A few piano notes accompany the beginning of this scene, whose romantic mood contrasts with the rest of the film. Then the voice enters. The song, “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” was already familiar: written in 1957 by British folk singer Ewan MacColl for Peggy Seeger, who would become his third wife, it had since been recorded by numerous artists, from Peter, Paul and Mary and Marianne Faithfull to Nana Mouskouri. But the voice heard in *Play Misty for Me* belonged to a singer who was still little known, even though she was preparing to release her third album for Atlantic.

Clint Eastwood came across the song by chance, as he recalled in a documentary broadcast on PBS: “I wanted to make a beautiful, idyllic scene in which he reconciled with his girlfriend. I heard Roberta Flack’s song on the radio while driving to work one day, and I thought, ‘Oh yes, that tells the story.’” It was an unlikely stroke of luck that brought the song to the director’s attention: not only was the recording already two years old, but it had not even been released as a single at the time. Eastwood also had to overcome the objections of Joel Dorn, the producer of the original session, who feared the track was too long and suggested either rerecording it or at least shortening the instrumental introduction. Eastwood stood firm—“I want every note, every breath”—and the original recording, all five minutes and more of it, appeared in the film.

*Play Misty for Me* enjoyed only moderate success in theaters, but audiences fell for the song. Finally released as a single in January 1972, it climbed to the top of the charts in the United States and around the world. The trade magazine Billboard named it its single of the year, and Roberta Flack won her first two Grammy Awards. Yet the singer and pianist was far from a beginner.

Roberta Cleopatra Flack was born on February 10, 1937, in Black Mountain, North Carolina, and grew up in a home steeped in music, with an amateur jazz pianist for a father and a church organist and choir director for a mother. After moving with her family to Arlington, Virginia, she began taking piano lessons at the age of nine and soon attracted attention. In 1950, when she was barely thirteen, the *Washington Afro-American* identified “Miss Roberta Flack” as one of the organists at Arlington’s Lomax African Methodist Episcopal Zion Church. In her school yearbook, her classmates predicted a future for her in music, already imagining her performing at Carnegie Hall.

At fifteen, she received a scholarship to study music at Howard University in Washington, where she was one of the youngest students. Her talent allowed her to distinguish herself, and at the end of 1956 she was among thirty Howard students selected for the college edition of Who’s Who. After graduating at nineteen, she enrolled in an advanced course of study, but her father’s death in the summer of 1959 forced her to abandon it and enter the workforce. She first taught at a school in North Carolina, then returned to Washington, where she worked at several schools while giving piano lessons from her home and accompanying classical singers at the Tivoli Theatre. Her mentor, Frederick “Wilkie” Wilkerson, a vocal coach who had worked with Paul Robeson and Maya Angelou, encouraged her to enter the world of popular music.

Married to double bassist Steve Novosel, who performed with musicians including Rahsaan Roland Kirk, she had no trouble finding a place on the city’s club circuit, appearing at venues such as the 1520 Club and, beginning in 1968, Mr. Henry’s. Hired by owner Henry Jaffe to perform three nights a week, she was able to leave teaching behind and concentrate on music.

Celebrities from Burt Bacharach and Carmen McRae to Ramsey Lewis and Dionne Warwick flocked to hear her. Les McCann caught her at a benefit concert for the Inner City Ghetto Children’s Library Fund and, impressed by what he heard, secured her an audition at Atlantic. In November 1968, she spent three hours performing all forty-two songs in her repertoire for the young producer Joel Dorn, who immediately offered her a contract with the label.

A single session at Atlantic Studios on January 20, 1969, was enough to record some thirty songs, combining standards and pop material—including “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face.” Eight were chosen for First Take, her debut album, released the following month. Some of the rejected sides would be issued much later, as part of a 2020 anniversary edition. The record attracted little attention, however, as did its successor, Chapter Two, released the following year and marking the beginning of her long-running collaboration with Donny Hathaway.

That did not prevent Flack from building a formidable reputation onstage as she moved from clubs to festivals. In July 1969, she triumphed at the Rutgers Jazz Festival, where she stepped in at short notice for Nina Simone and even upstaged Miles Davis, with whom she shared the bill. The local newspaper ran a headline about this “unknown singer.”

The following summer, she made her European debut in Montreux at what was then still called the Golden Rose Festival. In March 1971, she traveled to Africa for the concerts preserved in the film Soul to Soul. Held to commemorate Ghana’s independence, they also featured Wilson Pickett, Ike & Tina Turner, and Les McCann with Eddie Harris.

The success of “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face” propelled Flack’s career into another dimension, benefiting both her first two recordings and *Quiet Fire*, released in November 1971. But it was her next record that made her even more popular. Acting on an idea from Jerry Wexler, she reunited with Donny Hathaway for a collaborative album that became a tremendous success, driven by the hit “Where Is the Love.”

A year later, she repeated the feat on her own with Killing Me Softly, which gave her a signature song in its title track, “Killing Me Softly with His Song.” She had discovered Lori Lieberman’s original version by chance on an airplane. Like Nina Simone, Flack rarely wrote songs, preferring to sing the words and notes of others, but she was nevertheless deeply involved in making her records: beginning with Quiet Fire, she received credit as an arranger.

After a few low-key production efforts for other artists—including gospel singer Marion Williams, folk singer Donal Leace, and Wayne Davis—she began producing her own albums under the pseudonym Rubina Flake, starting with *Feel Like Makin’ Love*. Released in 1975, the album included not only the Eugene McDaniels-penned title song but also Stevie Wonder’s “I Can See the Sun in Late December,” which Wonder, then working on Songs in the Key of Life, was already performing onstage.

Flack continued to act as producer, at least in part, on each of her records through 1983’s Born to Love. She reunited with Hathaway in 1977 for a duet on “The Closer I Get to You” and began preparing another album with him, but the project was abruptly halted by his death. Only two tracks were completed, and they appeared in 1980 on Roberta Flack Featuring Donny Hathaway.

A constant presence on the charts through the end of the 1970s, Flack saw her commercial success fade somewhat during the following decade. Even so, she formed a new creative partnership with singer Peabo Bryson—who died on June 2 of this year, editor’s note—and scored one final major hit with “Tonight, I Celebrate My Love” in 1983. More discreet in later years, she regularly reminded fans of her presence. She lent her voice to the mother of Michael Jackson’s character in the video for “Bad,” for example, and won over a new generation when the Fugees brought “Killing Me Softly with His Song” back into the spotlight in 1996.

From the 1990s onward, she recorded only occasionally, but she continued to perform regularly until 2016, when a stroke and neurological disorders left her unable to sing. In a fitting full-circle moment, she published The Green Piano: How Little Me Found Music in 2023, an autobiographical children’s book illustrated by Tonya Bolden, before taking her final bow in February 2025.

“The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face”

Only an occasional songwriter herself, Roberta Flack had to rely on the pens of others to create her own repertoire. Like Nina Simone, she had an unerring instinct for identifying compositions she could make her own. “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” which before her had been recorded almost exclusively by folk artists, became in her hands a standard worthy of immediate entry into the illuminated pages of the Great American Songbook.

“Killing Me Softly with His Song”

Set aside the sordid dispute over the song’s origins between its two officially credited writers, Charles Fox and Norman Gimbel, and its first performer, Lori Lieberman: “Killing Me Softly with His Song” is unmistakably a Roberta Flack song, with Flack responsible for both the arrangement and the performance. Inspired by Lieberman’s reaction to a Don McLean concert, this tale of music’s emotional power is transformed by Flack, who quickens the tempo and strengthens its rhythmic force. Covered countless times from the moment it appeared—including in French by Gilbert Montagné—her version was not equaled until more than twenty years later, in 1996, when the Fugees offered their own interpretation, carried by Ms. Lauryn Hill’s voice. Hill still sings it at every concert today. On Flack’s recording, Donny Hathaway’s voice supports hers.

“Feel Like Makin’ Love”

The biggest commercial hit of Flack’s career, “Feel Like Makin’ Love” was written for her by Eugene McDaniels, whose “Compared to What” she had already covered on her debut album. More conventionally soul in form and arrangement than the music that preceded it, the song reveals the singer’s warm, even sensual side. A comparison with Isaac Hayes’s heavy-handed version, recorded the following year, only highlights the subtlety of Flack’s approach.

“The Closer I Get to You”

If one had to choose a single example of the vocal chemistry between Roberta Flack and Donny Hathaway, this intensely romantic duet would be its pinnacle. Written by Reggie Lucas and James Mtume, who had just left Miles Davis’s group to join Flack’s, the song is in fact a simulated duet. Hathaway’s failing health prevented him from joining Roberta Flack in the New York studio, forcing him to record his part separately. Released a year before his death, it became the biggest hit of Hathaway’s career.

“Tonight, I Celebrate My Love”

Roberta Flack’s career is often reduced to her landmark recordings of the 1970s, but it did not end with the change of decade, as this successful duet with singer Peabo Bryson demonstrates. Despite production mannerisms that sound very dated today, and a partner who does not quite possess the stature of his predecessor, the result retains a certain charm—provided one is not too averse to saccharine.

“How Many Broken Wings”

Les McCann was the person who introduced Roberta Flack to Atlantic, and she returned the favor by contributing vocals and piano to two tracks on the pianist’s third Atlantic album. Recorded two months after her first session for the label, this lovely duet was the first of a long series for the singer.

“On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)”

Although Quincy Jones and Roberta Flack’s collaboration on record was brief—amounting to a version of “When You’re Smiling (The Whole World Smiles with You)” on the soundtrack to Richard Brooks’s film $ (Dollars)—the singer appeared onstage with his big band several times in 1972. One such performance took place in Chicago as part of the PUSH Expo organized by Jesse Jackson. Recorded on that occasion, this shared performance of “On a Clear Day (You Can See Forever)” is one of the great moments in Save the Children, the film documenting the Expo concerts.

“You Stopped Loving Me”

Although Roberta Flack lent her voice to several soundtracks over the years, she composed only one film score: for the largely forgettable 1981 movie Bustin’ Loose, starring Richard Pryor and Cicely Tyson. For the occasion, she surrounded herself with some of the leading musicians of the day, from Marcus Miller and Barry Miles to Luther Vandross on background vocals. Vandross gave her the magnificent soul ballad “You Stopped Loving Me,” in the quiet-storm style of which he would soon become one of the foremost voices.

“Goodbye Sadness”

Beginning in the mid-1970s, Roberta Flack lived for several decades in the exclusive Dakota building at the corner of 72nd Street and Central Park West. There, she became friendly with her seventh-floor neighbors, John Lennon and Yoko Ono. Their son Sean grew close enough to call her “Aunt Roberta.” In 1984, when Ono decided to produce her own tribute album, Flack contributed a version of one of Ono’s compositions, “Goodbye Sadness.” Despite its distinctly dated production, Flack delivers a minimalist yet deeply emotional interpretation that elevates the songwriter’s original.

“Flower”

This is surely the most improbable record of Roberta Flack’s entire career. In 1999, a Japanese label released Friends: Roberta Flack Sings Mariko Takahashi, an album devoted to English-language adaptations of songs by Japanese pop singer Mariko Takahashi. Produced by Jerry and Katreese Barnes, regular Flack collaborators who also wrote the English lyrics, the album was not distributed outside Japan. Even so, it confirmed that Flack had lost none of her power as an interpreter.

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In the prologue to the Book of Rhymes, an interruption happens in a club show. The beat relinquishes, the MC leaves the stage, and the lyrics being performed flash up in bold print on the screen behind the crowd, rolling smoothly in clean lines. Some in the audience boo. Some leave the premises. The remaining start figuring out what they’ve been missing all along—rhymes hidden inside the lyrics, metaphors upon metaphors, rhythm generated by the language itself—and pretty soon their heads start nodding to a beat you can’t even hear. Adam Bradley, the critic responsible for staging this scene, went on to examine rap lyrics as thoroughly as an English seminar analyzes Yeats and Frost. His little fantasy also stages a charge that has hovered around hip-hop for decades and gained momentum in the last few years—the assertion that the crowd leaves when the lyrics become too challenging, and the rapper who seems to be too intelligent for the room ends up performing for the remaining nodders.

Lupe Fiasco voiced the charge in “Dumb It Down” in 2007—the song based on the industry executives’ advice that the double meanings cost him the market, while his lyrics are overloaded with abstractions in apparent revenge. MF DOOM stacked layers of triple entendre beneath his metal mask and remained a cult rapper while far less accomplished writers hit the platinum sales. And Black Thought is mentioned among the best living rappers every time peers and critics evaluate the skill, but the largest audience the Roots has ever attracted happened because they performed as the house band for a late-night talk show.

Then Kendrick Lamar continues to challenge the charge. DAMN. won the 2018 Pulitzer Prize in Music, becoming the first rap album outside classical and jazz ever to win it, a feat that the award committee described as a portrayal of “the complexity of modern African-American life,” and also made the smash single, “HUMBLE.” Then seven years later, the battle track “Not Like Us,” loaded with allusions, double meanings, and minute details, topped the charts and swept the Grammys before headlining the Super Bowl halftime stage. JAŸ-Z has been successfully selling complex, allusive writing for decades while no minimalist writer has managed to approach his sales figures. Ms. Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill—the dense, scripture—and literary-reference-filled first album to win the Grammy in the Album of the Year category in the hip-hop genre. OutKast rapped coded in the dialect of Georgia and spoke about apocalypse and elections and made diamonds.

Richard Hofstadter drew a convenient distinction in 1963 in his Anti-Intellectualism in American Life between intelligence, a quality valued highly by Americans whenever encountered, and intellect, the activity of the mind done for its own sake, which, as Hofstadter notes, elicits “resentment and suspicion”. The rap criticism also works along this dichotomy: the verse becomes intelligent if it is as complicated as an English paper, multisyllabic, full of allusions, worthy of quoting—anything else does not belong in the category of intelligent lyrics. By such a criterion, the South has been considered unsophisticated for decades, hence the booing in the room of New York tastemakers during the 1995 Source Awards, when André 3000 got hold of the microphone and announced that “the South has something to say.” The intelligence of the Pimp C verse is the timing, the economy, and the mastery of the dialect. The intelligence of the drill lyrics is the compression, the menace contained in the absence of information. Declaring that all of these forms of lyrics are not intelligent is not a verdict of the lyrics but a class statement with literary clothing.

The streaming service requires the listening time of thirty seconds to qualify the song as a stream. Hence, the lyrics that work are those grabbing the attention within twenty-nine seconds, and the payout in fractions of a cent per stream favors the material replayed out of reflex rather than the material replayed for studying. It is the playlist editors, the radio programmers, and the marketing budget that determine whether the songs will be available for listening at all. No listener can punish the verse that wasn’t even presented to them. When the label hears sixteen bars of dense lyrics and requests a catchy hook, as Lupe Fiasco captured the request on tape, the request is the commercial plumbing. Complexity delays the flow. Whatever gets narrated afterwards as the audience tastes is primarily the byproduct of ten thousand decisions about distribution made upstream, by the people paid to avoid skips.

Hugh Auld saw his wife teaching the letters to the enslaved boy in Baltimore in the 1820s and ordered her to stop, warning that learning to read would make the boy unmanageable and unfit for slavery. The boy was Frederick Douglass, and he remembered that the prohibition had taught him more than the lessons themselves. It was obvious from the panic in the order itself.

The panic was already statutory at the time. In 1740, South Carolina made teaching an enslaved person to write a crime in the amendment to its Negro Act, passed right after the Stono Rebellion. After David Walker’s Appeal spread in the Southern ports in 1829, Virginia amended its code in April 1831, prohibiting any gathering of free Black people for reading lessons, and after the Nat Turner rebellion in August, statutes proliferated and became tougher. In 1833, Alabama fined the teaching of any Black person, slave or free, how to spell, read or write. In North Carolina, they differentiated the penalties on racial grounds: whipping for a Black teacher, fines or imprisonment for a white one. Perhaps five to ten percent of the enslaved population could read in the country that made fear of literacy a statutory matter.

After emancipation, the policing switched locations. Disfranchisement was rebuilt around the literacy tests, with the exception for white men through the grandfather clause; reading, prohibited for a century, became the condition of the voting right at the very moment when much of the liberated population couldn’t afford it. Around 1900, approximately half of the voting-age Black men couldn’t read, compared to about twelve percent of white men—a disparity the tests were designed to exploit.

According to the 2023 PIAAC survey, a part of the OECD’s adult skills study, twenty-eight percent of American adults tested at or below the lowest literacy level, a share nine points higher than in 2017. On the 2024 NAEP, four out of ten fourth-graders failed to read above the basic level, the worst result since the introduction of the test in 1992, and about three in ten reached the proficient level. Decades of standardized testing of schoolchildren under No Child Left Behind and its successor resulted in classes being loaded with the test-preparation. The public that reads less is easier to serve, to advertise to and to poll. The same corporations that consider a rap listener in thirty-second increments don’t voice objections.

Eight hundred pages of transcribed rap verses appeared as The Anthology of Rap in 2010, published by Yale University Press and edited by Bradley and Andrew DuBois, with afterwords from Chuck D and Common. Henry Louis Gates Jr. has started the foreword with his father, born in 1913, reciting the Signifying Monkey toasts in rhyme, and tracing the evolution of the art form from the Dozens through toasts to MCs; twenty years earlier he testified in a Florida obscenity case that the rowdiest 2 Live Crew’s record was a parody in venerable tradition. The anthology immediately ran into a public correction after the Slate reporter compiled the list of mistranscribed bars, hearing errors printed in Yale typeface; the flap told as much as the book did about the ownership of the vernacular transcription and care. Bradley’s claim that rap lyrics are poems of which the mass popularity partially hinges upon the refusal to call them poetry rested comfortably in the midst of the entire affair.

The appetite is evident everywhere where the charge doesn’t expect to find it—on the syllabuses, in an anthology, on Genius, where the millions of listeners transcribe the verses line by line free of charge, just for the fun of catching the reference. Against this backdrop, the assertion that the crowd runs away from the difficulty looks misaddressed. The people telling Lupe Fiasco to dumb it down were the people who worked in the label. The programmers kept MF DOOM off the daytime radio airwaves without polling a listener in the Bronx. Any argument ending with the indictment of Black listeners for lack of sophistication repeats the oldest slander in the American file, the one stated in the 1740 statute—the problem with Black people and books lay with Black people. Douglass has answered the charge himself, teaching his hands to write by copying letters off the fence posts and pavement in the city where the lesson was contraband.

The text becomes instantly available, fluent and inexhaustible, practically free, and this flood reveals what the price of a sentence used to cover. Hugh Auld reads differently in this perspective. His fear went beyond the alphabet, aiming at the activities of a reading mind, and nothing about that fear has become irrelevant. A verse that requires several listens to be deciphered, a Rakim lyric, where rhymes occur inside the verse rather than at its end, a Black Thought freestyle lasting ten uninterrupted minutes on the live radio broadcast -all these are the testimonies of the activity of the human mind functioning at full capacity, and this value grows with the flood of generated filler covering all feeds.

Every statute, literacy test, playlist algorithm, and label’s request of simplicity worked to shrink the number of those who stick to the words on the wall. Yet the number kept increasing all the way through 1740, 1831, 1900, test-prep decades and up until February 2025, when the Pulitzer winner played a diss record constructed like the court document in front of the packed stadium in New Orleans.

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The vacant store space of the old Crown Diner at 161st Street and Gerard Avenue remained so for six years until the start of July, when a pop-up shop opened up selling thirtieth-anniversary merchandise for the album Reasonable Doubt by a Marcy Houses hustler whom no label wanted to sign at the time. Now known as JAŸ-Z, who booked Yankee Stadium for three nights in July to celebrate it, and sold out the first two nights. 44,916 at the first show became the biggest paid attendance in the history of Yankee Stadium for a concert and 45,832 in the second night broke the record from the previous night, and from the stage, JAŸ-Z drew a personal line: “the album that did 43,000 in its first week now put 45,000 in the seats”—and another night with more than 45,000 in attendance was yet to come.

The Friday night started with the release of the album Reasonable Doubt. Beyoncé took the stage to sing her part on “Can’t Knock the Hustle”—originally performed by Mary J. Blige, and Blue Ivy Carter sat at a piano for “Feelin’ It”. Nas took the stage for his song “Dead Presidents,” the track that includes his sample voice, and continued playing the songs of the album that were “science fiction” in 2001, like “The World Is Yours”, “N.Y. State of Mind” and “Where I’m From.” Memphis Bleek did “Coming of Age.” Jaz-O, the first mentor, did “Bring It On,” and Alicia Keys sang “Empire State of Mind” to close the main set. The Blueprint celebrated its twenty-fifth anniversary with the appearance of Slick Rick, Pharrell and Eminem, who performed two tracks: “Renegade” and then “Lose Yourself” over “Takeover” beat—at Yankee Stadium in the Bronx, the site of the original insult.

The freestyle took place immediately after “Politics As Usual” with the use of Frank Ocean’s “Made in America” hook. JAŸ-Z stopped the show to mention his critics in it. “They say I sold out, yeah, I did sell out/Three nights, I sold Yankee Stadium the hell out.” Then, “Ex-drug dealer you might not like the packaging, but my presence is a present.” And finally, “I don’t listen to Twitter activists, they type, and I laugh at them/It’s really no comparison.” The description claims that the freestyle was milder than the one performed at Roots Picnic earlier this year that had actual names mentioned in it. The Yankee Stadium freestyle, on the contrary, was targeted against the stans and critics for the whole spring, accusing the anniversary of being a cash grab.

I have no problem with a man answering his own record. Rappers have always litigated in verse, and it is exactly the case when a fifty-six-year-old man performed it from the stage that he filled three times. The first bar is the piece of writing that truly deserves attention; it turns a moral issue into a figure, and 45,000 people cheering back is the proof of it. The third bar, however, becomes rather weak in writing. “Twitter activists” is the real phenomenon: the discourse economy where posting replaces doing. A man who spent the last seven years in state houses definitely has a point in this matter. However, using the term in the context of this controversy sweeps up a lot of people who are far beyond “typing.”

This is exactly the point that is ignored by JAŸ-Z in his freestyle. The anniversary itself included a special edition of Reasonable Doubt on vinyl to be sold through Target, the company that experienced serious backlash because of the rollback of its diversity, equity and inclusion initiatives. This was exactly the point where a boycott appeared, one of the few means available for an ordinary customer. The boycott mechanism is the register where the line is not to be crossed: an unglamorous work that has been conducted by the Montgomery for 381 days. For a Black fan keeping the discipline, the thirtieth anniversary of the great independence album came with a choice: to cross the line or to be absent from the celebration. None of the options is tempting, and some of the people who were “laughed” from the stage kept the boycott the same weekend.

However, the complaint sounds stranger the closer it becomes related to the rest of the anniversary’s promotion. There was no problem with the Amazon tie-ins. The criticism that was typed on phones made by Apple, posted on platforms of Meta and Google that have reached deep into labor conditions, data extraction and public policies in comparison with one retailer’s HR retreat sounds like a rounding error. None of it absolves the vinyl: this is the reality of consumer politics where people boycott what they can leave, and nobody can leave the phone. The Target is a real and narrow lever. The vinyl variant walked in the midst of it in the wrong year.

Kaepernick is the older controversy, and the freestyle touched upon it. In 2016, Colin Kaepernick kneeled during the national anthem protesting police killings and has not played a down in the NFL ever since that season ended. The early position of JAŸ-Z on this matter was clear: he wore custom Kaepernick jersey performing on Saturday Night Live in 2017, turned down the Super Bowl halftime show offer and mentioned this fact on wax, on “Apeshit”: “I said no to the Super Bowl: You need me, I don’t need you/Every night we in the end zone, tell the NFL we in stadiums too.” The video of that song aired when Kaepernick’s collusion grievance was still active, and JAŸ-Z and Beyoncé posed in front of the Mona Lisa with the message to the league.

Then the situation changed twice in six months. In February 2019, Kaepernick and Eric Reid settled their collusion case against the league confidentially and in August, Roc Nation announced a partnership with the NFL as its live music entertainment strategist, consulting on the halftime show and steering the league’s Inspire Change social-justice platform, with Robert Kraft acting as the broker. Standing next to the commissioner that ordered the blackballing, JAŸ-Z said, “I think we’re past kneeling. I think it’s time for action.” His more comprehensive account, given afterwards, ran, “No one is saying [Colin Kaepernick] hasn’t been done wrong. He was done wrong. I would understand if it was three months ago. But it was three years ago, and someone needs to say, ‘What do we do now—because people are still dying?’” The room that he said this phrase in shaped the perception of it, and “past kneeling” sounded like an epitaph to the man who was unemployed for kneeling.

The most vocal opponents came from the inside. Eric Reid, who knelt beside Kaepernick and settled along with him, called the deal “asinine.” Kenny Stills said that JAŸ-Z “didn’t seem very informed.” Nessa Diab, Kaepernick’s partner, criticized the deal publicly. Jemele Hill wrote that the partnership provided the league with “guilt-free access to Black audiences, culture, entertainers and influencers”. The man was not part of the deal, and according to the sources at the time of the news, the two men did not speak about it. None of these people were the Twitter activists. One of them filed the collusion grievance.

The publicly visible money is divided in half. The NFL made a $100 million promise to Inspire Change over the course of ten years, earmarking it for education and economic advancement, police-community relations and criminal justice reform, and this promise is genuine and checked. As well as the gap that critics continue to point out seven years in, with no publicly verifiable outcome and unclear grant partnerships. In November 2019, the league arranged a workout for Kaepernick, and the sources credited JAŸ-Z and Roc Nation with bringing the parties together. No team signed him. The public record of this matter ends there: nine-figure promise on one hand and quarterback who never played again on the other, and all the rest is kept in private.

One more privately kept fact appeared in the record of Friday night. The Kaepernick bars appeared in the freestyle immediately after “Politics As Usual” naming the song, “You pickin’ and choosin’ the politickin’ as usual/They digging deep for narratives, it’s embarrassing/They running outta characters, had to bring back up Kaep again”, and went even further: “Buddy took a check, I ain’t even mad at him/But along with that check you have to sign a non disparagement/I’m the one they can’t control.” CBS lead NFL insider Jonathan Jones reported the claim as JAŸ-Z saying that Kaepernick signed the non-disparagement clause in the 2019 settlement. The settlement is confidential, and its terms have never been disclosed: a man who was not a part of the agreement characterized its contents in front of 45,000 people. Sources that have direct knowledge of the deal told TMZ that the non-disparagement clause was not included in it, pointing to Kaepernick’s posts mentioning the number of teams that denied him employment. The quarterback did not give any comments regarding the freestyle. The fact written in the privately kept paper is now challenged in public with the publication of the denial.

The “no comparison” part of the bar has its own paper trail. JAŸ-Z co-founded REFORM Alliance with Meek Mill and Michael Rubin, and the organization continues to conduct probation and parole reform in multiple states, the statute-by-statute process that shortens the terms of supervision. JAŸ-Z financed Meek Mill through the probation case that became the national scandal, as well as 21 Savage’s immigration case. He executive produced Time: The Kalief Browder Story (about a sixteen-year-old boy who spent three years on Rikers Island without a trial), Rest in Power (Trayvon Martin) and Free Meek. Roc Nation finances lawyers in the police-misconduct and wrongful prosecution cases that do not get the headline coverage. Against the quote-tweet, the post is indeed the no comparison; he is right about that, and the people who reduce the record of the post-2019 JAŸ-Z to the handshake with Goodell are arguing with a cartoon.

None of it, however, explains the $100 million. Freestyle cannot address Reid, who was there and on the field at the time, and rhyme cannot dispute Hill’s structural read, which was never about JAŸ-Z’s intentions, and always about what the league purchased. Seven years of Inspire Change without publicly verified books does not dispute it either.

Sunday was supposed to be the final celebration. The additional performance, added as “Extra Innings” after selling out the first two nights, was scheduled for 8 p.m., and more than 45,000 people held tickets. According to the police source and the joint statement issued by the Yankees, Roc Nation and Live Nation, the hundreds of people without tickets who moved in groups tried to push past the ticketholders at multiple fan entrances, shoving past checkpoints and, in some cases, breaching security completely. The stadium gates were closed. The stadium was placed in complete lockout; nobody was allowed in, nobody was allowed out, and it stayed this way while the re-entry took place from around 10 p.m. until late midnight through slow and thorough screening at every entrance. JAŸ-Z took the stage at the beginning of midnight, four and a half hours late, performed the set until 3 in the morning with Rihanna (“Run This Town,” “Bitch Better Have My Money”), Usher (“Heart of the City,” “Throwback”), Jeezy (“Seen It All,” “Go Crazy Remix”), Swizz Beatz (“Money, Cash, Hoes” through “On to the Next One”), the Clipse (“Grindin’”) and Beyoncé (“Drunk in Love”) among others, and apologized for the delay on stage. The FDNY claimed that it had difficulties to reach the people needing medical help through the crowds outside, and six people were hurt and all expected to recover. There were no arrests reported.

The bill for this performance has its names on it. Rosalynn Glover flew from Atlanta, watched Gate 2 and then Gate 4 being stormed by the crowds, claimed that some people entered the stadium without passing the checkpoint and that the staff at Gate 4 were laughing at ticketholders who were still waiting in line. Another concertgoer reported that his friends who paid $3,000 for the floor seats never got into the stadium. Videos circulated of A$AP Rocky, Charlamagne Tha God and Fabolous being on the wrong side of the doors. The joint statement thanked the NYPD and stadium security for “putting the welfare of attendees above all other considerations”, and the separately reported line of the night made it more precise, “We didn’t want people to get trampled.” Fair enough and true, and the decision was correct after the gates broke. The gates breaking, however, is the accusation. The baseball franchise, record label and the largest concert promoter in the world organized the performance, setting an attendance record twice in 48 hours, and then could not hold the checkpoint against people who never bought the ticket, while the people who did stay outside in the heat eating the flight, hotel and floor seats.

The people who rushed those gates deserve their share in the blame without the sociology usually associated with it on the internet. They were not identified, no motive is available, but the necessity to mention it is not needed to say the obvious: that is, that they climbed over paying fans to get the free seats at the celebration of the man whose entire myth says that he paid for everything himself. Nobody gets to blame them on his behalf, and nobody gets to remove them from the narrative either. All the rest at those gates followed the rules and waited four hours in the heat.

The man asked in the end to be judged by the present and not the packaging. Friday night showed a much better argument than freestyle, with Blue Ivy at the piano, Nas playing in the Bronx outfield on “N.Y. State of Mind,” the attendance record set and broken in 24 hours. Sunday night showed the opposite argument without anyone typing a word, with the gates closed, laughing staff behind them, and thousands of people waiting outside for the present that they paid for in full (with the music direction provided with the help of Adam Blackstone and others, who deserve their flowers as well). The pop-up at the old Crown Diner space was built to be removed, and when it happens, 161st and Gerard will return to the dark windows that the neighborhood saw for six years, near the ballpark that set the three largest concert attendance records in its history.

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On the Fourth of July, the country’s 250th birthday, a government website was predictably dark. The Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) had hit its self-imposed termination date, eighteen months after the foundation had been laid by the man who would become president and gifted the enterprise to Elon Musk, completing its work as a “gift to America.” The Office of Management and Budget, through Russell Vought, estimates that roughly $215 billion in savings had been realized by the off-ramp, though no final audit is anticipated to confirm the accuracy of the figure since the office itself is being shut down, leaving the number permanently unverified. The layoffs, meanwhile, are entirely verifiable. With more than 272,000 civil servant jobs eliminated in the latest phase of freeze, deferment, or reduction-in-force, since assuming office, the president had cut the federal workforce by more than a tenth.

Atlanta ministers in 1963 witnessed something similar in their congregations, describing their experiences before the FBI in an account later uncovered by researcher and historian Nancy MacLean. Black women with college degrees cleaned houses; Black men with the same were employed as postmen; the federal government hired based on credentials, and Black families invested in those credentials for three decades, securing a legacy of federal jobs through the civil service exams and postal union locals and Title VII. Black women accounted for about twelve percent of federal employees at the time, compared to their approximate six percent of the labor force, according to AFSCME, and more than a quarter of the staff at the Department of Education. The pension, the GS schedule, and the health insurance plan for a mother and her children, funding all of which came from the federal budget, were the results of a jobs war fought and won by the civil rights demonstrators, a chapter of the larger movement not captured on film by the lunch-counter sit-ins.

The victories bore fruit in the ground, and the cuts ran through it. Gender economist Katica Roy analyzed the 2025 figures for the president’s 2025 federal spending plan, released this month, and found that nearly a third of the jobs scheduled to be eliminated this year from the nearly 300,000 projected to be lost nationwide would be held by Black women. Twelve percent of the workforce, thirty-three percent of the cut. The agencies targeted for personnel reductions in the Department of Energy, the Education Department, the Health and Human Services Department, HUD, USAID, and the Consumer Financial Protection Bureau were all disproportionately employing Black women as of last year.

One of these jobs was not even in a federal building. A compliance officer for a climate change think tank posted an open letter to the president this week, after her position at the firm was eliminated along with several others during the shutdown of the Greenhouse Gas Reduction Fund, the $27 billion climate fund authorized in the Inflation Reduction Act. Her job had been to ensure that the appropriated funds were, in fact, being distributed to the appropriate disbursement agents, many of which were Native tribes, in accordance with the law. The program, she explained in the letter, had been canceled as part of the changes to the federal budget, and the grant, accordingly, had been rescinded. The compliance officers, she noted, were only a small part of the program’s operations, but their layoff was nevertheless counted in the federal employment numbers. When a government program is ended by Congress, the funding is terminated, the contracts canceled, and the jobs eliminated, not by the federal government but by the private contractors who hold the contracts, one office at a time.

The layoffs, in turn, were not confined to the private sector or to the government. The same administration that had eliminated the climate fund and the Office of Gun Violence Prevention and the National Institute for Allergy and Infectious Diseases, among dozens of other initiatives, had issued executive orders banning diversity, equity, and inclusion initiatives from the federal payroll and the federal contracting process, which effectively accomplished the same objectives for the private sector, without needing the imprimatur of the Rector of the Realm. Roy was able to track the figures for all federal employees, finding that Black women had lost roughly 319,000 jobs between February and July while their white counterparts gained 142,000, Latinas gained 176,000, and white men gained 365,000. The Black women were the sole minority group to have lost jobs since the beginning of the year, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which had just released its latest monthly employment figures last week. The unemployment rate for Black women, which had begun the year at five and a half percent, was approaching eight percent at the year’s end, the highest rate among female workers.

Roy’s other figure, meanwhile, is incalculable. It is the number of Black families with children under the age of eighteen in which the primary wage-earner was a Black woman; such families accounted for an estimated fifty-two percent of Black households with children, meaning that every eliminated job cut into the family’s income, its rent or mortgage payment, its food budget, its college savings, its health care coverage, for as long as the separation lasted. The effects of the layoff would extend far beyond the severed paycheck, cascading down the length of the family’s financial commitments like a stone dropped in a pond. The same could be said for the families of the laid-off workers, whose incomes were also diminished, although not necessarily as drastically as the families of the federal employees, since the losses were, after all, distributed across a far wider group. The loss of the civil service jobs was, in effect, subtracted from two budgets instead of one.

Then there is the matter of the costs themselves, the sums appropriated to the Department of Government Efficiency. DOGE’s own accounts never added up to the promised $215 billion in savings, and an independent audit projected the government’s expenditures on the initiative to be roughly $135 billion higher than the amount budgeted for the following year, on top of the losses projected by the IRS for the year. An agency dedicated to finding waste and fraud, it turned out, had incurred costs by every measure save its own, finally shutting down on a holiday and dubbing the figure a gift.

James Farmer testified before Congress in 1963 on the subject of spending and the ability of the poor to earn. The right to spend, without the right to earn, he said, was an instrument of oppression, and the movement to which he belonged—the Student Nonviolent Coordinating Committee—had pressed relentlessly on the federal agencies, one at a time, to open up hiring and unionization and benefits. Sixty years of that pressure were undone in eighteen months, by one man, one signature, with no vote at all. Organizing the federal employees to restore the protections and the pensions—to return the jobs and the budgets to the families—is where the jobs war resumes, as it always has, and where the last one left off, with those most directly affected speaking out in public, one after another, until someone answers.

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Halfway through Durand Bernarr’s speech, the singer realized his acceptance speech was still on his phone, and his publicist had to track him down the aisle while still open on the Notes app. Previously nominated four times, didn’t have a record label and referred to his fans as his cousins, who amassed his YouTube following one video at a time since 2008. The trophy he received on the first of February was for Best Progressive R&B Album, for Bloom, and he brought both his parents to see the night he was waiting for. He started by wishing everyone a happy Black History Month for the rest of his life.

By the end of June, months after his win and weeks after the release of his successor’s album BERNARR, a discussion about him and the singers like him was already trending on Twitter. It began with a post about how one can be both a global pop star and still embrace R&B, stating that both genres can co-exist and not take out one for the other. It cited a list of singers from Whitney to Michael, Beyoncé, Janet, Mariah, Diana, Donna, and SZA. The replies that followed promptly disentangled that tweet, one of which was aimed directly at Bernarr and claimed that he never rejected his R&B roots, and those replying only wanted him to remain exactly where he was, as the one asking him to stop only wanted him to do R&B.

Six years prior, Tyler, The Creator, backstage at the Grammys following IGOR’s win for Best Rap Album, described the victory as a backhanded compliment. He disliked the term urban because, to him, it was a politically correct replacement for the n-word, the niche music industry’s binary for any song created by a POC that was “urban enough.” The same year, the Recording Academy voted to rename Best Urban Contemporary Album to Best Progressive R&B Album, the title of the trophy Bernarr would receive in 2026, while Republic Records announced the end to any department’s or artist’s use of the term urban. The Academy retained the language in the Latin category, and the changes that had occurred in the trophy’s engraving were enough for the label to stop considering the term. The phrases that fueled the racist folks’ fire were the same that the industry utilized to box its Black performers in.

Let’s take it back to 1920, where the vaudeville performer Mamie Smith’s “Crazy Blues” had been released in a crystal-clear OKeh recording, and it had sold approximately seventy-five thousand copies in the first month. It marked the first time the record men realized Black people would buy their fellow Black people’s music. The talent scout responsible for discovering Smith, Ralph Peer, would go on to create the first RPM catalogs, dividing them into popular, hillbilly, and race categories based on the customers’ skin color and not the music itself. Blues, Gospel, and Jazz, therefore, were all put under the same label, race, with no distinction besides who bought them.

The man who created a new standard for record charts and replaced race records with rhythm and blues could not read music. Jerry Wexler, a young executive at Billboard, got his colleague to change the trade journal’s Race Records chart to Rhythm & Blues in 1949. He later wrote in his memoir Rhythm and the Blues that “race was a word used by black people for themselves,” that “Race Records just didn’t sound right to me,” and that “I felt that we needed a name that reflected more enlightened times.” Both things he said were true—a white man named Jerry Wexler got to choose the name, and the name he chose embodied his own complicated feelings about his own prejudice. Four years later, Wexler would buy Atlantic Records and begin to make the music his charts once celebrated.

The flag kept getting changed, but the hand holding it remained the same. The chart that once spotlighted Mamie Smith became the Rhythm & Blues chart, the Soul chart, the Black chart, the R&B chart, the R&B/Hip-Hop chart—run up by the trade to hide the one before it, not once in a hundred years covering any of the artists it purported to honor.

Whitney Houston was booed at the Soul Train Music Awards by fans of the very music she was there to celebrate. They had decided that her music was too pop, that her image was too white, that this talented but provincial singer who’d sold tens of millions of copies of “I Wanna Dance with Somebody” simply did not belong to them. Decades later, Houston would tell the story on television, surprised and a little confused by the treatment, saying that she’d grown up listening to Soul Train just like everyone else. The most vicious rebuke of the “R&B audience” is that it really is an audience, that it wants what it wants and is not particularly interested in any explanation. No R&B artist, Houston seemed to be saying, gets to grow beyond its audience, to move from one niche to another, more accepting one, without selling out. It is the nastiest way of reading Houston’s piece, and it may be the correct one. A young black woman discovers there are two kinds of R&B: the kind that sounds like her own life, and the more popular kind, which is for everyone else.

MTV did not feature black singers for its first few years, a policy that ended when CBS threatened to pull all its shows from the network and “Thriller,” the single, came out in ‘83. Michael Jackson had seen his Off the Wall get snubbed by the Grammys the year before, getting one R&B trophy and no love from the pop categories, and he was ready to make the album of his lifetime. King of Pop would be the name he got to use when no one else would let him, a moniker so large no one could corral him. One of the summer posts noted this development as well, observing that Michael Jackson isn’t called the King of Pop for nothing and that the pop world was the exit from the smaller room the business had built for him.

Sony created Mariah Carey for the world, a pure pop and adult-contemporary singer, and they reacted negatively when she transformed towards hip-hop soul and added Ol’ Dirty Bastard to the remix of “Fantasy” in 1995. The most explicit expression of this thread’s inner tension was Carey criticizing the same system that putatively signed her. By naming the genres that a record would fall under before its release, a label determined which radio formats the song would target, what awards its author could receive, and how much money would be poured into the campaign. Artists who oppose the R&B genre are attacking the machinery that put Anita Baker and those who consume her music on the same platform. Janet Jackson sounded similar when she announced the name of the project Control, and Diana Ross scored significantly by jumping from the carefully tailored Chic productions to the pop charts as disco was taking off.

In the summer of 1979, Chicago radio stations hosted an event that drew a crowd of thousands to a local baseball stadium, where a group of boneheads set a stack of disco records on fire during the seventh-inning stretch. The dancefloor anthem that had conquered the hearts of millions had outgrown its home, and soon after, Donna Summer, its most renowned presenter, was exiled from the airwaves. This happened because the R&B community and radio stations could no longer accept such a project as part of their programming.

SZA posted the title of her first single on SoundCloud in 2014 with the note “Not R&B,” and she has been vocal about her thoughts on the matter ever since. The only reason her music is categorized under R&B is because of her skin color, and she resents the lack of versatility that the label implies. Justin Bieber has been creating R&B, folk, and other types of music and has continued to gain fame as a pop idol. Meanwhile, co-signing singers like Summer Walker and Ari Lennox are committed to the R&B genre, and the star has nothing against it. She means that it does not describe her music adequately, but that is the only problem. It highlights the most critical aspect of tension in this thread, in which the most exacting authorial intentions collide with the reluctance of radio jockeys, critics, and industry executives who automatically categorize Black singers as R&B vocalists.

Beyoncé paid tribute to Linda Martell, the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, on Cowboy Carter, her newest album, and allowed her to declare that genres are a “fun little concept,” simple in theory but frequently limiting in practice. At the same time, the star has struggled to fit into the much narrower confines of country music. For years, the Recording Academy has been reluctant to present her with the genre’s highest honor, the Grammy for Best Country Album, despite her being repeatedly nominated. It went to her album Cowboy Carter in 2025, making her the first Black artist to win the award, but she made it quite clear that the music was intended to be a Beyoncé album rather than a country one. Renaissance, the act preceding Cowboy Carter, was a house-inspired opus that drew heavily from the Black and queer dancefloor culture that had once devoured the ballpark. Again, Beyoncé proved that she could force an industry to reevaluate itself from within rather than simply exiting and starting over.

Bloom jogs through the funk and soul and rock and the pop-R&B of the early 2000s, fifteen tracks Bernarr recorded without a major label on his back and with a particular nod to the 1995 Waiting to Exhale soundtrack, which he made with his friend, and the real subject of his range, is a gospel-trained vocalist who’s been singing backup for Erykah Badu for ten years. When discussing his range, he talks about touching on genres that we created. He name-drops Linda Martell with the same kind of dismissive wink that Beyoncé does. He won inside Progressive R&B, the category Race Records got rebranded multiple times, and he wears the victory like a homecoming he feels he’s due.

Bernarr is right to name the system, and he is not the first to do so. Black singers have been doing it for decades, singing about the ways in which the label dictates the formats in which they can be heard, the radio stations to which they can sell their songs, the playlists they can land on, the space they have to maneuver within the greater music ecosystem. The credit, when it comes, goes one direction, and the criticism comes the other. A white singer can meander effortlessly through pop, folk, and soul, and be lauded for her range, while a Black singer who touches on the same styles will be told to narrow her focus, questioned about her inability to stay within the confines of R&B. To hear the former described as a “chameleon” is to miss the point entirely; the labels that want to sign her do so precisely because she can be shaped, molded, sound like everyone, and therefore belong nowhere. The people who feel cheated by the system are the ones who want the music to be bigger than the box first, and biggest of all are the ones who feel their own contribution to the tradition has been unfairly narrowed.

To feel cheated by the system is one thing. But to outgrow it and act like it never happened is another. Rihanna is an easy comparison to make; the way the marketing machine wants to file her under R&B for her skin tone, not her music, but a chameleonic pop star who refuses to be contained is a very different thing from a Black singer who has outgrown the R&B template. The problem with the latter is that she is still inextricably linked to the tradition, to a certain way of making music that can be frustrating to move beyond, even as one wishes to. The debt remains due, long after the annoyance at the accounting has passed. It takes its worst toll when the artist who most loudly proclaimed their departure from the box grows roots within, turns back around, and begins to guard it zealously.

Both the sense of debt and the feeling of being trapped are addressed in the very same statement, the one made by Bernarr to the journalist who asked him to discuss his growth as a songwriter, his range, this “versatility” that is so sorely coveted in these parts. He speaks of the need to engage with the different genres of Black music, to exercise this range he feels he has, and then proceeds to admit he hasn’t done it, not really. The next best thing, then, is these two records he has made since, the ones that finally let his R&B-adjacent ambitions, expressed so frequently in interviews, see the light of day.

The record he laid down right after that? It came out this past May, and he named it after his father, Bernarr Ferebee Sr. As a live audio engineer, his father’s credits include Whitney Houston, JAŸ-Z, Aretha Franklin, Stevie Wonder, and so many others to name. The very names the original thread used as proof that the pop world could embrace Black music and make it bloom were on the consoles in the control room of the man his son chose to name an album after. The coexistence the thread pretended to celebrate was right there in plain sight the whole time. The thread barely had to do any work. Bernarr simply put his father’s name on the spine and claimed the legacy in the name of his album.

The thread was not able to decide whether R&B is a home or a holding pen. It could not have, not while it was circling the word. The word needs to be both. The century turning on the phrase turns on the word itself, on something that has been far more tightly held and administered by people outside the music than within, by talent scouts and chart compilers and award show administrators and A&R execs, who have had far more influence on how it might be renamed or retained than the artists who make the sound. Every iteration of the fight left the hand right where it needed to be for whoever controlled the word to continue to control it.

Bernarr won his Grammy without question, in a category that had existed for a century, but still, it took another man, another black man, whose ancestors once physically laid hands on Race Records charts, to ensure that he would not win it in any other category. What Bernarr did with the trophy was use it to reject the terms entirely, to lay claim to the tradition in the name of his father and pass it on to his contemporaries, those he named in his speech. The people who are yelling at each other on Twitter need not worry about a word. The century turns on the phrase turns on the hand that administers it, and the hands of people like Bernarr, who are able to take it back, one record at a time, and reclaim it for themselves.

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The strip club in the “Spend Dat” video is fictional, a place where bottle service doesn’t come with a bill at the end of the night, where the floor is all dancers and no bouncer at the door, where NeNe Leakes and Trina and Trick Daddy and Ball Greezy are summoned by the cash. It is a realm where money floats and never ends, and Caresha Brownlee, known as Yung Miami to the millions who have spent the summer with her, is the creative director of a concept she saves, her face, for the center of the piece, printed on a hundred-dollar bill in the place of Benjamin Franklin.

What she wants everyone who hears the song to do with all that money is spend it, and where it came from is the joke and the boast and the provocation. The hook names names and gives orders, a scammer and a booster both getting one shout and one command before the item is flipped, the Goyard bag on a boosting run already unzipped, its tags gone before it can cool. Boosting is shoplifting as an industry, scamming is fraud as an art form, the song names both and cleanses neither. J. White Did It has the curl of a guitar figure and the sigh of a piano in the pocket, a bounce light enough for a rooftop at noon, and Yung Miami has the sneer and the skip of a playground chant, her nasal, clipped delivery easy enough that it accompanied brunch all June, the booster’s manifestos riding on top.

India.Arie heard the same song everyone else did and took a different lesson. When someone asked her to boycott (meaning someone else sparked the conversation and not her), she declined the suggestion, and clarified that while she had not told people to stop playing the song, she did think that a track “accepted so widely” was “a sign of where we are as a culture,” and that was, she added, “just facts.” People could do what they wanted. She would do what she wanted. In a Substack post responding to the comment in full, she clarified her stance on the comment and the song, as another in a long series of thoughts on music as “pure frequency,” on lyricism as a means to get inside of people’s subconscious mind, on her own careful curation of what she listened to, as she curated what she ate. She would not, however, say the words to the title out loud.

India Arie The Soulbird Perch

CLARITY. COERCION. CELEBRATION!!

THANK YOU FOR WATCHING and LISTENING. Please leave your comments below…

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a month ago · 583 likes · 111 comments · India Arie

Take it with a pinch of salt, and you won’t be wrong, either. Songs teach. A hook drilled into the skull enough times becomes a habit, and a habit, unavoidably, turns into a thought before it becomes a requirement, and children know the words to things long before they understand what they’re asking of you. Parents have feared exactly this since records began, and they have not always been wrong. Her reading of it is complicated by the provocation of the premise, the implication that she hears a broke public in that hook, a public that has fallen for scamming, and she blames the fall, but the arrow could just as easily be pointed the other way. No one wrote this to ruin a content crowd, but it found one, and it played them the one story it knew.

It was money, and no song is responsible for that (nor we co-sign scamming); the recession had hollowed these pockets long before Yung Miami told them to spend, and the record only put voices to the feeling. To be broke in the summer of 2026 is not to be in a state, but to have a ledger with your name at the top, with jobs vanishing in slow, unremarkable increments and rents devouring paychecks in cities all over the country, with the formerly well-rounded suddenly underwater on a down payment. Songs about overcoming this specific set of circumstances didn’t appear from nowhere, they didn’t materialize with some kind of secret knowledge of the times, they bloomed where the ground had opened up, and the depression had its own movies, with penthouse parties and champagne tastings in every lobby, the 2008 wipeout set rap up to have a decade of trap houses converted to storefronts and cornerboys rebranded as founders, and when the straight road stops paying everyone, the crooked one stops looking like a moral failing and starts looking like a lifeline, and “Spend Dat” is a song about lifelines.

None of which is new, either, from Yung Miami or from the long history of music. Cardi B put out “WAP” during the pandemic, and the conservatives had a meltdown, not only among the residents of the state but also among a congressional candidate, and rock and roll had its own moment of reckoning half a century earlier, then gangsta rap took over, all of which have been greeted by the same sense that youth is wasted on the young. Underneath it all, there is a certain amount of panic, not likely to be acted on, which is easy to overlook given the wailing about murder committed in the name of love. Those who really engage in murder are far less likely to engage in the same kind of self-purification, and a prison guard would be free to enjoy Pusha T’s verses about bricklaying while his commanding officer listened to “Ha” and agreed in principle to teach a seminar on the finer points of the university at nine in the morning. It is the provocation that matters, as does the ability to crawl inside the skin of someone who would have committed the crimes described in the song, and that has been the case since the parents first bought their children records that made it clear that sex was far more important than death.

Notice who gets to be lectured to, who gets to be an artist, a street philosopher, a chronicler of his corner of the world, and who gets to be the subject of lectures. A man who built his reputation on lies, women, and guns is praised as an icon, while a woman who counts the hundreds of men who tried to scam her and calls them out is a problem. No presidential commission was ever formed to determine what was happening to the moral fabric of the country while JAŸ-Z spent his career rapping about selling crack to his neighborhood or while an entire generation of males decided that dealing was a perfectly sensible idea. Women get asked to stop doing what they’ve been doing, and men get asked to do the same, but the reasons why are far more interesting, as an insight into why they behave as they do, with far less remorse. It might not be a detail, then, when it comes to this discussion, to point out that it isn’t a detail at all.

The men arrived to her defense and turned the defense into defense. Trick Daddy went on social media berating the women criticizing the song that they were old and raggedy and jealous, and dismissed a singer’s larger argument about how music affects children by reducing it to one about bodies, while Free and Dee-1 pushed back (Trick told her, “You ain’t shaped like her. You shaped like me”). Then came Uncle Luke, who built 2 Live Crew out of the filthiest shit the genre had to offer and ended up in federal court in 1990 fighting for the right to continue selling “Me So Horny,” now saying that India.Arie’s criticism was “Black on Black crime” and brushing off all the Afrocentric types forever seeking art carved in their own exact image. The man who went toe-to-toe with the United States government over the right to say as dirty as he wanted now stands sentinel over a Black woman for saying a dirty record gave her pause.

Months before “Spend Dat,” Caresha penned a letter to the federal judge who was about to sentence Sean Combs, begging him for leniency and describing the mogul as a “good man” who was “not a danger or a threat to the community.” This was the man a jury had just found guilty of trafficking women across state lines for his sex parties. This is the man Cassie Ventura and generations of other women have accused of raping them and beating them for years. India.Arie gave credit where credit was due and highlighted that letter midway through her screed about the record. Then the whole thing devolved into women arguing over whether women should be allowed to rap about money, which was the only question in that pile that wasn’t worth asking. There is nothing being harmed by twerking to “Spend Dat.” Signing your name to a letter asking a judge to go easy on a monster like that is another sort of credit, and it is the one we should lose sleep over.

There is more to what was said before, to this particular set of complaints, and it involves black women and the burden imposed on them for a century or more, to know that the best way to help the race as a whole was to present themselves in a certain way at all times, because any employer or policeman or politician was likely to notice if they didn’t. It was a matter of self-preservation, and it worked, which meant that it became a problem, and it got folded into the same set of directions given to women, in general, to cover up their legs, their necks, their brains, and it often came from black women, directed at other Black women, in the presence of white people who needed to be reassured that Black women were, in fact, one of the good ones. It is the same set of instructions given to Yung Miami to stand up in front of a microphone and do what she did, to be the answer to a hundred years of questions, asked by everyone except those who were supposed to know better.

And yet a community gets to ask what it wants. That’s not being a boycott, and painting everything questioning as policing is a means of avoiding the question. It is fair to ask what it means that the biggest woman-rap song of the summer is a boosting anthem, and it is fair to want more from the radio than instructions in how to spend stolen cash. The sole critique with India.Arie’s position is not that she asked questions, but looked at the culture that swallowed the “Spend Dat” fantasy and saw the listener in the wrong place. A three-minute song was hardly going to disenfranchise anyone. Capitalism and white supremacy and the men who serve both have done that, and the song is just the sound of people who have been economically exploited reciting to themselves on the walk to the job they can barely hold.

Listen again to the song, and the wish in “Spend Dat” turns out to be more specific than the disillusionment allows. The dream is not simply about money; it is about never having to explain the money—the Goyard on the lifter, the twenties, fifties, and hundreds all racing one another, the ten figures the man pulling who rides with her against the opps—all a single direction, the life where no one gets to ask questions regarding the source because there simply is not enough room for all the answers. Her face on the bill is the end of that particular road, the one where she stops chasing money and becomes the chased.

Somewhere in the explanations India.Arie has given in the article, the one that sticks is the one that traveled farthest, that she had come to terms with the fact that not everybody wanted to get free. Take her at her word, and the argument is easily divided. What she wants is to turn away from the wrong jukebox and onto the right, to curate her world so that she can eat the nourishing meal and not the cheap one, and it is all a freedom that costs nothing but self-discipline. What Yung Miami is selling can also be purchased, and no amount of self-discipline will unlock the front door before the rent is due on Friday. Thus, the entire argument is measured in the distance between what India.Arie has and the young and broke listeners she has defined as her contemporaries.

Therefore, the record is a reflection, but this entire long argument is reflected within it. Yung Miami didn’t invent a woman wanting to beat the fuck out of a house that robbed her before she could even vote, but wrote a hook that will not stop playing out of your head about it, drew her face all over that money, and then watched a broke summer scream it right back at her. The responsibility for that record lies far upstream of her. It is located in the system that makes gaming its ruggedness into the closest thing to catharsis so many of us can imagine. India.Arie is correct: America’s favorite song deserves to be looked at very closely. Look closely enough and “Spend Dat” is a fever. And a fever is your body’s way of telling you that it’s already fought something and lost. What your body lost was the ability to live in an economy that doesn’t make millions of us rhyme along to a hundred-dollar bill with someone else’s face on it every day and wish that face was ours.

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Today, the United States turns 250, and the official program has selected its songs, its fireworks budget, its fresh faces in bronze. The math of the birthday is always a negotiation. Subtract the founding fathers and the Declaration and the Massachusetts Bay Colony and the Pilgrims and the Mayflower, and the United States turns 250. But add the ship that first landed some twenty Africans in Point Comfort, Virginia, in 1619, and the country’s been around another 170-some years. Historian Gerald Horne reads 1776 as a slaveholders’ rebellion against England’s abolitionist turn and has found himself in increasingly solitary possession of that view. The historians who disagreed have seen fit to document the dispute, most recently in the pages of the 1619 Project, which finds itself under similar siege. Frederick Douglass needed no academic scaffolding to declare that the Fourth of July belonged to other people, that it was not for him to deliver eulogies or pronouncements. He spoke from the condition of bondage and asked his white audience if it might not also be for others, including the enslaved, a question that has been returning every July 4th since.

Long before any anthem was sanctioned, the colonies forbade Black song. After Stono River slaves escaped in 1739, heading for Spanish Florida and carrying drums into the fight, the South Carolina legislature banned the very sound of them in the Negro Act of 1740. They could not be taught to read, either, or to write; the latter prohibition would follow throughout the South in the wake of Nat Turner’s revolt. What survived the bans was the voice. The spirituals carried scripture, sorrow, and working songs into a single line, and “Wade in the Water,” as hundreds of thousands of Black singers have passed it down through generations, instructed its listeners in the methods of making a scent trail, all under the guise of pious address. In New Orleans, Congo Square hosted the one sanctioned opportunity for drumming, and the enslaved men and women filled it every Sunday, replacing the rhythms that had been banned elsewhere in the land.

Nine students set out from Nashville in 1871 to sing their institution into existence. Fisk University did not yet have much in the way of endowment, and its surplus Union barracks provided the main campus attraction, but the treasurer hired a small choir to take to the road and back pay off its debts; Fisk Jubilee Singers charmed their way from white churches and through Europe, singing the songs their parents taught them in bondage. Audiences that refused to put them up in hotels wept their way through “Steal Away,” and the Queen of England received them with open arms. Enough money returned from their voyages to construct Jubilee Hall, the first permanent building in the South for Black higher education, and a business model was born. The songs, which would come to be known as the sorrow songs, were performed for the children of slave owners, their proceeds funding what their fathers would not, and the custom has endured to this day.

Ma Rainey would later record in 1928 that she had spent the night “walking out all night with a whole crowd of women.” Her clothes were nice, her collar and tie turned out, and she told the law and the church to get their proof somewhere else. Bessie Smith sang of leaving her menfolks and her earnings and the gin mills that had taken her life, and her catalogs sold in numbers that kept Columbia Records at work through the 1920s. Angela Davis read these same catalogues as manifestos, the utterances of working-class Black women on the subjects of travel, sex, and violence, long before any movement made the words its own. None of these women addressed their audiences in white, but the blues queens performed for domestics and dockmen who wrote to the companies about the records, and the openness with which black performers discussed white women was the reason preachers everywhere blamed the blues for the war. Behind the sanctified front was a private life that no census taker had ever managed to document.

Columbia Records had no use for “Strange Fruit” in 1939, and so the small Commodore label got the song. Abel Meeropol, a Bronx schoolteacher, had seen a photograph of a lynching and written the poem that became a song, and Billie Holiday performed it at the end of her sets in Café Society in Greenwich Village, where the waiters could expect the whole room to fall silent at the finish. The club had only one light, and it shone on her face when the set ended, and there was no encore. “Strange Fruit,” performed by a white jazz singer in a basement club, had entered the national songbook, and the major labels had no use for it.

The growl in “Hound Dog” belonged to Willie Mae Thornton, who cut the song in 1952 and spent the next seven weeks climbing the R&B charts, from the number fifty spot to the top. She had kept the check for one performance, and the single had bought her a $500 house. Elvis Presley’s version, cut in 1956, made him a star and a fortune, and the hound dog had entered the popular imagination, its authorship claimed by a white teenager the way “Tutti Frutti” belongs to Pat Boone, the way swing music got its Benny Goodman, its Paul Whiteman, and the original black bands worked the chitlin’ circuit. Chess and the other indies paid flat fees for the songs their artists recorded, and publishing took care of the rest. Rhythm and blues got its name changed to rock and roll somewhere along the way from the chitlin’ circuit to the white radio stations, and the transition took place without the involvement of its black creators.

Medgar Evers was shot in his driveway in June 1963; three months later, a bomb killed four girls waiting to start Sunday school in Birmingham. Nina Simone sat down at the piano and wrote “Mississippi Goddam” in the hour, or so it took to reach the town. A show tune, by her own description, in which she wasted no time in naming Alabama and Tennessee and wasting no words at all on the effect of her words, which she knew the Southern radio stations would return to her in the form of promotional singles, cut in half. Sam Cooke was turned away from a Shreveport motel with his wife a few years later, and he wrote “A Change Is Gonna Come” with strings in the verse asking “if there is life,” a gospel doubt embedded in a pop song, and he was dead before the winter that produced the single. Both songs are safe now in the Library of Congress, their authors’ voices preserved as national treasures two generations removed from the events they summoned into being.

The idea for “What’s Going On” began on a tour bus when the Four Tops’ Renaldo Benson saw police in Berkeley beating anti-war demonstrators in 1969. Marvin Gaye finished it with his brother Frankie in mind, three years after his discharge from Vietnam, when the boy had little to return to but the family dinner table. Berry Gordy refused to release it, protest being a bad look for a hit factory in the business of white crossover, but Marvin Gaye did not stop recording until Motown relented. The single was the fastest-selling record the company had ever put out, and the album that followed detailed police brutality, ecology, heroin, and taxes in a series of tracks that Gaye layered his own harmonies over for the chorus. A record company that sent its artists to finish school and to learn the proper dances for white television got its most mature recording to date, and it nearly got buried by the label that made it.

A Chicago radio DJ went on a rampage on July 12, 1979, and tossed a case of disco records into center field during a game at Comiskey Park. The White Sox had played the doubleheader, and the second game was forfeited when the crowd surged onto the field. The records in the case were largely black, Latin, and gay, the music having conquered the country by way of the Loft and the Paradise Garage. Larry Levan played for black and brown gay dancers until the morning clubs closed, and Chicago’s own Warehouse had opened two years earlier, Frankie Knuckles stretching and editing the local sounds into something new. House music got its name from the neighborhood, or so one version of the story goes, and the city’s record companies had been busy in the interim turning “One Nation Under a Groove” into a worldwide hit. Funkadelic had declared “One Nation Under a Groove,” a promise that the counter-brief to racism had already appeared in the title. It was the dance floor anthem of 1978, but by 1981 it sounded like something coming from the basement, where it was reborn in both Chicago and Detroit. House music crossed the Atlantic in the early Eighties, where it conquered the warehouses of Britain.

The Bronx had something to say in 1982, and its voice was called “The Message.” Broken glass, the reeking stairs, rats in the living rooms and repossession notices in the mail all made their first national appearance in a seven-minute song performed by Melle Mel and Duke Bootee, narrated by a city that no longer seemed to want the borough to survive. Six years later, N.W.A. took the complaint to the next level, and an assistant FBI director responded by sending a letter to their record company complaining about the song “Fuck tha Police,” a correspondence unique in the annals of the bureau. The letter may well have been unprecedented, but it did not appear again, not even when the next generation of musicians used the occasion of a police killing to file its own brief with the nation. Kendrick Lamar’s “Alright” was performed by protesters in Cleveland, Ohio, at a police line still in evidence the summer it was released, and Lil Baby, an Atlanta rapper with no protest credentials at all, delivered “The Bigger Picture” the week of George Floyd’s killing and appeared in marches himself the following days, addressing both sides of the street in a single verse about being bigger than black and white. “It’s bigger than Black and white.”

Marvin Gaye slowed “The Star-Spangled Banner” during an exhibition game at the 1983 NBA All-Star contest. The national anthem was always likely to have a Black singer or two waiting in the wings, but the NBA was not prepared for what happened next, as Whitney Houston belted it out over the Persian Gulf armada in 1991. The recording subsequently appeared on the charts, and again after the attacks of September 11. It was another Black singer who brought “Formation” and her dancers in berets to the Super Bowl in 2016, and again the police unions were quick to file their disapproval. Beyoncé’s halftime show performance of “Lift Every Voice and Sing” two years later drew largely favorable reviews from the press, but it was the children’s choir that carried the words into the next morning’s op-ed pages, and the NFL began playing the song before kickoff in the wake of the league commissioners’ apology for the players who had protested the anthem during the 2016 season.

So the birthday playlist writes itself, if you let it. Put “Lift Every Voice” next to the Star-Spangled Banner and let the two anthems carry on their hundred-year argument. Put “Strange Fruit” next to the fireworks and “Mississippi Goddam” next to the Founding Fathers and let the voices speak for themselves. The fun records should go there too, if you can bear to hear “One Nation Under a Groove” among the protest songs. The catalog of the Black experience holds as much music about living as it does about dying, and an honest accounting requires both. What Black people have recorded for the last quarter millennium happens to be the fullest description of the country anyone is likely to find, including the writers who pretend to have authored it. The children of Stanton school grew up, and their descendants were still singing “Lift Every Voice and Sing” when the Super Bowl organizers put the band together, and the stadium lights went dark. They knew the words to the dark song and the dawn anthem, as did their mothers, and as do their children, still finding their way through the darkness after 126 years. Whatever it is the United States has prepared for its 250th birthday, the music is already there; it has been running for a considerably long time, and it has plenty left.

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If you are sick enough, or if someone dear enough to you dies, the people around you begin to manage how you do it. Put on the form, and nobody has to imagine the thing that’s gone. Keep your voice down, out where other people are dying too. Show gratitude.

Look more or less as you looked before. That instruction came to Audre Lorde in the fall of 1978, in a recovery room in New York, and, later, in the office of her breast surgeon, where a nurse informed her that one-breasted women were bad for the office morale. Lorde, the Black lesbian feminist poet, had just lost her left breast, and she’d spend the next two years writing The Cancer Journals, a spare volume of poems and diaries, in which she turned down that role. The Chicago rapper who records as Chelsea, earthsignchels, breaks that same instruction, from the other end. Her new single, “Daddy Died,” is four minutes of a daughter saying her father died, at full volume, with no regard for politeness or room etiquette.

“My daddy died.” The line was delivered as insipidly as if you were reading the forecast, never peaking, always returning throughout the song. Chelsea hangs everything else on the line, and it’s what she hangs that sets her elegy apart. “My daddy died, so I don’t take no shit from niggas.” With that rap, death immediately becomes a method of traversing the world. Beat later, it’s swagger and sexuality: “Fits sucking on my titty, screaming ‘fuck regime’.” Then, “Bad Carmel ting/Bad bad Billie Jean.” His legacy to her, in other words, is the hardness he leaves behind. “I get my way, then act up daddy taught me that,” and act up she does. Her father’s death takes the form of a bodily crisis only once, early on: “No life inside his body gave me heart attack.” As his body falls still, hers is pummeled.

Lorde came out of anesthesia feeling colder than ever before. But the word had already entered the space when she was out, “the gong in my brain of ‘malignant,’ ‘malignant,’” slicing through the drugs “like a fire hose trained on my brain.” She screamed. She begged, and the nurses—“very put out by my ruckus”—sent her back to her floor sooner than expected. In recovery, her pain manifested in howls and curse words, which earned her a shot and a shushed warning: “Be quiet, there are sick people here. ” I have a right to be here, she responded, because I’m sick too.

That injunction, “Be quiet, there are sick people here,” is the domestic counterpoint to the stand Lorde would make over the next two years. The world wanted her to fill the space in her bra with a wad of lambswool and pretend everything was fine, and the breast surgeon’s nurse articulated the expectation succinctly: to maintain a certain kind of office morale. Present yourself. Do not take up too much space with what happened to you. Chelsea has likewise received her versions of this prescription, and she issues them a clear directive. “I don’t give a fuck about them niggas/Don’t need to be cool with them.” She soon switches her aim: “I don’t give a fuck about these bitches.”

The war in both women is loud, and for both it takes shape as armed resistance. Lorde embraced it, without apology: “I am not only a casualty, I am also a warrior,” and was ready for anyone who flinched. When Moshe Dayan stood in the Israeli parliament with a patch over a vacant eye socket, she observed, no one suggested he wear an eye patch, no one worried that his appearance was bad for morale. The world treated him as a veteran, as a hero. But a one-breasted woman was expected to wear padding. Chelsea’s is a more raw fight, one that moves with little analysis. “Don’t test me, I’m prone to get filthy. “A moment later, “I brought a cannon you can hop in and explore.” His death made her a dangerous woman, and she invites you to feel it.

Despite the threats and braggadocio, however, Chelsea doesn’t maintain her shield. Midway through, the war turns inward, and she delivers a stark and raw confession: “It’s war up in my head at times.” A few lines later, as if discarding her bravado like shed skin: “I’m crying and shit.” Both the vulgar and the heartbreaking lines appear in quick succession. Even her vision of aliveness, in the wake of everything, sounds surprisingly tender: “Waterfalls and butterflies, the air I breathe is crisp.”

His death seeps into the body for both women and persists long after the initial crisis. For Chelsea, the truth is the most stark, arriving in the late minutes as she articulates what has ended him: “I scream bloody murder, cancer diagnosis/Every part of me’s been burned I’m just the ashes.” She casts herself as the leftover char, the residue of the fire already passed. Lorde bore the same phantom pain for years. On the third morning after surgery, she journaled, “the pain returned home bringing all of its kinfolk,” and one ache resided specifically in the phantom breast: “hurt as if it were being squeezed in a vise.” This absence never entirely leaves.

A fundamental distance separates the two women, a difference more resonant than any superficial similarity. Lorde is speaking from the crucible of her own dying. Cancer took up residence in her chest, forcing the removal of her breast. She meets the scar in the mirror, wondering how much time remains, what to do with it. Chelsea is speaking from the bedside of another’s deathbed; her father has the disease. The extent of her longing to bring him back is nearly cosmic: “I’ll sell like all my soul to get my daddy back.” And she cries out to the one who ordered the departure, “God has final say; he chose to remove access.” Lorde, in contrast, processes that same event of the loss of control as the ultimate form of freedom: “Who can ever have power over me again?” And still, despite her rage at God’s decree, Chelsea offers her father her own child’s gesture: “You lived a good life/1956 bullseye.”

A Reach for Recovery volunteer presented Chelsea with a packet containing a soft sleep bra and a lambswool insert resembling a pale pink breast. “You’ll never know the difference,” was the promised reassurance. Lorde, after four decades lived with the lost breast, knew better. “Sure as hell I’d know the difference,” she later wrote. Alone in her bathroom, she tentatively tucked the artificial breast into the hollow of her bra; it “perched on my chest askew, awkwardly inert and lifeless,” its wrong color peeking through, a form unrelated to any me she could imagine. Taking it out again, she observed, it felt “strange and uneven and peculiar to myself, but somehow, ever so much more myself.”

Both women finally find voice through dialogue. Lorde directs her voice outward to all those who are keeping secrets, who are silent about their pain, sharing her own hard-won realization: “My silences had not protected me. Your silence will not protect you.” Chelsea speaks into the silence of a person who can no longer hear her, the father who watched her grow up but can no longer watch her succeed: “You been seeing me on TV/I’m yo little rug rat/Really doing it, dad.”

It’s the report of a child delivered into an unhearing void. Neither woman silenced herself. Lorde continued to write until cancer claimed her, the warmth of her own blood a testament to life, while Chelsea’s message of her father’s death rings out, unanswered by the room around her.

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Rap is perhaps the ultimate revolutionary reincarnation, perhaps, of African-American music. Others far better than we have told this story (Jeff Chang in particular, in Can’t Stop Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation, published in France by Allia), and in the few lines that follow we will try to trace the flirtations and the successful marriages between jazz and hip-hop, between music and the word, between improvisers no doubt more curious and open than the rest and rappers ready to step outside their comfort zone.

But before we reach the early 1990s, the start of a certain golden age, we should remember that long before the first festive MCs bent on making us clap our hands and join the dance, such as Kurtis Blow (with “Christmas Rappin’” or “The Breaks”) or the Sugarhill Gang (with “Rapper’s Delight,” the first worldwide hit in the history of rap), their elders, in a sense, went by names like Cab Calloway. A flamboyant MC in his own way, an apostle of scat with an extravagant look that a Michael Jackson or a Prince would not have disowned, a first-rate hype man and a notorious party man, who from the early 1930s made the swing of jazz rhyme with the art of staging his words, loosening them up, popularizing a new form of slang and turning it into a weapon of mass seduction ready to set crowds ablaze.

In a wholly different vein, a quarter-century later, the great Langston Hughes, future inspiration to Gil Scott-Heron, recorded his poems over music composed, arranged and conducted by Leonard Feather and Charles Mingus. On “Weird Nightmare,” and across the entire second side of the original LP, his voice, underpinned by Mingus’s bass, was already connecting with the horn players: Jimmy Knepper on trombone, Shafi Hadi on tenor saxophone.

In 1992, on Hal Willner Presents Weird Nightmare: Meditations on Mingus, one of those albums that gathered musicians from every horizon (Geri Allen, Charlie Watts, Marc Ribot, Vernon Reid, Dr. John), producer Hal Willner brought together MC Chuck D of Public Enemy (a major group we’ll cross paths with again a little further into this “saga-mixtape”), Bill Frisell on guitar, Greg Cohen on bass and Michael Blair on drums for a powerful, aggressive reworking of “Gunslinging Bird,” or more precisely “Gunslinging Bird, or If Charlie Parker Were a Gunslinger, There’d Be a Whole Lot of Dead Copycats.”

What a shame that Charles Mingus died in 1979: a few more years on earth, and his attention would surely have turned to hip-hop. It is not even far-fetched to think that his formidable “Scenes in the City” of 1959, a kind of film for the ears in the spoken-word-and-jazz spirit of the record with Langston Hughes (who had, incidentally, helped the actor Lonne Elder shape his text), inspired not only Branford Marsalis, who recorded a remake of “Scenes in the City” very close to the original (this time with Wendell Pierce narrating), but also the duo Gang Starr (a few spoken words, by Lonne Elder or Wendell Pierce, hard to say, are sampled in their “Jazz Thing” of 1990). Impossible not to mention, too, Charles Mingus’s “Original Faubus Fables,” set with the explicit lyrics that had been scrubbed from the instrumental version Columbia released in 1959.

Speaking, reciting, narrating, talking over jazz was already fairly common by the end of the 1950s. “Poetry and jaaaaazz!” exclaimed Lenny Bruce in Psychopathia Sexualis. “Lenny Bruce is a social commentator, like the jazz musician,” wrote critic Ralph J. Gleason, while rightly noting that Bruce had honed his craft and his not-politically-correct routines for a penny in the jazz clubs. Who plays on Psychopathia Sexualis? Which jazzmen answer him in music? A mystery... We do know, on the other hand, who trades lines with Jack Kerouac on American Haikus: none other than Al Cohn and Zoot Sims. That session, supervised by the future producer of John Coltrane and Louis Armstrong, Bob Thiele, no doubt left a bitter memory for the bard of the Beat Generation, who broke down in tears at the end of the recording. Why? Because his two idols had packed up and left without a backward glance, and worse, without bothering to listen to what they had just played alongside the poet, with no rhythm section, for ten minutes, like a subtle game of calls (in words) and responses (in notes).

That same year, 1959, one of the greatest vintages in the history of jazz, George Russell cut one of his masterpieces, New York, N.Y., with a dream big band that included, among others, John Coltrane, Bill Evans, Bob Brookmeyer, Art Farmer and Milt Hinton (who had played on the first side of the Langston Hughes LP mentioned above). As an MC-narrator with staggering swing and diction, Jon Hendricks opened “Manhattan” in a duo with drummer Charli Persip. Spoken-sung words, a driving beat: tell us about the pioneers of rap! His legendary intro hails New York as so nice they named it twice. Another great figure of black talkin’, a charismatic singer and brilliant lyricist, Oscar Brown, Jr. cannot decently be overlooked. Proof of that is “But I Was Cool,” one of the gems of his first LP, from 1960 (hear in this song the seeds of the wild flights of a future Ol’ Dirty Bastard of the Wu-Tang Clan? why not), and the devastating “Driva’ Man,” same year, whose sublime lyrics, haunted by the horrors of slavery, he wrote and which Abbey Lincoln performed on the manifesto-record We Insist! Max Roach’s Freedom Now Suite.

In the lineage of Langston Hughes, Charles Mingus, Lenny Bruce and Jack Kerouac, the collaboration of LeRoi Jones, the future Amiri Baraka (a Muslim name for blessed Prince), with the New York Art Quartet is a great moment of interaction between poetry and (free) jazz, even if only Lewis Worrell on bass and Milford Graves on drums accompany LeRoi Jones (Roswell Rudd and John Tchicai stay silent), who with “Black Dada Nihilismus” wrote a poem whose bloody violence, between name-dropping and shock images, has lost none of its impact. They are right there, those “poems that kill” he called for.

With the jazz-soul crooner Lou Rawls, spoken word takes another form, calmer but no less engaged, which he uses to introduce, somewhere between social conscience and caustic humor, a few of his songs: thus “Southside Blues” (just before his cover of “Tobacco Road,” whose 1966 live version benefits from the audience’s participation, those “oh yeah!”s and those hand-claps that bring the whole crowd back to church); and likewise the monologue on “Dead End Street” (1967), in the same spirit. More striking still, his “Lifetime Monologue” of 1968, again produced by David Axelrod, where his deep, warm voice and singular phrasing settle into the drumming of the great Earl Palmer. And it’s a delight, finally, to find Lou Rawls twenty-eight years later on the soundtrack of The Great White Hype, where hip-hop held pride of place, for an unexpected version of the Cole Porter standard “I’ve Got You Under My Skin” in a duo with rapper Biz Markie, produced by Marcus Miller. It’s far from certain that the crooner and the rapper ever met in the studio, but you absolutely must hear Lou Rawls all but rapping over the bridge!

Poetry and jazz: this tradition is carried on by altoist Jackie McLean on “Soul,” where his sextet backs the poet Barbara Simmons over music by Grachan Moncur III. “Yeah man, soul is a trumpet, a trombone, a saxophone playin’, baby, eyes closed”: it was the first time the young woman, a close friend of LeRoi Jones who lived in Harlem, had found herself in a recording studio. “We’re with you, baby. Be beautiful. Don’t be afraid. Be soul,” Grachan Moncur III told her before they began to play. A blessing and a windfall for her, since she felt, rightly, that her poetry was shaped by jazz. The result: ten minutes of conversation in words-and-music mode, utterly delectable.

In 1969, the emergence of the Watts Prophets in Los Angeles, then the Last Poets in New York, is a key moment in our story. Take “Part-E, S” on the Watts Prophets’ first album: they pick things up exactly where LeRoi Jones / Amiri Baraka had left them five years earlier with the New York Art Quartet. Bobby Seale, Dizzy Gillespie, Charlie Mingus and Big Mama Thornton are all named in the same “poem that kills” by Emmery Lee Joseph Evans, Jr., who then added his flute by overdub, with Greg Edwards laying in his feverish saxophone.

Take, too, the very raw and very direct “There’s a Difference Between a Black Man and a Nigger,” delivered by Dee Dee McNeil, who accompanies herself on piano with Buddy Woodson on bass. This young woman who gives voice without restraint opened the way for many... In 1975, Quincy Jones, who saw in the Watts Prophets “essential figures of our culture, what Charlie Parker and Dizzy Gillespie were to the bebop revolution of the 1940s,” invited them for a poetry recitation in praise of the female body, “Beautiful Black Girl.” Backed by the very funky Wah Wah Watson on guitar, Louis Johnson on bass and Harvey Mason on drums, the Watts Prophets foreshadowed by fifteen years the marriage of jazz and hip-hop that “Q” would orchestrate. Then, in 1996, at the height of hip-hop’s golden age, the Watts Prophets reunited for a record, on which pianist Horace Tapscott appeared for a moving duo, this time with Anthony “Amde” Hamilton.

Three years after the release of the Last Poets’ self-titled debut LP, Jalal, still under Alan Douglas’s supervision, recorded under the pseudonym Lightnin’ Rod the now-cult Hustlers Convention. On “The Cafe Black Rose” he speak-sings, all but raps, over a funky groove laid down by an astonishing band assembled for the occasion: Buzzy Feiten on guitar, Neil Larsen on keyboards, Gene Dinwiddie on saxophone, Phillip Wilson on drums. Was Hustlers Convention a blaxploitation record? There’s no doubt a touch of that.

Just as important and probably even more decisive for our story, Gil Scott-Heron was launched in 1970 on Bob Thiele’s label (see the sessions with Jack Kerouac), Flying Dutchman. “A book of poetry he had written landed on my desk,” the great producer recalls in his autobiography, “and he turned up, as if by chance, the same day, to tell me that ‘someone who had recorded Jack Kerouac and John Coltrane couldn’t be all that bad.’ That was all I needed to hear from this authentic spokesman for his militant community.” After a first LP of poetry backed by two percussionists, in the Last Poets vein, Bob Thiele decided to add a real rhythm section to Gil Scott-Heron’s texts and songs (Ron Carter and Bernard Purdie, no less), harmonic support, and various guest soloists, including Hubert Laws on flute. Comparing the two versions of “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised,” recorded a year apart, lets you gauge the speed with which the “new black poet” (the subtitle of his first album) shaped his style, before finding in keyboardist Brian Jackson the ideal alter ego to develop his art. A notable influence on so-called “conscious” rappers, Gil Scott-Heron tugged the ears of those who found no favor with him on “Message to the Messengers,” in 1994.

Among Gil Scott-Heron’s true disciples, the leader of the Disposable Heroes of Hiphoprisy, Michael Franti, a rapper but also a singer (like his model), who on “Music and Politics” calmly set the record straight in a duo with jazz guitarist Charlie Hunter, in 1992 (he was certainly not the one Gil Scott-Heron would address two years later with his Message to the Messengers).

Let’s go back to the early 1970s and pause for a moment on a true cult record, Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse by Eugene McDaniels, a laid-back soul man of the sixties (he recorded then under the name Gene McDaniels) turned committed singer at the dawn of the seventies. The best-known song on Headless Heroes of the Apocalypse is no doubt “Jagger the Dagger,” sampled more than once by A Tribe Called Quest in 1990, but let’s confess our weakness for “Supermarket Blues,” where McDaniels’s phrasing and his subtly incantatory style throw into relief a supermarket trip gone wrong, the narrator floored and racially abused by an old woman. The whole thing carried by the groove of his rhythm section: Gary King on bass and Alphonse Mouzon on drums.

No less an agitator at heart, director and actor Melvin Van Peebles made his first film in 1971, the chaotic and provocative Sweet Sweetback’s Baadasssss Song, which would open the way, unintentionally, to the blaxploitation movement. On the soundtrack, one track astounds by its invention, speak-sung by Van Peebles as if in shock, propelled by members of Earth, Wind & Fire, funky, riddled with strange chords and textures, police sirens and train noises: “Come On Feet Do Your Thing,” a small masterpiece of blazing inventiveness.

The concept albums Cannonball Adderley and the sextet of his brother Nat Adderley produced with David Axelrod in the early 1970s have the merit of resembling nothing else. On Soul Zodiac, narrator Rick Holmes runs through the traits of each astrological sign, and “Aries” already “sounds” like rap; on “Psalm 54,” from Cannonball Adderley Presents Soul of the Bible, the first chorus, before Cannonball’s on alto saxophone, is a spoken-sung psalm. These records did not, in the end, find favor with David Axelrod’s ears, but you can hear in them some of the early signs of the rap that would be practiced twenty years later.

Even more than his fellow altoist Cannonball Adderley, saxophonist Gary Bartz is one of the jazz figures venerated, which often means sampled, by the hip-hop community. Four tracks in our selection sum up this fascination well: the touching “I’ve Known Rivers,” inspired by a Langston Hughes poem of the same title, captured live at Montreux in 1973 with his Ntu Troop; the astonishing, futuristic “Dozens (The Sounding Song)” of 1974, where Gary Bartz lines up rhymes like a true proto-rapper, the title itself echoing the dozens (or dirty dozens), the verbal jousts in which insults were traded in the Black communities of America’s ghettos; “Incident,” from an album that is also a sample mine, where Bartz speak-sings while “answering himself” on alto sax over a hypnotic groove James Brown would not have disowned; and, finally, “Passage, Part I,” later (1994), which seals his true encounter with rap, in the person of Ransom, whom we’ll also find around the same period on the records of Gary Thomas (in both cases, the superlative drumming of Dennis Chambers makes the difference). “Passage, Part I” appears on an unjustly overlooked concept album by the altoist, where we find, certainly not by chance, a certain Jon Hendricks.

Back to 1974 with Eddie Jefferson, one of the fathers of vocalese, the art of writing lyrics over themes and solos. The eight minutes and forty-six seconds of his formidable cover of Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” earn their place in our selection, because they opened unheard-of perspectives for future rappers, with that way of bouncing words off the rhythm, of making them ring like notes. And that gift of gab too, that larger-than-life personality, foreshadow the patter and charisma of rap’s pioneers.

In a more intimate mode, the poet and spoken-word artist Camille Yarbrough, long forgotten, was rediscovered through the grace of sampling at the end of the 1990s, when her one and only album was reissued on CD for the first time. It closed with “All Hid,” a striking track where her words became one with her musicians (among them Cornell Dupree on guitar and Linda Twine on clavinet), where a certain frenzy vied with a held-back anger, over one of the most insistent looping basslines. In a very similar aesthetic, the writer, poet, academic and activist Nikki Giovanni made a record of poetry and jazz-funk in 1975, backed on “Seduction / Kidnap Poem” by the best New York sidemen of the moment: Cornell Dupree, Richard Tee, Steve Gadd, Gordon Edwards, that is, the legendary group Stuff at nearly full strength, plus David Newman on tenor saxophone. Another tenor titan, Benny Golson, always on the case, made “The New Killer Joe Rap” in 1977, based on his famous theme “Killer Joe.” For once he had set aside his fetish instrument. Was he rapping, though? No, but Ted Lange played the caustic narrator. Worth discovering.

To grasp the importance of speak-singing in popular culture, and even more that of the best African-American disc jockeys, listen to “The Rocketship,” recorded in 1979 by the Philadelphian Jocko, who had an enormous influence from the 1960s on Jamaican DJs, who in turn played a crucial role in the birth of rap (DJ Kool Herc, one of the pioneers of the turntables, was of Jamaican origin). Jocko, whose vocal style is very close to the first rappers’, popularized lines casting himself as the musical ace from outer space, back on the scene with his record machine. “The Rocketship” will surprise more than a few, even forty years on.

In 1978 the Brecker Brothers released their most popular album, Heavy Metal Be-Bop. Some tracks, “Inside Out” (long the theme of Jazz à FIP) or “Some Skunk Funk” (studied in every jazz school), have become so famous that they all but eclipse “East River,” the only studio track on the record, rapped, or nearly, by bassist Neil Jason with the help of the mysterious Kash Monet. Recording “East River” cost more than the Roslyn concerts that formed the basis of the album, but this funk-rock and proto-rap treat was a surprise hit in England. Proto-rapper Randy Brecker liked to play the part, perhaps without knowing it, from the early 1980s. His droll “Don’t Get Funny With My Money” brought back to fashion the unbridled style and patter of a Cab Calloway or a Louis Jordan. In 1990, by adopting the phrasing and delivery of the notorious funkster Larry Blackmon (of the group Cameo), himself influenced by rap, “It Creeps Up On You” proved that fun (humor) was a component of his world. Two years later, having reformed the Brecker Brothers with Michael, “Big Idea,” composed four-handed (plus the hands of producers Maz & Kilgore), was jubilantly anchored in the modernity of the hip-hop sound, with its funky beats and sampled voices. On the same record, “On the Backside” extended the pleasure with scratch effects and, as if in the background, all their hard-bop heritage. The same goes for “Scrunch,” from their next album, Out of the Loop (a very hip-hop title in spirit), released in 1994.

Ten years earlier, Michael Brecker had toured in Herbie Hancock’s Rockit Band, named after his worldwide hit “Rockit,” a revolutionary track that it would be quite wrong to call “commercial,” for nothing in its form could have predicted such enormous success. Future Shock, the album it came from, sold more than a million copies in the United States. As reluctant as his record company was to release the track, Herbie Hancock himself wondered who could possibly like this unclassifiable music, accompanied by a video clip whose at-once avant-garde and catchy side he had not, by his own admission, immediately appreciated. (Along with Michael Jackson and Prince, Herbie Hancock was, thanks to this clip, one of the first African-American artists to air on the music channel MTV.) Of the nascent hip-hop culture, this being 1983, he skipped over rap, dwelling only on those new rhythms and new textures, embodied by the pioneering scratcher Grand Mixer D.ST and the group Material, whose two pillars, Michael Beinhorn and Bill Laswell (also the track’s producer), appear on “Rockit.”

“Rockit” sowed confusion among the world’s jazz critics. Yet beyond its formal radicalism, it’s the melody that carries everything, and the use of scratches, which for many were unheard-of; it took a little time to understand, and above all to accept, that turntables had been turned into an instrument... Hancock followed up “Rockit” in 1984 with “Hardrock,” and you can clearly hear the influence of these two tracks on other artists, such as saxophonist Bill Evans (listen to “Let the Juice Loose!” on his lone Blue Note album). Ten years later, under the Urbanator banner, a project steered by Lenny White, Michał Urbaniak and Al MacDowell, Hancock is one of the two features, with rapper Muckhead, on a clumsy but entertaining jazz-hip-hop cover of his jazz-funk standard “Chameleon.”

Then, in 2002, nearly twenty years after his first sonic breakthroughs with Grand Mixer D.ST, Hancock teamed up again with a turntable virtuoso, Rob Swift, a member of the turntablist collective X-Ecutioners, on “This Is Rob Swift” (what a tribute!), recorded with keyboards, turntables, bass (Bill Laswell) and drums (Jack DeJohnette), proof that this eternal seeker has follow-through. That same Rob Swift invited Bob James in 2005 to lay a few Fender Rhodes notes on “Terrorism” (from an album heavily marked by the Bush years). He had also taken part in the lone album by the Aesop Quartet (the fantastic “Cuttin’-N-Scratchin’,” in osmosis with Ernest Dawkins, Jeff Parker, Rollo Radford and Hamid Drake) and pulled off an incredible exercise in style on the concept CD Bird Up: The Charlie Parker Remix Project, scratching note for note the theme and all the solos (!) of “Cheers” (X-Ecutioners style), cut in 1947 by the genius altoist, in order: Parker, Wardell Gray, Dodo Marmarosa and Barney Kessel. Breathtaking.

The year of You’re Under Arrest, on the cover of which, machine gun in hand, he plays the gangsta jazzman, Miles Davis takes part in the anti-apartheid manifesto-record supervised by the rocker Little Steven and producer Arthur Baker. His trumpet haunts “Let Me See Your I.D.,” rapped, among others, by Duke Bootee and Melle Mel of Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, so this is the first time he rubs shoulders with MCs, and crowned with spoken-word interventions from Gil Scott-Heron, a shrewd commentator on the distress of the South African people. Seven years later, Miles Davis is no longer of this world, but... patience!

In 1986, alto saxophonist Steve Coleman and his Five Elements made “Change the Guard,” a track that proves his attachment to the sounds of the street. Very funky, rapped by Coleman himself, electrifying to the hilt, “Change the Guard” opens a thrilling adventure. In 1987, the futuristic “Tydor’s Bane” drove the point home alongside Geri Allen and her keyboards: the spirit of James Brown was there, but the Coleman style was already recognizable among a thousand, with those lyrics chanted-rapped by DK Dyson, Cassandra Wilson and himself. That style would soon be labeled M-Base, and in 1990, with Rhythm People (The Resurrection of Creative Black Civilization), the questing altoist made a masterpiece on which “No Conscience,” again rapped by Coleman, was one of the high points. But the best was still to come, with one of the first real encounters between rap and jazz: Steve Coleman and Metrics. First with a mini-album where five lyricists, that’s how the altoist (the Wu-Tang cap forever screwed onto his head) referred to his rappers, alternated at the mic depending on the track: Utasi, Sub-Zero, Shahliek, Kokayi and Black Thought (of The Roots). “Be Bop” opened the festivities and, as its title suggested, mixed the old and the modern, the swing of the 1940s with the groove of the 1990s. Over a typically “M-Base” rhythm, Utasi and Sub-Zero rose to the level.

Harder to find, all but impossible in fact (but the urge to flag its existence was too strong), “Serve & Protect (Guard),” from the non-commercial single We Beez Like That!, is a breathtaking three-way conversation without a net between Steve Coleman (alto sax), Kokayi and Sub-Zero, who switch between rap and beatboxing. This out-of-the-ordinary trio foreshadowed the now-legendary concerts at the Hot Brass (today the Trabendo), in March 1995, during which Steve Coleman and Metrics swept the audience into a new dimension: “Swept away by the breathtaking utterance of an unheard-of trio, lyricists of the extreme, as one says of mountaineers or surfers. Like an endless swell, their little urban theater strikes and rebounds off the music (Kokayi’s staggering ‘chorus’ on ‘Hyped’). Here they are at last, these modern griots, admitted to the high spheres of improvisation. Musicians to the very tips of their words. ‘Off-the-top words’ that seem to spring up raw, yet so precisely that one tells oneself these men are reinventing, in their own way, a kind of automatic writing dear to the Surrealists. Give the word back to the music? Steve Coleman manages it here in the most natural way in the world,” ran the liner notes of the original effort.

Determined to fold the art of rap into his music and not merely ride the trend, Steve Coleman took the most brilliant of his lyricists, Kokayi, to record his next album in Cuba. “The Seal (Elekoto Agayu)” proved, if proof were needed, that Kokayi was also an authentic improviser, able to distill his rhymes over tempos unusual for the average rapper.

In the wake of Steve Coleman and the M-Base movement, whose contours were not so easy to define, trombonist Robin Eubanks delivered a powerful “Karma” under funk and rap influence (samples of James Brown and Public Enemy, with Marvin Smith, alias Smitone, in the role of the “Assistant Rap”), while the “post-Metrics” groups such as Opus Akoben (with Black Indian, Kokayi and Sub-Zero, the three mic-devourers of the Metrics) or Quite Sane (led by the bassist of the Five Elements, Anthony Tidd) carried on spreading the good word. Twenty-five years later, Kokayi is now an integral part of Steve Coleman’s universe: still a lyricist and more lyrical than ever, he creates the event on the recent double live project by the Five Elements, recorded at the Village Vanguard (listen to “Rumble Young Man, Rumble”).

The very year, 1994, that the Metrics’ one and only studio EP appeared was also the year of the release of the second record, an EP too, by The Roots, a group Steve Coleman held in high esteem. He played, in fact, on half the tracks, and “Mellow My Man” opened still more perspectives for the fruitful collaboration between rappers and improvisers, even if Coleman, Graham Haynes (trumpet) and Josh Roseman (trombone) only played in section, taking no solos. Likewise on “Datskat,” released a few months later, which remains one of the gems of one of the best rap records of the 1990s. In 2002, the musicians of The Roots, always ready to experiment, invited (a rare thing in hip-hop) two guitarists to open up, James Blood Ulmer and Jef Lee Johnson, who cracked open an avant-garde breach on “Water,” notwithstanding a mix that kept up a kind of joyful confusion of the senses. And as proof that their music spread across borders, you’ll find rapper Black Thought and drummer Ahmir Thompson on the very “Colemanian” “Pfat Time” by English saxophonist Steve Williamson, and on “Relax” by former Ornette Coleman bassist Jamaaladeen Tacuma.

In 1989, fourteen years after inviting the Watts Prophets onto Mellow Madness, Quincy Jones with the legendary instinct was “Back on the Block,” back in the neighborhood (i.e. tuned to the street), and he rolled out a real red carpet for rappers. On “Jazz Corner of the World,” the two now-old-school virtuosos Kool Moe Dee and Big Daddy Kane traded the mic to introduce an impressive roll call of jazz superstars: James Moody, Miles Davis, George Benson, Sarah Vaughan, Dizzy Gillespie (whom Big Daddy Kane pronounces “Gillepsie”), Ella Fitzgerald and Joe Zawinul, each taking a little solo. The whole thing mixed dazzlingly, with sampled voices as a bonus: Charlie Parker’s and that of the Birdland MC Pee Wee Marquette (the group US3 would lift the idea for their hit “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia)” in 1993). Less well known, because it’s drawn from a minor “Q” album, the version of “Ironside” superbly rapped by Talib Kweli (who name-checks Dizzy Gillespie, applause, and Miles Davis) is worth the detour.

1989 also marked the arrival of a hip-hop duo set to change the game for good, Gang Starr: Guru on the mic, DJ Premier on the turntables and the production. From their very first album, “Jazz Music” underscores, through Guru’s words, their true passion for this music, his verse tracing jazz’s migration up the rivers and into the big cities, to Chicago and to the Apple, the scene their forefathers knew, the music with all the razzamatazz and the swing that made you tap your feet.

In 1990, a kind of remake of “Jazz Music” appeared on the soundtrack of Mo’ Better Blues, the jazz film by Spike Lee, himself the son of a jazzman. With Kenny Kirkland on piano and Robert Hurst on bass, “Jazz Thing,” peppered with clever samples (Thelonious Monk, Louis Armstrong...), remains to this day one of the finest tributes to jazz ever made by an MC and a DJ, among the greatest in the history of hip-hop.

From then on a new current was launched, and Guru parted ways for a time with DJ Premier to throw himself into the Jazzmatazz project, at the height of the acid jazz wave. It would yield three volumes, but the one that made the most “noise” was obviously the first. “Jazz is real, and based on reality,” he said. And on Volume I he invited Donald Byrd (on “Loungin’”) and Roy Ayers (on “Take a Look at Yourself”), two of the jazzmen most beloved, and sampled, in the hip-hop world. On the final installment of the Jazzmatazz trilogy, Guru also invited Herbie Hancock, who made his clavinet sing on “Timeless.”

The mid-1990s is also the era when jazzmen drop a solo here and there, like Grover Washington, Jr. with DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince (better known as Will Smith), who is a fish in water on “The Groove (Jazzy’s Groove) Radio Version.” Sometimes the jazzmen aren’t invited in the flesh but sampled onto wax: yes, that really is Miles Davis’s “Fat Time” inside “Nuttin’ Nis Funky” by the Oakland combo Digital Underground, very cleverly lifted and rerouted. It’s all there: Marcus Miller’s growling bass, Mike Stern’s meowing guitar and Miles’s stinging trumpet. Two years later, in 1992, Miles was no longer of this world, but his posthumous record Doo-Bop still created an event on release. For his umpteenth metamorphosis, the trumpeter had begun working with producer Easy Mo Bee, and the result, even if it disconcerted some at first (but which Miles record didn’t, etc.), has aged with a certain panache. The proof is “Blow.” Had fate granted him a little more time, not only would Doo-Bop have been more fully realized, but we would surely have seen the trumpeter onstage trading with rappers. In 2007, sixteen years after his death, an official (and rather exciting) remix of “Freedom Jazz Dance,” titled “Freedom Jazz Dance (Evolution of the Groove),” blended his trumpet and especially his raspy voice with contemporary beats, with a rap from Nas thrown in for good measure.

The 1990s thus embody a certain golden age, the decade when jazz, that timeless music, and hip-hop, then in its prime, often got along well. Sampling went on full tilt, and all these borrowings were declared to avoid resounding lawsuits. Imagine: rapping over Quincy Jones’s “Soul Bossa Nova” without asking his permission! Luckily his lawyers were in the know, and Dream Warriors’ joyful “My Definition of a Boombastic Jazz Style” could quietly become a hit. Great inspired jam sessions were also organized (a nod to Norman Granz’s): on the album Heavy Rhyme Experience: Vol. 1, the English combo The Brand New Heavies made jazz, funk and hip-hop rhyme, calling in The Pharcyde, Main Source, Black Sheep (hip-hop groups little known to the general public but first-rate) and Guru, his tempo as impeccable as ever and his words as honed as ever on “It’s Gettin’ Hectic.”

Oddly lumped in at the start with the acid jazz movement, Meshell Ndegeocello masterfully blurred the lines between jazz, funk and hip-hop on her first masterpiece, Plantation Lullabies, herself moving, depending on the track, from a soul-leaning, deeply sensual singing to a thoroughly convincing rap delivery. On “Step Into the Projects” she mixes the best of these worlds with Joshua Redman on tenor saxophone and Geri Allen on piano. A great classic.

If everything on Innercity Griots, Freestyle Fellowship’s second album, had been in the vein of “Inner City Boundaries,” there’s no doubt the comparison with the first Metrics EP by Steve Coleman would have been made, all the more so since this overlooked record came out a year earlier. MC Aceyalone was very promising but, like many of his peers before and after him, he quickly fell back into the ranks. 1993 was also the year of the XXL success of US3, a hip-hop combo whose Blue Note bosses had given carte blanche to lift whatever they wanted from the label’s archives. Not a single sample, except for the nasal and so-characteristic voice of Pee Wee Marquette, already mentioned above in connection with Quincy Jones’s “Jazz Corner of the World.” Which didn’t stop the funky, entertaining “Cantaloop (Flip Fantasia),” based as everyone knows on Herbie Hancock’s “Cantaloupe Island,” from setting radio and the clubs alight.

Still in 1993, the third volume of the excellent compilation series The Rebirth of the Cool unveiled a La Funk Mob remix of MC Solaar’s classic “Caroline,” shot through with a blazing saxophone solo by Guy Harvey, cleverly taken apart and put back together by producer Hubert “Boombass” Blanc-Francard. MC Solaar and jazz: the most attentive had already noted the connection on his first album, Qui sème le vent récolte le tempo, and even more on the CD single of “Victime de la mode,” whose track no. 4 was “Love Supreme,” a brief one-minute-twenty instrumental, a funky variation on John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme. It was perhaps a detail for some, but for others it meant a great deal: it meant you were free to be there, at the right time, trying to bring together two pairs of ears not always as reconcilable as one might think: those of jazz lovers and those of hip-hop fans. MC Solaar again, on the charity record Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool (proceeds went to the fight against AIDS), duetted with Ron Carter, who had just set his bass vibrating on A Tribe Called Quest’s masterpiece The Low End Theory (on the track “Verses from the Abstract”). With MC Solaar the understanding was no less perfect, and they met again in 2008 on the stage of the Théâtre du Châtelet, invited by Roy Hargrove and Hard Groove.

The compilation Stolen Moments: Red Hot + Cool held other great moments worth the “jazz meets hip-hop” label: “Flyin’ High in the Brooklyn Sky” by Digable Planets with Lester Bowie on trumpet and Wah Wah Watson on guitar, or “This Is Madness” by Umar Bin Hassan and Abiodun Oyewole with Pharoah Sanders. On the bonus CD of the first pressing, Branford Marsalis covered John Coltrane’s A Love Supreme in an acoustic quartet; a year later, in 1994, the year of Steve Coleman’s first Metrics, his ambitious Buckshot LeFonque project gave him the chance to collaborate with DJ Premier of Gang Starr, on a record where funk, soul, spoken word, raggamuffin and rock had as much room as rap.

On the instrumental “Some Shit @ 78 BPM (The Scratch Opera)” and on “Breakfast @ Denny’s,” DJ Premier nonetheless staked out his territory with all his virtuosity. Music Evolution, the second Buckshot LeFonque album, came out two years after the first. Hip-hop production techniques served once again to (re)showcase the musics Branford Marsalis had grown up with, like that of James Brown (“James Brown (Part I & II),” with David Sanborn and a great turn from DJ Apollo). Again at Bernard Loupias’s mic, Branford Marsalis admitted he had changed his mind about rap, which he barely took seriously at first, for one simple, good reason: “The music changed. With Public Enemy...” Very few had noticed, but Branford Marsalis had worked with Public Enemy and their producers, The Bomb Squad, in 1990, and the single of “Brothers Gonna Work It Out” contained an instrumental version of “Fight the Power” (the fantastic rap song from the credits of Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing) renamed “Powersaxx,” where Marsalis, through the grace of overdubbing, unspooled the blazing spirals of his Coltranian soprano.

Because he recorded for the same label as Steve Coleman, JMT (Jazz Music Today), and because his “urban” music buzzed with jazz and funk intertwined, Gary Thomas was wrongly lumped in with the M-Base movement. A member of Jack DeJohnette’s Special Edition and, for a time, a Miles Davis sideman, this tenor saxophonist with a harsh, powerful tone made absolutely fascinating records in the 1990s, and his way of confronting the most demanding forms of jazz with the art of the MCs had no equivalent.

Between 1991 and 1997 too few of us let ourselves be swept up by his records, but thirty years on the shock is still strong when you dive back in. Before anyone else, Gary Thomas gave MCs a prime place in his music, as “First Strike” shows, where the “rap solos” of Joe “BMW” Wesson and Gary Thomas himself (both clearly under the influence of Kool Moe Dee, Rakim,Melle Mel) sit naturally alongside those of Thomas (on saxophone) and Mulgrew Miller (on piano). Dennis Chambers, freshly teleported in from the P-Funk Galaxy, is hallucinatory in his polyrhythmic madness, as he proves on “The Kold Kage,” where Gary Thomas is once again on the mic. On “The Godfather Waltz / Just a Villain,” the flow of the MCs (including Godfaddah, No Name, Jovanotti, who raps in his native Italian, Pork Chop and Ransom, found again on the Gary Bartz record mentioned above) carries the music into a gangsta-rap darkness, reinforced by the production and sound design, visibly inspired by the records of Dr. Dre and Ice Cube. In 1997 on “Treason,” the “rap artists” No Name and Pork Chop are still there, soloists as essential as organist George Colligan.

An “official” figure, this time, of the M-Base movement, alto saxophonist Greg Osby also brought a few touchstones to the jazz-and-hip-hop edifice that, by the mid-1990s, was starting to look impressive. It all began in 1991 with a 12-inch maxi-single (or CD single, take your pick), “Man-Talk (Club Mix),” which reflected his attraction to, and above all his knowledge of, the new forms of rhythmic culture in hip-hop, machine-generated but inhabited by innovative grooves (though often, early on, around the mid-1980s, sampled from James Brown’s). Over the hypnotic beat of “Man-Talk,” the precise, pointed cut of Osby’s phrasing worked wonders.

In 1993, the release of the album 3-D Lifestyles was a real shock: here at last was that end-of-century jazz record truly produced like a hip-hop opus, without concessions, without clichés, inventive, daring, that could be played between a Public Enemy and an A Tribe Called Quest (Osby was, in fact, collaborating with one of ATCQ’s members, Ali Shaheed Muhammad, on “Flow to the Underculture (Hip Hop & Jazz),” a little jewel of invention featuring Osby’s swirling alto and Geri Allen’s sparkling piano), while “Mr. Gutterman,” inspired by Marvin Gaye (“the Legend,” dixit Osby), opened the album on a subtle Crusaders sample. The five MCs unspooled their storytelling art there, giving the track the feel of a striking short film. In 1995, Greg Osby this time invited a rapper, and not just any rapper, Shä-Key, to swing “Rocking Chair” in another direction. (One would dearly love to see Greg Osby and Gary Thomas return to recording, digging, why not, new jazz-and-hip-hop furrows.)

Meanwhile, on the other side of the Atlantic, the English saxophonist of Jamaican origin Courtney Pine delivered a magnificently produced album, haunted by hip-hop culture. On “In the Garden of Eden (Thinking Inside of You),” his generous, lyrical and frankly Coltranian tone (today we’d say spiritual) blended to fine effect with the beat programmed by DJ Pogo, built on a sample of Stanley Clarke’s “Desert Song,” where John McLaughlin’s acoustic guitar, set on a loop, curls delicately around the eardrum. Let’s cross the Channel, heading for Uzeste. And here is the Compagnie Lubat, Bernard Lubat, André Minvielle, Patrick Auzier, true enchanters of the rap phrasing that came from America. There’s madness in Scatrap Jazzcogne, whose very title perfectly sums up their approach. (No need to attempt ugly puns to try to capture their art; the peaceful battle is lost in advance against such free inventors.) Lubat too, like Big Daddy Kane, name-checks Charlie Parker and Dizzy (but when he shoots himself, the bullet is musette). And Minvielle, for his part, scats the legacy of Jon Hendricks, Eddie Jefferson, Parker (all in our mixtape-saga) and, of course, the Double Six (American rappers don’t listen to the Double Six enough) on “Mme Mimi.” It’s dizzying. Watch out, masterpieces ahead!

Let’s cross the Atlantic again, because things are bubbling in America: Jon Hassell (with the group Bluescreen) reinvents his famous Fourth World concept, this time roaming the streets of New York in search of new sounds and rhythms. “G-Spot,” which opens on a sample of Miles Davis’s “Honky Tonk” (one of his heroes), embodies that quest: it’s radical and funky, owes a great deal to hip-hop, the groove is as if crushed, and his winged trumpet meets the (soprano) saxophone of Kenny Garrett. Another trumpeter, M-Base pioneer Graham Haynes, son of King Roy, teams with the virtuoso DJ Logic, Jean-Paul Bourelly, Steve Williamson, Lonnie Plaxico and Fred Alias to send jazz back into the street, on the corner: you’ll have guessed it, “Mars Triangle Jupiter” sounds like an unreleased cut from Miles Davis’s On the Corner (1973), without ever feeling stuck in the past. No small feat.

The Pat Metheny Group in a jazz-and-hip-hop saga-mixtape? “Are you sure?” Yes, listen to “The Girl Next Door”: that programmed beat, those catchy chords, it resembles a bit what the Brecker Brothers were doing at the same moment; it may not be quite as memorable, but it’s a real success all the same (a breathtaking solo from the boss, followed by the calm trumpet of Mark Ledford), and it proves that the native of Lee’s Summit, Missouri, has always had an ear turned toward tomorrow. That same year, his hero Ornette Coleman invited Avenda “Khadijah” Ali to recite a poem of her own on “Search of Life,” a fairly rare attempt for him to include singing in his music (one remembers Asha Puthli on Science Fiction in 1972), and even, here, rap, since an MC also steps in (is it someone else, or Avenda “Khadijah” Ali by overdub? a mystery...). A wink, in any case, is sent to the Wu-Tang Clan through an inversion of their 1993 hit “C.R.E.A.M.” (Cash Rules Everything Around Me).

A tutelary figure for many rappers, the composer, jazzman, keyboardist and singer Weldon Irvine had a gift for releasing records that quickly became impossible to find, such as Weldon & The Poets, where, on “Prankster Gangster,” he takes wild pleasure in rapping himself, urging his guest MCs to stay polite: the word “fuck” gets bleeped when one of them says it (”Not on this record!” Irvine specifies). We love the contributions of keyboardist Don Blackman and saxophonist Danny Walsh.

And here is Nas again (see above, with Miles Davis), in 1998 with his father, cornetist and singer Olu Dara. The prodigy rapper had invited him onto his first record, Illmatic, a 1994 masterpiece if ever there was one. It’s hard to resist the swaying lilt of “Life’s a Bitch,” where the paternal cornet wraps calmly around the son’s rhymes. Nas put it well: jazz, bebop to rapping, it’s all the same thing, it’s a jungle, our world. Six years later he would work again with his progenitor, who in near-rap recounts the birth of his first child on “Bridging the Gap,” a blues-jazz-rap nugget set with an obsessive guitar riff he plays himself.

Between 1999 and 2003, the Chicago trumpeter Russell Gunn made a thrilling trilogy of albums. On the first two, DJ Apollo, noticed with Buckshot LeFonque, plays an essential role, adding his scratch work to the cover (perhaps even more successful than the original) of “The Blackwidow Blues,” one of the major tracks on the first Buckshot LeFonque, or to that of Thelonious Monk’s classic “Epistrophy,” where we notice Gunn Fu, a rapper with a doctored voice (Russell Gunn himself?) whose nasal timbre is inspired by Parliament’s famous Sir Nose, one of the many characters created by George Clinton, whose influence is even more evident on “The Critic’s Song,” from the third volume of the Ethnomusicology series.

Already crossed paths with on Graham Haynes’s “Mars Triangle Jupiter,” DJ Logic, a child of the Bronx, had given us “Project Logic” in 1999. At the turntables, his virtuosity matched perfectly the eclectic style of his guests. On “Flat As Aboard,” the sound of Vernon Reid (guitar), Casey Benjamin (alto saxophone) and John Medeski (organ) was inventively altered through his remarkable post-production work. DJ Logic, seen recently onstage at the New Morning with Patrice Rushen and Christian McBride, is one of the most musicianly DJs there is.

Another Chicago native, percussionist and A.A.C.M. member Kahil El’Zabar had also explored, under the name Juba Collective, the possibilities of jazz and hip-hop on his cover of Charlie Parker’s “Now’s the Time,” transformed alongside two rapper-scatters, Tree and Simeon, a poet, Tamara Love (who recites her text in French), a saxophonist, Ari Brown, and a keyboardist, Robert Irving III, known for his records with Miles Davis. An asterisk right after the title pointed to the following little note: “Contains lyrics that may be too mature for a young audience.” Pay it no mind.

The early 2000s also marked the arrival in the jazz world of an extraordinary producer, Otis Jackson, Jr., alias Madlib, nephew of trumpeter Jon Faddis. For twenty years now we’ve been following the trail (not without difficulty at times) of this multi-instrumentalist beatmaker who likes nothing better than to muddy the waters, rolling out projects wreathed in mystery where you never really know who is who and who is playing what. The six tracks of our saga-mixtape reflect this discreet personality, who gives very few interviews: a cover of Ramsey Lewis’s “Sun Goddess” under the name Yesterdays New Quintet, another of Miles Davis’s “Bitches Brew” (thirty-three years after Eddie Jefferson’s!) with the Otis Jackson, Jr. Trio (on the compilation Yesterdays Universe), his “invasion” of the Blue Note archives with a strange cover of Wayne Shorter’s “Footprints” (under the Yesterdays New Quintet name), a waltz for Woody Shaw on Miles Away, this time with The Last Electro-Acoustic Space Jazz & Percussion Ensemble, or “Etude Montrachet” in a duo with drummer-beatmaker Karriem Riggins, one of the rare jazzmen equally credible in the worlds of jazz (he accompanied Oscar Peterson and plays regularly with Diana Krall), of nu soul (Erykah Badu loves his productions) and of hip-hop (his mixtapes are a reference).

The dawn of the 21st century was also that of the advent of Roy Hargrove’s RH Factor, which delivered a first album now hailed as a classic. Two of the rappers closest to the jazzosphere contributed: Common on “Common Free Style” and Q-Tip on “Poetry,” in support of Erykah Badu, who in her early days had formed a hip-hop duo with Roy Hargrove (who handled trumpet and beatboxing). That same year, the New York “alternative” hip-hop group Antipop Consortium, today vanished from the radar, had crossed rhymes with pianist Matthew Shipp, but also bassist William Parker, vibraphonist Khan Jamal, trumpeter Daniel Carter and drummer Guillermo E. Brown. “A Knot in Your Bop” is the most emblematic track of this fruitful collaboration, released by Thirsty Ear, a label very open to experimentation (Craig Taborn, Nils Petter Molvær and Tim Berne have recorded for Thirsty Ear). But the instrumental “Free Hop” could just as easily have made our saga-mixtape, because it’s also Antipop Consortium’s gifts as producers that made the difference.

Rarely has a record so intensely sat at the crossroads of jazz, rap, rock and soul as the first Ursus Minor, overseen by Jean Rochard, a producer-catalyst, a gatherer of creative forces from every horizon. Around the quartet of François Corneloup (baritone saxophone), Jef Lee Johnson (guitar), Tony Hymas (keyboards) and Dave King (drums), several MCs, African-American and French (Boots Riley of The Coup, M-1 of Dead Prez, D’ of Kabal, Umi, Spike), a soul singer, Ada Dyer, and a very special guest, Jeff Beck on guitar. All these fine people had first given a concert that stayed in memories at the Sons d’Hiver festival in 2003, then recorded in the wake of it with a former Prince sound engineer, Chuck Zwicky. It’s hard to extract a single track from this engaged concept album, inhabited by a healthy, demanding anger (which doesn’t rule out great moments of emotion), but one will remember the furious “Square Dance Rap.”

As you can see, goodwill was not lacking at the start of the century, and one of the best MCs in the history of hip-hop, Q-Tip of A Tribe Called Quest, also tried his hand at a solo “jazz” album. Conceived in the very early 2000s, sent in “promo” CD form to the press, it ended up oddly being canceled, only to come out in 2009. Gary Thomas, Kurt Rosenwinkel (whose 2003 album Heartcore Q-Tip produced) and Kenny Garrett, who plays on “Abstractionisms,” were part of the adventure, which thus came to nothing. Kamaal the Abstract, Q-Tip’s jazz pseudonym, which ended up being the album’s title (a thoroughly remarkable record, to be urgently rediscovered), in fact revealed the difficulty for rappers, even the most talented, to evolve without losing their audience along the way.

Between severity and lucidity, the saxophonist pressed where it hurt. Since then, Q-Tip has put out almost nothing, apart from an A Tribe Called Quest album, whose brief reunion was nipped in the bud by the death of his partner-in-crime, Phife Dawg. A remix album of Miles Davis has also been announced for ages. After all, the most “jazz” moments of his discography rest on samples, drawn from the best records of the 1960s and 1970s, obscure and/or famous (Jack Wilkins as much as Weather Report, Billy Brooks as much as Woody Shaw), and that is surely where the creativity of Q-Tip and his cohorts expressed itself best, between appropriation and rerouting, metamorphosis and reinvention. Through samples, several generations of hip-hop fans, especially in the 1990s and 2000s, discovered jazz. The presence in the flesh of Ron Carter on “Verses from the Abstract” carried strong symbolic weight all the same in 1991.

Like many great hip-hop producers, J Dilla (1974-2006) was a jazz fanatic. He’s the one, in fact, who introduced Robert Glasper to a 1978 Herbie Hancock record. And to pay tribute to his inspiration, gone too soon, Glasper recorded one of his compositions in 2007, a moving tribute in an acoustic trio if ever there was one, “Dillalude.” (A year earlier, his colleague Eric Legnini had recorded “Funky Dilla” on Big Boogaloo, Label Bleu.) Measuring the importance of J Dilla's contribution, who also recorded under the pseudonym Jay Dee, is a treasure hunt, but three “Dillanthology” releases exist, summing up his work very well, not to mention the albums released in his lifetime. “Oblighetto (J Dilla Remix)” by Brother Jack McDuff, on the 2004 compilation Blue Note Revisited, will not leave anyone indifferent. As for Robert Glasper, his Experiment, formed in 2012, was fertile ground for yet more rapprochements between jazz and hip-hop, by musicians who grew up listening as much to John Coltrane and Miles Davis as to Public Enemy and Gang Starr. The progressive MC Yasiin Bey, formerly Mos Def, shines on “Black Radio,” and on Black Radio Recovered: The Remix, Glasper recalls everything he owes to J Dilla on “Dillalude #2,” with Casey Benjamin alongside him in a full Sunlight Herbie Hancock trip.

Over twenty years after their first historic concerts, Public Enemy returned to Paris to play their classics of the 1980s and 1990s. Surprise: at the end of the concert, Archie Shepp came onstage. In the wake of it, Chuck D, one of the group’s two MCs, who has today become to hip-hop what Archie Shepp is to jazz (a transmitter), went off to the studio to record with the saxophonist. These two “blues people,” dixit Shepp at the mic of Fara C. (in the book The Gemini), very spontaneously cut two versions of “The Reverse,” which seal the one and only encounter (alas) between these two giants.

A lot has happened overseas and the proof of it with “Mountain Sunlight” (composed by Mos Def (before Yasiin Bey), who raps on the track) by the Jazz Liberatorz; “Slow Motion (Part I/II)” by trumpeter Antoine Berjeaut, in collaboration with the talented American MC settled in France, Mike Ladd; “I Live in Fear” by Thiefs, a project co-piloted by saxophonist Christophe Panzani and bassist Keith Witty, where we find Mike Ladd, this time set against the rapper and writer Gaël Faye; “Game On” by bassist Sylvain Daniel, haunted by the memory of J Dilla; and very recently “Don’t Get Mad” by the very promising group Ultra Light Blazer, which recaptures the accents of the best jazz-and-hip-hop productions of the 1990s, thanks, among other things, to the gift of gab of their MC, Edash Quata, and the very inventive saxophone playing of Jonas Mue.

One last crossing of the Atlantic (and the Channel) to verify that the love between jazz and hip-hop is still current? “No Apologies,” by the short-lived trio August Greene (Common, Robert Glasper, Karriem Riggins), proves there are still words and notes to exchange. So does “Americana / The Garden Waits for You to Watch Her Wilderness” by Ambrose Akinmusire, even if Kool A.D. is more a sayer than a rapper (but no matter, so ambitious, demanding, sophisticated, intelligent and shaded is the music, which also draws on all the harmonic resources of a string quartet). In 2019, drummer Terri Lyne Carrington once again distinguished herself with an exceptional record, close, in a way, to the Ursus Minor one mentioned above. On “Purple Mountains” we notice, besides the presence of Kassa Overall (on whom we’re counting heavily to keep the jazz-and-hip-hop flame alive), also present on the very recent record by drummer Nate Smith: on “Square Wheel,” his phrasing contrasts with the singular voice of Michael Mayo, the singer to watch in the years to come. And if Sparkz is not a wildly original rapper, he recaptures on “Between the Lines” by English pianist Ashley Henry the lighter, more festive accents of the 1990s, when acid jazz and hip-hop drew us into the dance.

It is hard, though, not to close this saga-mixtape with the record that reshuffled all the cards in 2015, To Pimp a Butterfly by Kendrick Lamar. On “For Free? (Interlude),” his dizzying style enters into osmosis with his rhythm section (Robert Glasper on piano, Brandon Owens on bass, Robert “Sput” Searight on drums), and Terrace Martin, on alto saxophone, plants a very hot mood in a few notes, in keeping with the no-less-raw language of the star rapper. We await what comes next. And see you in thirty years for, who knows, the second chapter of this fine story, where other artists will have found their place, from Makaya McCraven to Alfa Mist by way of Theo Croker, Kassa Overall and Keyon Harrold.

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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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