album. She spent a decade in therapy.

The accusations shift by country and decade, but they pull from the same depleted phrasebook. Manon is “lazy.” Normani is “not talented enough” to lead. Leigh-Anne is “invisible.” Keisha is “aggressive.” Burke is “too dark to sell.” Each label arrives to shrink the Black girl’s claim on a position she earned through identical auditions, identical training, and the same grueling schedule as her groupmates. The industry loves casting Black women in these ensembles because diversity photographs well. What the industry does not love is treating them as full members once the cameras shift to daily operations. Normani was the group’s strongest dancer and barely sang. Leigh-Anne possessed a voice that matched anyone in Little Mix and still felt like an afterthought at her own meet-and-greets. Manon drew the most viral attention from the Dream Academy series and then vanished from brand partnerships.

The professional wreckage compounds. Normani’s debut solo album, Dopamine, did not arrive until June 2024, six years after Fifth Harmony’s hiatus and a full career cycle behind Cabello, who parlayed her preferential treatment into an immediate deal and the smash “Havana.” Leigh-Anne released her debut solo album, My Ego Told Me To, this month—nearly four years after Little Mix went on hiatus, rebuilding at 34 while Perrie Edwards had already charted a solo path with industry wind at her back. Normani told The Cut in 2024 that being in Fifth Harmony felt like “a prison sentence ordered and duly served.” Leigh-Anne admitted in her documentary that the experience “ruined a lot of” what should have been the best years of her life. These are women describing robbery—of confidence, vocal time, fan affection, career momentum—committed on the same stage where their groupmates collected the benefits.

Manon is 23 and has already cycled through the accusation gauntlet, the promotional erasure, the BBC interviewer who could not bother learning her face, and now a health-related hiatus the public will frame as proof she was never committed. The group will continue scheduled activities during her absence. KATSEYE remains a Grammy-nominated act climbing the Billboard 200. Whether Manon returns to the same footing she left, or to a smaller chair with fewer solo lines and the quiet understanding that her spot was held but not protected, depends on a set of decisions that labels and management companies have been making the same way for twenty-five years. Keisha Buchanan cofounded the Sugababes at fourteen. She lost the name, the group, and a decade of her mental health before she got any of it back. Nobody involved has ever called that a failure of the system. They called it a lineup change.

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Somebody opens the call. The room is tight, shoulders touching, the air thick with breath and floorboard heat. A voice pitches high and deliberate from the front, each syllable spaced so a child can follow it: I am—somebody! And the room returns it. Not a whisper. Not a murmur. A holler, chests up, spines pulling straight as the sentence fills the space between bodies. People who walked in with their eyes on the carpet now fix them forward. The phrase does physical work on them. It stiffens a jaw, lifts a chin, pushes a pair of lungs wider open. In church basements across Chicago’s South Side, in school gymnasiums where the bleachers had been folded against the wall, in union halls that stank of old coffee and radiator dust, this five-word sentence traveled through rooms and rearranged the people standing in them.

The man behind that sentence was born in Greenville, South Carolina, in 1941, to a sixteen-year-old mother who raised him under Jim Crow. Jesse Louis Jackson spent his childhood walking past the whites-only school on his route to an inferior one, absorbing the daily mechanics of exclusion. Tall and loud and restless, he earned a football scholarship, transferred to North Carolina A&T, and by 1965 had left Chicago Theological Seminary unfinished because Selma, Alabama, needed bodies on the ground. Within months he had joined the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and driven himself into Martin Luther King Jr.’s orbit by sheer persistence. Andrew Young, who knew both men well, explained why King tolerated Jackson’s relentless petitioning for attention. King recognized that Jackson “compulsively needs attention” the way a fatherless child would, and so he held space for that hunger rather than banishing it.

King was pivoting the SCLC’s attention toward economic life when Jackson proved most useful. The program was called Operation Breadbasket, and its premise was blunt. If a company collected money from Black neighborhoods but refused to hire Black workers, Black customers would stop buying. Jackson helmed the Chicago franchise of Breadbasket starting in 1966, and his first target was a dairy that distributed to more than a hundred stores in Black areas. When the company refused to open its employment records, Jackson enlisted pastors, and their congregations emptied the dairy’s shelves within days. The company pledged to reserve twenty percent of its positions for Black inner-city residents. Next came the High-Low Foods grocery chain, which buckled after ten days of picketers outside its storefronts and committed to hiring 183 Black employees across every level from delivery to management. Jackson treated each capitulation as a tutorial. Gratitude from these corporations did not interest him. He wanted them to understand a transaction: respect the dollar, respect the person spending it.

This was Chicago in the late 1960s, a sprawling, bitter-cold city where six million Black southerners had migrated only to discover that discrimination in the North wore suits instead of hoods but operated with identical purpose. Richard J. Daley operated the tightest political machine in postwar America, and his control of Black wards depended on their compliance. Jackson threatened that arrangement simply by existing. Without an appointment, he showed up at Daley’s office on a regular schedule. When the mayor agreed to meet, Jackson walked out and told reporters what they discussed. When Daley refused, Jackson held a press conference outside the glass doors and told reporters what he would have said. The mayor had never absorbed that kind of pressure from a single individual, and his response was to plant an undercover officer in Jackson’s entourage disguised as a bodyguard, charged with feeding intelligence back to City Hall.

After King was murdered at the Lorraine Motel in Memphis on April 4, 1968, Jackson spent three years grinding against the SCLC’s remaining leadership, who distrusted his ambition and suspected him of co-opting King’s name. They suspended him in 1971 after discovering he had incorporated the lucrative Black Expo festival under his own name rather than the SCLC’s. Jackson resigned, gathered five thousand followers at the Metropolitan Theatre on the South Side, and declared that “a new movement is about to be born.” People United to Serve Humanity had the same DNA as Breadbasket: economic empowerment through organized pressure. But PUSH also had a board stacked with the country’s Black elite, including Quincy Jones, Berry Gordy, and Manhattan borough president Percy Sutton. Jackson could pack a Saturday morning meeting hall with thousands of ordinary citizens and then have dinner with the most recognized names in Black America. He operated as preacher, negotiator, and celebrity at once, and that combination rattled everyone who assumed those roles belonged in separate rooms.

PUSH’s Saturday broadcasts on Chicago radio turned “I am somebody” into a weekly ritual. Listeners across the city chanted along as Jackson intoned the verses. I may be poor, but I am—somebody! I may be young, but I am—somebody! I may be on welfare, but I am—somebody! Each line attached the declaration to a specific condition. Poverty was named. Youth was named. Welfare dependence was named. And each condition was overruled by the same verdict. The chant did not ask anyone to pretend their circumstances away. It demanded they refuse to let those circumstances define their worth. Surrounded by a mixed group of children, Jackson recited the same words on Sesame Street, planting them in the mouths of kids who were still learning to tie their shoes.

And the chant carried economic teeth. In 1972, General Foods and Schlitz Breweries signed what PUSH called “covenants” with Black communities. The General Foods agreement alone required the company to create 360 jobs for Black workers and other minorities across every department, direct twenty million dollars of its insurance volume to Black-owned insurance companies, retain Black law firms, employ Black physicians and their paramedical staff, use Black-authorized automobile dealers, deposit an additional five hundred thousand dollars in Black-owned banks, hire Black contractors for all plant construction and renovation, and increase its advertising in Black print media while strengthening its relationship with Black-owned advertising agencies. That single covenant funneled approximately sixty-five million dollars into Black communities. When Coca-Cola balked at a similar arrangement, Jackson reminded its executives that their spokesman, Bill Cosby, was a PUSH supporter. Coca-Cola signed. Quaker Oats, 7UP, and Avon followed. The Wall Street Journal reported that white corporate leaders privately regarded Jackson as “a superb negotiator” who knew “exactly when to get tough, when to pull back, and when to bring God into the discussion.” Others called him and his team “the moral Mafia.” Jackson accepted both descriptions.

This was what “I am somebody” sounded like when it left the call-and-response circle and walked into a boardroom. The chant was not mood. It was a set of demands backed by organized purchasing power, picket lines, and the threat of Sunday sermons aimed directly at a corporation’s quarterly revenue.

Jackson’s collision course with the Daley machine taught him a second curriculum: attention converts into concessions if you spend it correctly. PUSH conducted voter registration drives, hosted seminars on local candidates, and backed its own slate of aldermanic hopefuls to weaken Daley’s grip on Black wards. Jackson endorsed both Democrats and Republicans when it served his purposes, a flexibility that infuriated party loyalists and kept his adversaries guessing. His record at the polls was uneven. Many of his preferred candidates lost, and critics noted that Jackson frequently declined to grind out the door-knocking and vote-pulling that would have saved them. His strength was pressure applied through visibility, not precinct-level organization. He needed the camera and the microphone to produce his best results, and he knew it.

Around the time he announced his first presidential campaign in 1983, Jackson had spent two decades testing every lever available to a Black leader without elected office. He had boycotted grocery chains, negotiated corporate covenants, confronted a city boss, registered voters in the rural South county by county, and brokered the release of a captured Navy pilot from Syria in a trip so audacious that his own Secret Service detail was secretly swapped for a fresh group of agents once he landed in Damascus. The presidency felt to him like the natural extension of this work, not a wild leap. His critics, including many in the Black political establishment who referred to themselves privately as “the Family,” begged him not to run. They feared he would embarrass the race, split the Democratic vote, and provoke a white backlash that would re-elect Ronald Reagan.

Jackson ran anyway. The 1984 campaign was chaotic, underfunded, understaffed, and burdened by the “Hymietown” crisis, a derogatory remark about New York’s Jewish community that Jackson initially denied and then agonizingly apologized for over the course of weeks. His association with Louis Farrakhan compounded the damage. Mondale’s campaign worked to block Jackson at every turn, deploying its superior organization to prevent Black political organizations from endorsing him. The delegate rules, Jackson argued, were rigged to punish outsider candidates. He was right, and multiple rivals eventually agreed with him.

But the campaign also registered more than a million new voters, won 3.5 million primary votes, and cracked open a door that every progressive candidate would eventually walk through. In Georgia, exit polls revealed that twenty percent of Black voters who supported Jackson were casting ballots for the first time. Young people, Arab Americans, Latino organizers, Asian American housing activists, and Native rights groups poured into his coalition. Each brought their own cause, and Jackson stitched them together under a single argument. The word he used for this was “rainbow,” borrowed from Fred Hampton, the Black Panther leader assassinated by Chicago police in 1969, who had coined the concept of a “rainbow coalition” long before Jackson made it famous.

His 1984 convention address landed on a sweltering July evening in San Francisco. Thirty-three million Americans watched as he spoke for more than an hour. His voice opened even and measured, building by degrees the way a preacher’s voice ascends through a Sunday sermon. The crowd in the hall pushed him forward with shouts that grew louder as each passage crested. “If, in my low moments, in word, deed or attitude, through some error of temper, taste or tone, I have caused anyone discomfort, created pain or revived someone’s fears, that was not my truest self,” he said, and the arena swelled around the admission. Without repeating the slur, he was addressing the Hymietown fallout directly, and the audience grasped both what he confessed and what he asked for. The speech closed with him stripping himself down to the facts of his origin: a boy born out of wedlock in Greenville, South Carolina, who had no right to be on this stage by any measure the country normally applied. “God is not finished with me yet,” he said, and the hall erupted.

Four years later, Jackson returned with a professional campaign operation, a Jewish campaign manager named Jerry Austin from the Bronx, and a strategy built around Iowa, New Hampshire, and the Super Tuesday primaries in the South. Austin discovered immediately that Jackson was useless in a recording studio. Scripted lines died in his mouth. But in front of a live crowd, the man transformed. Austin cut a thirty-second television spot from rally footage of Jackson speaking to farmers and aired it across Iowa’s agricultural communities.

The farm crisis of the 1980s had gutted rural America. Interest rates had climbed to levels unseen since the nineteenth century. Farm debt doubled between 1978 and 1984. Net farm income collapsed from $22.8 billion in 1980 to $8.2 billion three years later. Thousands of families defaulted, banks shuttered, Main Street businesses boarded their windows. No major candidate in either party was speaking directly to these communities. Jackson arrived in Adair County, Iowa, on a bone-chilling day and drew a crowd that outnumbered the town’s entire population. Dairy farmers told journalists he “really touched a nerve.” At a town square rally in Iowa Falls, where Farmland Foods had just shut down a packing plant, Jackson proclaimed, “We must change the equation. There’s no sense of corporate justice, of fairness.” In a Wisconsin barn packed with white farm families who came out of curiosity rather than allegiance, Jackson delivered a speech so consuming that by the time he finished, skeptics were chanting “Win, Jesse, win!” Parents lifted children to see him. Teenage girls giggled over his looks. Former Klansmen from Beaumont, Texas, approached him to say they had changed.

Jackson placed fourth in Iowa with eight percent, an improvement over 1984 and a small but measurable crack in the all-white electorate. He took second in Maine with twenty-eight percent, won the Vermont caucus outright, and then tore through Super Tuesday, winning five states and finishing a strong second in the delegate count behind Dukakis. Bernie Sanders, who had watched Jackson speak to Iowa farmers from afar, endorsed him during Vermont’s nominating convention. “He was there when we needed him,” Sanders told the crowd. “He has stood with the farmers being thrown off the land. He has stood with the workers being thrown off the picket lines.” One woman in the hall slapped Sanders across the face for the endorsement. Others turned their backs. Sanders campaigned for Jackson anyway.

Jackson finished the 1988 primary in second place, winning seven million votes, carrying thirteen states and the District of Columbia, and assembling the most racially diverse coalition the Democratic Party had ever seen. He pushed the party to adopt proportional delegate allocation, replacing the winner-take-all system that locked out insurgent candidates. Barack Obama’s path to the White House cut directly through the breach Jackson forced open. Donna Brazile, Minyon Moore, Yolanda Caraway, Leah Daughtry, Ron Brown, Alexis Herman, Maxine Waters, Barbara Lee—each of these people entered the machinery of Democratic politics through Jackson’s campaigns and spent the next three decades shaping the party from within.

Jackson fathered a child with a former staff member, which became public in 2001. His association with Farrakhan dogged him for decades. His organizational finances were perpetually chaotic, his temper toward staff members often brutal, his ego as enormous as his talent. One staffer described “constant unwarranted abuse.” Another recalled Jackson screaming at his team after they forgot to book a plane, leaving the entire campaign stranded at an Iowa airport in the cold. “I’ve had enough of this ‘Well, I tried, but he lied, so we died,’ excuses,” he fumed. Total control was his default. He disclosed tomorrow’s schedule to reporters by phone from his hotel room before his own staff knew the plan, and he exhausted every person who worked for him. These were real costs extracted from real people, and they coexisted with the generosity, vision, and stubbornness that powered everything else.

Jesse Jackson died this morning, February 17, 2026, at the age of eighty-four. His family announced it in a statement from the Rainbow PUSH Coalition, the organization he led for more than fifty years.

Now the question moves to the rooms where the phrase was born. “I am somebody” was never meant to hang on a wall or sit under a yearbook photo. It was designed to be repeated, out loud, in a room with other people, until the sentence stopped being words and started being attitudinize. Jackson understood that dignity without economic consequence was decoration. His chant always traveled alongside a specific demand: hire these workers, deposit money in these banks, contract with these businesses, register these voters, change these rules. Strip the demand from the chant and you have a greeting card. Keep them together and you have a discipline.

That discipline survives a man only if people keep repeating it where decisions happen. A union organizer in Memphis quotes the sanitation workers’ sign—I AM A MAN—before walking into a contract negotiation. Voter protection volunteers in Georgia make sure every provisional ballot gets counted. A community group in Chicago demands that a grocery chain stock fresh produce in a neighborhood it neglected for a decade. Tenant organizers in Newark pressure a developer to include affordable units. A twenty-three-year-old precinct captain knocks on a door in Milwaukee and explains to somebody who has never voted that their name belongs on a roll.

A first-grader stands in front of a class, feet planted apart, and says the five words because a teacher asked her to. She does not know yet what they will cost or what they can buy. She only knows that when she says them, the other children say them back, and the room fills with a sound that belongs to all of them at once.

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A wicker basket sat at the entrance. Phones went in before bodies passed through. Shenae “Curry” Craig enforced that rule at S.A.F.E., the gathering she designed for Black women and professionals of color who needed a gathering stripped of surveillance. No recording, screenshots, or content captured for someone else’s timeline. Craig collected the devices herself, stacking them in that basket the way a hostess collects coats, and the gesture carried weight precisely because she did not soften it with apology. The boundary preceded the conversation. If you wanted to enter, you surrendered the instrument most likely to betray you.

Inside, women talked about salary negotiations that had gone sideways. They named supervisors who took credit. They described exhaustion without performing resilience. The privacy policy functioned on the strength of consequence removal. A corporate diversity panel invites you to speak and then circulates the footage. Craig’s model reversed that architecture. She built a container where admission required a small act of trust, and the trust paid dividends in candor. Women disclosed things they would not repeat at brunch, let alone on a podcast. The room held on the strength of someone who had decided in advance what it could not become.

Specificity defined Craig’s method across every project she assembled. A sign-in sheet at the door. A group text going out early in the morning to confirm who was bringing what. A DJ controller plugged in and levels already set because she had tested the sound an hour before anyone arrived. Craig, a Brooklyn-born event curator, journalist, and community organizer, approached gathering the way a contractor approaches framing. She measured first. She secured permits. She did not invite people into a structure she had not load-tested.

Craig’s journalism carried the same discipline. As an editor at Secret NYC, she covered restaurants, culture, and neighborhood happenings across the five boroughs with a particular gravity toward Black-owned businesses and the Caribbean diaspora she belonged to. Her bylines for Blavity, Travel Noire, and Yahoo News stitched together food criticism, lifestyle coverage, and cultural reporting with a Brooklyn-specific knowledge that could not be faked. She knew which West Indian bakeries closed on which days. She knew the subway transfers that tourists botched. Granular familiarity powered the writing; she did not parachute into neighborhoods. She walked through them carrying grocery bags.

Political organizing through We Grew Here (which helped Zohran Kwame Mandani secure the mayoral win) extended that local intelligence to door-knocking, canvassing for candidates with roots planted deep enough to recognize which intersections people called by unofficial names. She spoke to voters the way you speak to someone you might see at the laundromat later. Clipboard tucked under her arm. Lanyard swinging from her neck. She trained volunteers not on messaging but on listening. Her requirement was direct. If you canvassed with her, you knocked and then you shut your mouth until the person on the other side of the door finished talking. The method was slow and it was effective, grounded in the assumption that the voter already knew what they needed. Craig’s contribution was showing up at their stoop and asking.

The same instinct powered Don’t Call Me Baby, the women’s sports and culture platform she founded alongside Sharine Taylor, a Toronto-based editorial strategist. The project was built on a stubborn premise. Women athletes deserved coverage that did not shrink their lives to box scores and postgame interviews. Craig attended New York Liberty games at Barclays Center with a credential around her neck and a phone aimed at the crowd as often as the court, capturing the community that orbited the franchise. She covered WNBA culture as civic infrastructure, treating ticket holders and tailgaters with the same attention other outlets reserved for star players. The platform’s mission committed to chronicling women athletes beyond the game, advocating for women and girls in sports via storytelling that respected their full lives.

Don’t Call Me Baby functioned on the same asperity Craig brought to every room she assembled. She curated contributors. She set content standards. She decided what the platform would not publish as firmly as she decided what it would. Taylor handled operations and editorial strategy from Toronto. Craig handled community from Brooklyn, pressing her network of writers, DJs, and cultural workers into service around a shared conviction that women’s athletics warranted sustained, serious attention rather than seasonal curiosity.

In November 2022, her body interrupted that momentum. Days before her thirty-first birthday, Craig discovered a lump in her left breast during a shower. Her family history sharpened the terror. Two of her mother’s sisters had battled breast cancer. One of them died in Jamaica. Craig scheduled a biopsy for November 9, the day after her birthday. The results confirmed stage 2 breast cancer.

Treatment stacked on top of her existing life like paperwork on a desk that was already full. Chemotherapy sessions at Memorial Sloan Kettering. Radiation. A double mastectomy followed by reconstructive surgery with tissue expanders that required weekly saline fills. Fertility preservation through egg retrieval and freezing, a procedure necessitated by her age and the chemotherapy’s threat to her reproductive capacity. Craig endured months of aggressive treatment while calculating which assignments she could still file and which events she could still attend between infusion days. The fatigue was physical and total. She described the post-surgical period as a dark passage where her body no longer felt like her own, a disorientation compounded by hair loss and the altered silhouette she confronted each morning.

She beat the initial diagnosis. She rang the bell at Sloan Kettering. She resumed writing. She picked up DJ gigs. She went back to covering Liberty games. Katherine Polanco, her best friend of twelve years, had organized the first GoFundMe to offset medical bills that insurance declined to cover. Craig returned to the structures she had raised, thinner and slower but present.

March 2025 brought the cancer back. Metastatic breast cancer. The disease had migrated to her bones. At thirty-four, Craig confronted a diagnosis that oncologists classify as lifelong, managed rather than defeated. The pain became daily and severe. The fatigue compressed her schedule into shrinking windows of capacity. Many days confined her to her bedroom. She could not work. Her cousin Samantha Riddell organized a second fundraiser to cover groceries, bills, and a trip to Jamaica that Craig had been planning for years, a visit to ailing family that the first diagnosis had postponed and the second threatened to cancel entirely.

Even through that contraction, Craig’s infrastructure held. Don’t Call Me Baby continued publishing. The standards she had codified for the platform did not depend on her physical presence at every event. She had trained collaborators and established guardrails before her health forced delegation. Taylor kept the Toronto side running. Contributors filed stories shaped by the parameters Craig had hammered into place during healthier years. The rooms she constructed did not require her body in the doorway to remain functional. They required her rules, and those rules survived her absence; she had written them down and enforced them long enough for other people to internalize them.

Persistence is what distinguishes Craig’s legacy from the softer tribute language that so often follows Black women who organize. She did not offer comfort without structure. She erected walls and enforced what passed through the door. She did not amplify voices. She collected phones so that a whisper could carry its full weight. The distinction matters. Craig understood that safety is architectural. You cannot wish it into existence. You install it through policy, repetition, and the willingness to tell someone at the door that their device stays in the basket or they stay in the hallway.

Those rules outlast her. The S.A.F.E. model circulates among Black women professionals who attended her gatherings and replicated the phone policy in their own organizations. Don’t Call Me Baby publishes at dontcallmebaby.club, its voice carrying the standards Craig established with Taylor before the first diagnosis altered her calendar. The credential lanyard, the group text, the sign-in sheet, the tested sound levels. These are not memories. They are protocols, maintained by people who absorbed them from a woman who understood that a room without rules is a room where someone eventually gets harmed.

Shenae “Curry” Craig died on Thursday, February 12, 2026. Thank you for what you have contributed. She will forever be missed.

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“Rap/HipHop is so boring. Artist are still rapping about the same topics. It’s no creativity or it’s too much creativity. I miss having record labels and A&R’s.” That sentence, posted on Twitter this past Wednesday by veteran rapper and songwriter CyHi, contains a contradiction so clean you could teach a logic class with it. Rap lacks creativity, or it has too much. The music is stale, or it is too unfamiliar. These cannot both be true. But they can both be felt by someone who misses a version of the genre that put him closer to the center, and CyHi, who spent more than a decade ghostwriting hooks and verses for Kanye West, Travis Scott, and a constellation of platinum-selling acts, has earned the right to feel displaced. Feeling displaced and diagnosing the problem correctly are different things, though, and the second tweet he fired off six minutes later pried the gap wide open.

“I grew up in an era where your lyricist were from the streets,” he wrote. “Now it’s a bunch of straight A students who dropped out of college they sophomore year to be rappers. You can tell they don’t have any life experiences they’re just good with words.” Seven hundred ninety-seven thousand people viewed that one. The phrase “life experiences” is doing enormous labor in the sentence, and it deserves to be pulled apart before it hardens into common sense. CyHi is drawing a border. Rappers whose biographies pass a specific credentialing test land on one side, people who grew up adjacent to or inside of street economies, who carry scars that register as legible to a particular ear. Everybody else gets filed on the other, rebranded as tourists. Good with words, sure. Talented, maybe. But counterfeit where it counts, because their transcripts were too clean and their childhoods too cushioned to generate the raw material that makes rap feel like rap.

Born Cydel Charles Young in Stone Mountain, Georgia, raised Baptist by strict parents who barred hip-hop from the house until he was twelve, CyHi carries a Grammy-nominated songwriting résumé thick enough to paper a hallway. His solo material ranges from his Royal Flush series to Black Hystori to his long-awaited debut record, No Dope on Sundays. He holds credits on nearly every track from Kanye West’s Yeezus, contributed to My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy and The Life of Pablo, co-wrote Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode,” and penned songs across the Vultures sessions as recently as 2024. In 2021, he survived an assassination attempt on an Atlanta highway, his car flipped and shot up and left wrapped around a tree. None of this is trivia. CyHi has paid real costs, inside and outside the booth, and those costs give weight to his frustration. Weight and precision are different currencies, though, and his tweets buckle under the load of their own assumptions.

Start with the gate itself. “Life experiences,” as CyHi uses the phrase, narrows to a very particular slice of Black American biography. Proximity to drug economies, violence, incarceration, the daily friction of living without a safety net. These are real conditions that produce real art. Nobody with any sense disputes that. The trouble arrives when that slice becomes the only biography that qualifies a rapper to be taken seriously, because at that point rap stops functioning as a creative field and starts running like a passport office. You need the right paperwork. The stamp has to come from the right ZIP code, the right set of traumas, the right relationship to the criminal justice system. Anyone whose suffering took a different shape—debt, caretaking for sick parents, navigating a campus where they were one of seven Black students in the department, grinding a warehouse night shift to keep an apartment they could barely afford—gets filed under “just good with words.” Their life, under this frame, does not count as life.

Hip-hop has always had writers who arrived through different doors, including writers who came from rough neighborhoods and still went to college, still read books, still carried report cards home. Kanye West, CyHi’s own primary employer and champion for over a decade, built an entire mythology around being the college dropout in a room full of street rappers. OutKast came out of Atlanta’s Eastside and Southwest, attended the same performing arts magnet school, and spent two decades bending the music past anything “street” or “college” could contain. CyHi himself listed JAY-Z, Nas, T.I., OutKast, Jadakiss, Trick Daddy, and Juvenile as his favorites in a follow-up tweet. That roster includes men who sold drugs and men who earned degrees, men who grew up in Marcy Projects and men who grew up in Queensbridge, men whose streets looked nothing alike. The category “street” already stretches past its own borders if you take CyHi’s own pantheon seriously.

Benny the Butcher ran a nearly identical argument in October 2025, ranting on Instagram Live that “weird Twitter nerds” had snatched the culture from the streets. The grievance traveled well in certain corners. It mapped onto a real anxiety, that the people who decide which rappers get playlisted, which albums get reviewed favorably, which artists get booked at festivals, are increasingly people who never had to worry about making rent on the first. But the grievance also dodged the question underneath itself. If “the streets” once controlled hip-hop, who inside that arrangement decided which street stories got funded? Who picked which version of Blackness was presentable enough to sell a million records? The answer, every single time, was a label executive, an A&R, a white-owned distribution company, a radio programmer. Exactly the apparatus CyHi is nostalgic for.

That longing is worth pressing on. “I miss having record labels and A&R’s” reads like a sentence about quality control, and there is a version of that desire that makes sense. Someone who listens to two hundred demos and picks the ten that can carry an album. A professional who tells a young artist to rewrite a second verse, who invests in development instead of throwing content at an algorithm and praying. CyHi is old enough to remember when that filtering existed, and he benefited from it directly; West’s recording camps, which functioned like songwriting boot camps, are exactly the kind of intensive A&R environment that barely exists anymore.

But the wistfulness skips over what that filtering actually filtered. Labels in the ‘90s and 2000s did not simply improve quality. They bankrolled stereotypes that were legible to money. They pushed forward a very specific kind of “street” narrative, one scrubbed clean enough for suburban consumption, violent enough to titillate, Black enough to authenticate the product without threatening the buyer. Nuance got sanded off. Artists who could write about their block and their bookshelf in the same verse got steered toward the block, because the block sold. What CyHi remembers as curation was also a sorting mechanism that shrank the range of Black life that rap was permitted to depict.

The present is no less coercive; it just distributes the coercion differently. Playlist pipelines prioritize engagement metrics over craft, and platform incentives push artists toward provocation and brevity. Clip culture squeezes a three-minute song down to its most extractable fifteen seconds. Outrage reply chains generate more impressions than patient criticism, and stan warfare—the organized, quasi-political mobilization of fan bases to inflate or destroy an artist’s reputation—has replaced the old-school A&R phone call as the primary mechanism of gatekeeping. The gates did not disappear. They multiplied, shrank, and scattered across a thousand feeds.

Within hours of the “straight A students” post, large portions of the reaction calcified into a guessing game about which specific rapper CyHi was targeting. The internet assigned suspects, cross-referenced perceived slights, and treated the whole thread as veiled ammunition in somebody else’s beef. Whether he was dissing anyone in particular is beside the point, and answering that question only services the machinery that prevents hip-hop from holding a structural conversation for longer than ten minutes. The reflex to collapse every opinion into a proxy war between fan camps is a symptom of the same malady CyHi claims to be diagnosing. A culture so fragmented and so addicted to conflict that nobody can sit with an argument long enough to decide whether it holds up.

A later tweet attempted to narrow the claim, insisting he wanted “more street rappers be lyrical” and that he did not believe “just extreme street rap or extreme College rap is all hip hop has to offer.” Fair enough. But even the narrowed version still pressures rap toward a binary that has never accurately described who makes the music. “Street” and “college” are caricatures, and between them lies the actual territory where most people in this country live. Working, borrowing, repaying, arguing with landlords, driving kids to school before a shift, trying to write at two in the morning with the lights off because the electric bill is overdue. That catalog of daily pressure counts as life no less than a corner or a trap house or a cell block. Rap has room for all of it, and always has. Slick Rick spun fairy tales. De La Soul sampled Steely Dan. Biz Markie crooned about a girl who broke his heart at a party. Hip-hop’s earliest commercial era included party-starters and college-educated poets and comedians alongside hustlers and brawlers. The supposed golden age was already more varied than the wistfulness permits.

When CyHi says “you can tell they don’t have any life experiences,” he is making an aesthetic judgment and disguising it as a biographical one. He can hear that something is missing from certain rappers’ music, a grain, a tension, a specific gravity, and he attributes that absence to their résumé instead of to their writing. The error is serious, because it immunizes street-identified artists from the same scrutiny. If background alone certifies quality, then a rapper with the right credentials can coast on cliché indefinitely, and plenty do. Topic repetition is a craft problem that cuts across every background in the music. The boredom CyHi is reacting to is real, but its origins are structural—algorithmic incentives, collapsed attention spans, a distribution model that prizes volume over labor—not autobiographical. Blaming the “straight A students” locates the sickness in the wrong body.

What happens when one personal history becomes the only accepted visa into mainstream credibility is that the field stops expanding. Artists who might otherwise bring unfamiliar textures into hip-hop learn to perform a background they do not have, because that performance is the price of admission. Artists who genuinely lived through the conditions CyHi valorizes, meanwhile, watch their stories get flattened into branding. “Street” shrinks to a marketing tag, a shorthand for danger and scarcity that can be printed on a hoodie and sold at Coachella. The range contracts from both ends. And the culture that once housed Ms. Lauryn Hill and Scarface and Missy Elliott and Ghostface and A Tribe Called Quest and Three 6 Mafia in the same decade starts operating like a border checkpoint, stamping some passports and turning others away.

Nobody disputes that CyHi is a talented, accomplished writer who has shaped records that millions of people carry in their pockets. His displeasure about the current state of rap circulates widely among working artists, and not all of it is misplaced. Wanting more lyricism from rappers with street backgrounds is a reasonable ask. Wanting stronger A&R infrastructure and more developed artist pipelines is a reasonable ask. But packaging those desires inside a frame that treats education as a disqualifier and “good with words” as an insult, a frame that swaps craft standards for background checks, only tightens the belt on a genre that needs a longer runway. If CyHi and the growing chorus of artists who share his displeasure—Benny the Butcher among them—believe rap deserves better, they have the pen game and the industry knowledge to demonstrate what better looks like. Write the records. Fund the writers’ rooms. Mentor the artists whose résumés do not fit the template. The grievance, at this point, is on file. The work is what will shift the weight.

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In 1995, the United States had roughly 5,100 commercial radio station owners. By 2001, that number had cratered to approximately 3,800. More than a thousand proprietors vanished from the dial in five years. The instrument responsible for that disappearance was the Telecommunications Act of 1996, signed by President Clinton on February 8, 1996, which overhauled broadcast ownership rules and, in the process, stripped Black communities of one of their last reliable vehicles for economic self-determination and cultural clout.

Before the Act, federal regulations capped any single entity at forty stations nationwide (twenty AM, twenty FM) with strict local ceilings preventing one company from dominating a single market. The Act demolished the national cap entirely and loosened local restrictions through a graduated scale tied to market size. In large markets with forty-five or more stations, one owner could now hold up to eight. The rationale sold to Congress leaned on free-market logic. Deregulation would attract investment, diversify programming, improve service. What followed instead was a five-year acquisition binge that concentrated broadcast power in fewer hands than at any point since the medium’s invention.

Station sales nearly doubled between 1995 and 1996 as companies raced to exploit the new rules. Clear Channel Communications, which operated fewer than sixty-five outlets before the Act’s passage, gorged itself on acquisitions until it controlled approximately 1,200 by 2002. According to the FCC’s own Radio Industry Review, Clear Channel and Viacom together commanded outsized shares of national advertising revenue by the turn of the millennium, their dominance built on debt-financed purchasing sprees that smaller proprietors could not match and did not survive. The average number of distinct owners per Arbitron metro market slid from 13.5 to 10.3 during this window. That arithmetic tells you who got squeezed out. Independent operators, the category that included most Black license-holders, lacked the capital reserves or credit access to compete against publicly traded conglomerates leveraging Wall Street financing to bundle hundreds of licenses under a single corporate umbrella.

The toll on minority licensure registered on the congressional record itself. At a 2003 Senate Commerce Committee hearing chaired by Senator John McCain, testimony documented a fourteen-percent decline in African American radio proprietors since deregulation took effect. The National Telecommunications and Information Administration had been tracking the pattern for years through its Minority Telecommunications Development Program, and the data told a consistent story of structural disadvantage compounding under merger pressure. Between 1991 and 2000, minority ownership of commercial broadcast outlets hovered between 2.7 and 3.8 percent of the total, a sliver that the acquisition wave threatened to reduce further. NTIA reports from the period noted that sixty-one percent of minority-held stations operated as standalone enterprises rather than parts of larger groups, which meant they bore the full weight of rising operating costs, signal competition, and advertising-market erosion without the economies of scale that insulated chain operators. The agency’s own assessment concluded plainly that concentration still threatened the survival of most minority owners.

Capital access had always been the bottleneck for Black broadcasters, and the post-1996 terrain squeezed it tighter. When station prices inflated because chains were willing to pay acquisition premiums, knowing they could offset the cost through bundled ad sales across their portfolios, independent buyers faced a seller’s market they could not afford. A Georgetown Law Journal study from the period synthesized the evidence linking proprietor demographics to broadcast content, finding documented connections between who held licenses and what those licenses delivered. The research established that outlets owned by people of color were measurably more likely to air diverse news, public affairs coverage, and locally relevant material than their chain counterparts. License concentration redistributed editorial authority along with the licenses themselves.

Understanding what that redistribution destroyed requires remembering what Black radio accomplished before the sell-off. In the decades leading up to 1996, a Black-owned or Black-programmed outlet in a city like Memphis, Atlanta, Detroit, or Houston functioned as something far more granular than an entertainment pipeline. DJs built their reputations on breaking records that national promotion departments had not yet prioritized, picking up a regional single from a pressing plant and spinning it into a hit before any label marketing budget caught wind. Mix shows on Friday and Saturday nights operated as live A&R laboratories, testing songs against real audiences in real time, gauging which tracks moved a particular city’s dance floors and which ones died on arrival. Church advertisements, community announcements, and neighborhood business spots filled commercial breaks. The station was an economic circulatory system for Black neighborhoods, routing attention and dollars through community channels that absentee corporate control had no incentive to maintain once the license changed hands.

That circulatory system depended on program directors with community authority, people who lived in the market, knew its tastes, understood its politics, and exercised discretion over playlists based on neighborhood knowledge rather than corporate research. The Future of Music Coalition’s quantitative study of post-deregulation programming patterns measured what happened when that authority evaporated. As independent owners sold to national chains, song selection migrated from resident program directors and DJs to centralized playlist managers operating out of distant offices. Format overlap between supposedly distinct radio signals climbed as high as seventy-six to eighty percent in some markets, a figure that demolishes any pretense of diversity under consolidated control. Peter DiCola’s research for the Coalition traced the mechanism to its root. Fewer decision-makers meant fewer people making playlist decisions, which meant narrower rotations, which meant less room for records that did not already carry national promotional muscle behind them. The Government Accountability Office, in its 2010 report on media ownership and diversity, acknowledged that multiple studies had linked concentration to homogenized radio playlists, even as the agency noted ongoing debate about the exact degree of impact.

Homogenization did particular damage to Black music because it collapsed what had been a range of formats into one commercial corridor. A market that once supported an Urban AC signal, a hip-hop signal, a gospel signal, and a quiet storm signal under separate proprietors—each with its own program director, its own advertiser relationships, its own sense of obligation to a specific listening community—could, after the merger wave, house all those formats under one entity running them with shared research departments, shared playlists, and shared commercial imperatives. The call letters survived and the frequencies remained active, but the editorial independence that had allowed those outlets to serve different facets of Black life had been absorbed into a uniform corporate metabolism. A record that did not fit the parent company’s research profile for maximum cross-demographic appeal had nowhere to go.

The advertising dimension compounded the damage in ways that rarely surfaced in policy debates. Kofi Ofori’s research, published under the title “When Being No. 1 Is Not Enough,” documented a practice among advertisers and agencies known internally as “no Urban/Spanish dictates”—explicit instructions refusing ad placement on Black-formatted and Latino-formatted frequencies regardless of their ratings or consumption metrics. A station could deliver the largest audience in its market, and major advertisers would still route their budgets elsewhere. An independent Black operator could fight that practice through direct advertiser relationships, community pressure, and sheer persistence. Once a chain acquired that same outlet, the parent company had less incentive to wage the battle when its portfolio included formats that attracted ad dollars without the friction. The economic strangulation was quiet but measurable. Shrinking revenue constrained content budgets, starved investment in regional talent, flattened the programming until nothing distinguished the outlet from its competitors, and left it more exposed to the next round of cost-cutting.

A common deflection holds that terrestrial radio’s influence was already waning by the time the acquisition cascade’s effects matured, that streaming, satellite, and internet platforms would have dissolved broadcast gatekeeping leverage regardless of who held the licenses. That argument confuses a technology shift with a policy choice. The Telecommunications Act did not predict the internet’s disruption of broadcast media. It facilitated ownership concentration years before streaming offered an alternative distribution channel, and the roll-up it enabled locked in structural damage during the precise period when radio still held primary control over which songs reached mass audiences.

The Congressional Research Service’s analysis of the Act’s consequences confirmed that Congress itself had not anticipated the speed or scale of concentration that followed deregulation, which suggests the policy was less an organic market correction than an unexamined giveaway. As Napster, then iTunes, then Spotify arrived to offer musicians and listeners alternative paths around broadcast gatekeepers, the community infrastructure that had once given Black neighborhoods autonomous cultural transmission power had already been sold, absorbed, and operationally gutted.

The thirty-year anniversary of the Telecommunications Act arrives in a media environment where Black artists have more distribution options than at any previous moment and less institutional broadcast infrastructure under Black control or community editorial discretion than at any point since the medium became commercially viable. Streaming platforms have decentralized access to music but concentrated recommendation power in algorithmic systems maintained by companies with no roots in any neighborhood.

The gap the Act tore open between Black music’s creative output and Black communities’ structural grip on how that music circulates has never closed. It widened into a permanent condition, one where the culture generates enormous commercial value and the communities that originate it retain almost none of the broadcast apparatus that once converted cultural production into economic and political leverage. No algorithm recommends a church fundraiser between songs. No centralized playlist manager knows which local MC deserves a first spin. The frequency was always the asset. The robbery was letting someone else price it.

Works Cited

Congressional Research Service, “The Telecommunications Act of 1996 and Its Impact” and “Broadcast Station Totals,” reports R43936 and RL31925. https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/R43936.html / https://www.everycrsreport.com/reports/RL31925.html

Federal Communications Commission, “Radio Industry Review 2002: Trends in Ownership, Format, and Finance,” FCC Working Paper, 2002. https://www.fcc.gov/reports-research/working-papers/radio-industry-review-2002-trends-ownership-format-and-finance

Telecommunications Act of 1996, Pub. L. No. 104-104, 110 Stat. 56, signed February 8, 1996. https://www.congress.gov/104/plaws/publ104/PLAW-104publ104.pdf

U.S. Senate Committee on Commerce, Science, and Transportation, hearing on “Media Ownership: Radio Industry,” 108th Congress, 2003. https://www.commerce.senate.gov/2003/1/media-ownership-radio-industry / https://govinfo.gov/content/pkg/CHRG-108shrg88772/html/CHRG-108shrg88772.htm

National Telecommunications and Information Administration, Minority Telecommunications Development Program Annual Reports, 1997–2001. https://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/opadhome/mtdpweb/01minrept/mtdpexecsum.htm / https://www.ntia.gov/files/ntia/publications/mtdpreportv2.pdf / https://www.ntia.doc.gov/legacy/reports/97minority/index.html

Peter DiCola, “False Premises, False Promises: A Quantitative History of Ownership Consolidation in the Radio Industry,” Future of Music Coalition, 2006. https://arthurmag.com/2006/12/16/false-premises-false-promises-a-quantitative-history-of-ownership-consolidation-in-the-radio-industry-by-peter-dicola-for-the-future-of-music-coaltion/

Government Accountability Office, “Media Ownership: Economic Factors Influence the Number of Media Outlets in Local Markets, While Ownership by Minorities and Women Appears Limited and Is Difficult to Assess,” GAO-10-369, 2010. https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-10-369 / https://www.gao.gov/assets/gao-10-369.pdf

Bill Ivey, “Radio Deregulation and Consolidation: Background Report,” Curb Center, Vanderbilt University. https://cdn.givingcompass.org/wp-content/uploads/2018/04/26100741/A-History-Of-Ownership-Consolidation-In-The-Radio-Industry.pdf

Georgetown Law Faculty Publications, studies on the nexus between broadcast ownership demographics and programming diversity. https://www.repository.law.indiana.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1455&context=fclj

Kofi Asiedu Ofori, “When Being No. 1 Is Not Enough: The Impact of Advertising Practices on Minority-Owned & Minority-Formatted Broadcast Stations,” Civil Rights Forum on Communications Policy.

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