Jay-Z has continued to ink new acts, adding DJ Khaled in 2016 and, in early 2017, longtime rival Fat Joe, after appearing on a remix of the Bronx rapper’s hit “All the Way Up”: “Twenty-one Grammys that I use for D’Ussé cups / I’m on the penthouse floor, call your way up.” It’s a description of his current reality. Jay-Z is a near-billionaire father of three who continues to rap about his lifestyle, even if it’s not remotely relatable to certain audiences. “We’ve never seen the maturation of hip-hop in this sort of way,” he told Forbes. “But, you know, people that listen to hip-hop when they’re eighteen listen to it when they’re twenty-eight. It’s just that the voices of hip-hop are not speaking directly to them anymore. Or weren’t. They’re speaking to an eighteen-year-old. I’m not going to do that anymore. I’m just going to make the music I love to make, and I’m going to mature with my music.”23
And yet in some areas, hip-hop still isn’t afforded proper respect. Former Def Jam chief Kevin Liles recalls a recent meeting with an auto executive. “The guy says, ‘Our brand has been devalued by hip-hop music because the truck was never built to be [rapped about],’” Liles recalls. “I said, ‘What you’re really saying is that all of the hundreds of millions of dollars that you made, you didn’t want that?’… We’re still fighting the battle.”24
Hip-hop has encountered similar pushback in Hollywood. (In a sign that the coastal feud of the 1990s is a distant memory, or was never really coastal to begin with, most of hip-hop’s big names are now based in Los Angeles, including Diddy, Dre, and Jay-Z.) Though there have been some examples of massively successful films and television shows influenced by hip-hop—Straight Outta Compton and Empire, to name a pair—there’s a tendency to check boxes and move on. “I take the meetings,” says Russell Simmons. What does he hear? “‘We already have an Empire… Why do we need [another]?’ Well, you had E.R., and how many fucking hospital shows did you have? It’s almost like they can play one rap record at a time on the radio. It’s like that a little bit in Hollywood. We still do one at a time.”25
Yet some of hip-hop’s biggest stars are already optimistically planning their curtain calls. Wiz Khalifa and Snoop Dogg like the idea of following in the footsteps of Celine Dion and Elton John. “Snoop was telling me, like, ‘Man, we’re going to be the first rappers to retire and do Vegas, like, seven nights a week,’” Wiz told me. “Hip-hop is going to be a mainstream thing right now. And it’s something that brings people from all over. Jay-Z’s going to be sixty, but that means all his fans are going to be that age, too… They’re always going to show up, and they’re always going to put their kids onto it.”26
Many of hip-hop’s earliest pioneers are already approaching senior citizen status, and they aren’t exactly pulling in six figures per night at the Colosseum in Sin City. A quick glance at touring database Pollstar finds the disgraced Bambaataa—whose Bronx River housing project is now surrounded by bus stops wrapped in Sprite ads featuring Tupac Shakur, Missy Elliott, and J. Cole—grossing just $3,000 per show; Herc, Caz, and Starski don’t even play enough to register.
“Why go into a young party of today and be a failure to them, or have them feel like you failed at something you’ve been doing for forty years?” Starski asked me. “I don’t want to walk away feeling like a failure, so I stay in my lane. I stay in my crowd. I stay under my umbrella for my own security, and my own feeling, and my own sanity. That’s where I feel safe at.”27
Yet there are signs of hope. In the middle of my interview with Starski, he called up Kurtis Blow, and the two of them discussed plans to perform on a cruise together. Flash was hired as a producer for the Netflix miniseries The Get Down, a Baz Luhrmann–produced spectacle based on the early days of hip-hop. In the six months following the show’s August 2016 launch, Grandmaster Flash played a dozen shows from Brooklyn to Australia, putting him on pace to spin more in a twelve-month span than he did in the first decade of the new millennium.
Even the landmarks of the movement’s birth are getting their due. In 2007, with the support of Herc and his sister—as well as New York senator Chuck Schumer—1520 Sedgwick was deemed eligible for listing in the National Register of Historic Places.28 Plans are also in the works for the Universal Hip Hop Museum, scheduled to open in 2022. The latest designs call for a mixed-use development nestled between Yankee Stadium and the Harlem River.29 “Hip-hop is about peace, love, unity, and having fun,” says Grandwizzard Theodore. “When we put out this hip-hop museum, all the myths and all the misconceptions that a lot of these parents got about rap and hip-hop—you can take them to the museum.”30
In the meantime, Grandmaster Caz, Kurtis Blow, and a host of other pioneers lead visitors from all over the world on bus excursions through the cradle of hip-hop via Bronx-focused Hush Tours.31 (Blow is even taking a page out of the three kings’ book: he told me he was trying to put together a streaming service of his own.32) Caz has moved on in the aftermath of having his lyrics cribbed for “Rapper’s Delight,” though he never really reconciled with the Sugarhill Gang’s Big Bank Hank, who died of cancer in 2014.
“He never looked back,” says Caz. “Not to say thank you, not to say, ‘Here’s a few dollars.’ Nothing.” But Caz recently scored the first platinum hit of his four-decade career, thanks to an unlikely ally: Macklemore. The Seattle-born white rapper of “Thrift Shop” fame recruited Caz, Kool Moe Dee, and Melle Mel to appear on “Downtown,” which went platinum in 2016. “The people that have benefited from [hip-hop] and came out on top, and was in a position to do something like Macklemore did, never did,” says Caz. “So how do I feel about Macklemore? I love him to death.”33
Grandwizzard Theodore, who says he now plays about a hundred shows per year, also takes a kind view toward the latest generation of rappers. He appreciates Jay-Z’s contribution to the cause with his 2001 line about exacting revenge on label executives for what they did to the Cold Crush Brothers. He also cites Diddy, Biggie, LL Cool J, Public Enemy, and the Wu-Tang Clan as acts that showed respect to the founding fathers. “They actually look us in the eye and be like, ‘Thank you, thank you guys for all the blood, sweat, and tears that you guys put into this art form, this culture,’” he says. “They say, ‘I wouldn’t be who I am today if it wasn’t for you guys. Thank you.’ That’s basically all I need.”34
Fab 5 Freddy continues to make art, displaying and selling his work at exhibitions across the country; he even starred in an Acura commercial in 2015. The spot features a woman cruising down the highway, blithely belting “Rapture”—including the classic line “Fab 5 Freddy told me everybody’s fly”—and inadvertently calling Fab, who sits in a conference room with a group of puzzled executives. “They came with this idea to see if I would want to be in the commercial,” says Fab. “We worked it all out… They have a Billboard chart for commercials and it was in the top five.”35
At the same time, Fab’s old friend Basquiat is enjoying ever-greater postmortem success. He’s continually name-checked by the likes of Jay-Z, who in “Picasso Baby” compares his home—with its “Basquiat in the kitchen corner”—to the Louvre and the Tate Modern. Today the artist’s works hang everywhere from France to Japan in some of the world’s finest museums, just as he would have hoped. “I wanted to be a star,” Basquiat explained in 1985. “Not a gallery mascot.”36
That wish came true—and then some. In 2017, a Japanese billionaire bought Basquiat’s 1982 work Untitled for $110.5 million, the sixth-highest total of any work ever sold at auction and the highest price paid for a piece by any American artist.37
In August 2016, Swizz held his second No Commission art fair, this time taking it to the borough that he, and hip-hop, calls home. The Bacardí-backed event brought the work of artists from all over the world to the Port Morris section of the South Bronx, where their work was seen by “billionaires, millionaires, thousand-aires, zero-naires,” according to Swizz, who appeared along with creative types from Kehinde Wiley to A$AP Rocky. Individual pieces sold for prices rang
ing from $50 to $270,000—almost $1 million in total—as thousands of onlookers participated in the extravaganza.
“I’m bringing Basel to the Bronx,” Swizz tells me. “The kids that live around here, the people that live around here, should be able to see things that they might not be able to afford to get on a flight to go see.”38
Yet Swizz still got flak from a few protesters for selecting a venue owned by Keith Rubenstein, a developer accused of trying to gentrify the borough and exoticize its heritage. Swizz scoffs at the accusations. “I’m from the Bronx. I lived twelve blocks from this place,” he says. “The space was the best space that fit the event. I’m not the landlord. I don’t own the property. I’m not a developer. Why are you protesting this again?”
It was a fascinating outcome of hip-hop’s journey: the brainchild of the Bronx grows up, expands into the rest of New York, takes over the rest of the world, turns into a multibillion-dollar industry, and comes home to find itself so changed as to be unrecognizable to some. But Swizz took the time to hear out the activists and eventually assuaged some of their concerns, partly by agreeing to launch a fair for Bronx artists exclusively.
Overall, the feedback for No Commission was positive. Store owners in the community wrote letters to Swizz, thanking him for boosting their sales by as much as 200 percent in some cases. A$AP Rocky called the event “the greatest art fair in the world.”39 Needless to say, Swizz’s new colleagues at Bacardí were quite pleased as well. “A lot of people came up to me and congratulated us for supporting it,” says Bacardí chief Dolan. “It was really Swizz’s instinct that, ‘Hey, this is the right thing to do. This is the right place to do it.’”40
Swizz is quick to credit the three kings as an inspiration for himself and others to keep pushing boundaries. “They let people know that they can make it big other than [in] music,” he says, growing philosophical as we wind down our interview in the cavernous cool of his in-home art gallery. “Puff is just the ultra hustler. He always had a gift.”
He notes the same for Jay-Z, marveling at the mogul’s vision for companies like Tidal and Roc Nation (the latter was launched as part of Jay-Z’s landmark ten-year, $150 million Live Nation deal signed in 2008; in 2017, he topped himself, inking a $200 million decade-long pact with the concert giant). “We always complain about, ‘We don’t own this, we don’t own that,’” explains Swizz. “Here he is, this man who owns that.”
And the producer from Compton who found a way to sell speakers as though they were sneakers? “Dre did it—changed the electronic industry and headphones,” says Swizz.
He smiles.
“I think that it just shows that the sky is not the limit: it’s just a view,” Swizz concludes, gazing upward. “There are billions of galaxies out there.”41
AFTERWORD
Kings, Queens, Presidents, and Precedents
On May 12, 2009, Michelle and Barack Obama held an evening of spoken-word performance—and transformed the White House into a launching pad for hip-hop. That night, Lin-Manuel Miranda debuted The Hamilton Mixtape, which later blasted off to Broadway and circled the globe as the smash musical Hamilton. The Obamas would go on to host hip-hop royalty from Jay-Z to Nicki Minaj to Kendrick Lamar, becoming the sort of cultural gatekeepers America had never before seen in a first family.
“It’s not even about a kid from Compton going to the White House,” Lamar told me in 2017. “It’s really about Barack letting urban kids walk inside that building.”1
On November 9, 2016, hip-hop woke up to a different sort of White House metamorphosis. Donald Trump’s upset victory over Hillary Clinton—for whom Jay-Z and Beyoncé, among other entertainment-world luminaries, had campaigned—augured the end of spoken-word evenings for at least four years. And although many of the divisive issues that have since come to the forefront of the national conversation aren’t new, they had long seemed dormant to many. In any case, Trump’s platform, with its calls to build walls and slash corporate taxes, was as far from the pillars of hip-hop as could be. One of his few attempts to woo black voters was the tone-deaf “Plan for Urban Renewal,” which coupled a Robert Moses–esque title with proposed tax incentives aimed at luring foreign investment to “blighted American neighborhoods.”2
Hip-hop has perhaps unsurprisingly been at the forefront of the pushback against the administration, from YG’s “Fuck Donald Trump” to the more diplomatic efforts of Hamilton. When Mike Pence attended the musical in New York in November 2016, actor Brandon Victor Dixon read a speech collaboratively written by Hamilton’s creator, director, producer, and cast exhorting the vice president–elect to “uphold our American values and to work on behalf of all of us.” Though Pence handled the situation with relative grace, Trump raged against the musical’s “very rude” cast on Twitter and demanded an apology.3
“There’s this rhetoric about being grateful and happy that you’re getting paid for your art,” said Okieriete Onaodowan, an original cast member who played President James Madison and Hercules Mulligan that night, in an interview with me a year later. “We are told to put our own stuff aside, but doesn’t everyone have a job they should just shut up and do? Shouldn’t the president just shut up and lead?”4
Hip-hop has been closely tied to Obama for a decade, but there are also connections to Trump in its past—even for the three kings. In the 1990s, Dre was one of many who paid verbal homage to him as a sort of wealth deity; Diddy and Jay-Z schmoozed with him in the Hamptons. And Trump has been rightfully slammed for some of the same things for which certain hip-hop figures have been criticized: namely, peddling overpriced junk, stiffing contractors, being a terrible role model for kids, and using language too crude for television. Perhaps most alarming are the casual boasts of sexually assaulting women, laid bare in the Access Hollywood tapes and underscored by a dozen or so actual accusations. Hip-hop’s virtues have been diluted by a still-too-prevalent tendency to demean women; the world heard a disturbing echo of this when Russell Simmons stepped down from running his businesses in late 2017 after several allegations of sexual assault (which he, like Trump, denied).
The stories of Simmons and other disgraced legends like Afrika Bambaataa serve as an important indicator of the work that hip-hop still has left to do. As diverse and inclusive as it is in some ways, the genre historically has exhibited various types of prejudice, most notably in the form of misogyny and homophobia. And despite the contributions of women from Sylvia Robinson to Debbie Harry to Minaj, there’s still a tendency to pit female stars against one another in a battle for a single seat at the table. If there are three kings, there should be room for more than one queen. As hip-hop lurches forward, its leaders need to find ways to empower those who’ve built their identities on the movement—even if they don’t necessarily look, sound, or act like its founding fathers and most profitable practitioners.
“Hip-hop is more than a genre,” twentysomething British rapper Simbiatu “Little Simz” Ajikawo, the daughter of Nigerian immigrants, told me in 2016. “It’s the only time I’m one hundred percent me.”5
To my eye—which admittedly comes with inherent limitations of lived experience—hip-hop has lately shown new signs of progress when it comes to including a more representative sampling of voices, thanks to acts from Simz to Cardi B to Frank Ocean to Young M.A. And the three kings have made various efforts to build a bigger tent. While Diddy and Dre have bankrolled schools, Jay-Z used his 2017 album, 4:44, as a vehicle for social commentary, from pushing the thought-provoking treatise “The Story of O.J.” to supporting his mother coming out as a lesbian on “Smile” to envisioning a more female-focused future in the Ava DuVernay–directed video for “Family Feud”—and tackling issues from marital transgressions to mass incarceration at the same time.
Diddy, Dr. Dre, Jay-Z, and their peers will have to continue to move in this sort of direction if hip-hop is to keep inspiring and cultivating its next generation of royalty. I, for one, am betting they will.
Zack O’Malley
Greenburg
New York, January 2018
The home of DJ Kool Herc—and the birthplace of hip-hop—in the South Bronx, present day. (Photograph by Zack O’Malley Greenburg)
Afrika Bambaataa at New York’s Roseland Ballroom in 1982. (Photograph by Cutman LG / Courtesy of the Universal Hip Hop Museum and From Now Until Music LLC)
A 1980 flyer promoting hip-hop founding fathers Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, among others. (Photograph by Peter Nash/Courtesy of the Universal Hip Hop Museum)
Hip-hop pioneer Fab 5 Freddy and Blondie lead singer Debbie Harry, whose 1981 single “Rapture” became the first number one song to feature rap vocals. (Photograph by Bobby Grossman)
1980s royalty, from left to right: Lynda West, Donnie Simpson, Michael Schultz, Buff Love aka the Human Beat Box, Kool Rock Ski, Sugar Ray Leonard, Prince Markie Dee, and Charles Stettler. (Photograph by Steve Friedman)
From left: Pete Nice, Eazy-E, Dr. Dre, and MF Doom partying in Los Angeles in 1990. (Photograph by Michael Berrin)
Jay-Z’s childhood home—the Marcy Houses in Brooklyn—at present day. (Photograph by Danielle La Rocco)
From left: Lonzo Williams, Dr. Dre, DJ Yella, and Cli-N-Tel during the brief 1980s heyday of the World Class Wreckin’ Cru. (Courtesy of Lonzo Williams)
The two-sided card Darryl Cobbin presented to Coca-Cola brass in the early 1990s, spawning a marketing plan that forever linked Sprite and hip-hop; below, his follow-up years later at Boost Mobile. (Courtesy of Darryl Cobbin)
Diddy gracing the cover of Forbes in 1999 alongside Jerry Seinfeld. (Courtesy of Forbes)
3 Kings Page 26
