a pause that almost refreshes but doesn’t give you quite enough time to answer anything before the drum returns and the flood of questions with it. That’s sort of how life operates.

1993: A Tribe Called Quest, Midnight Marauders / Wu-Tang Clan, Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers) Classic hip-hop is a sentence. And if the beginning of the sentence is me purchasing Eric B. and Rakim’s Paid in Full at Crazy Eddie’s in 1987, then these two records are the end of the sentence. A year before them, Dr. Dre’s The Chronic had changed

An album like Donuts—thirty-one short snippets, manipulated samples, overlaid dialogue, no real songs except that everything there is so endlessly tuneful and rhythmic—made people rethink some of their basic assumptions about music, and not just hip-hop, but all recorded music—made them go back to the beginning, to the drum, to a unit of

I feel like my cultural value comes from my role as a bridge. My job is to connect brilliant have-nots to the land of haves.

I thought it was the best gospel song I had heard in what seemed like forever, but it also sounded like an emo song that was crying out for a Ghostface Killah rhyme. I walked right up to Jim and told him that I loved it and wanted to find some way for the Roots to record it.

Dilla didn’t answer all those questions definitively, but he asked them, and he stayed true to that…

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He conducts an ongoing interrogation about what it all means. What’s black culture? What’s hip-hop? What are the responsibilities of a society and the people in it? And his inquiry isn’t bloodlessly academic, either; there’s something very consequential about his approach.

Game Theory, the album that grew out of that directive, out of the rubble of Katrina and the confusion of the band’s middle age, was also a pained love letter to Philadelphia, which had become a virtual war zone, with twelve to fourteen murders per week. We were sick to see our home city this way, and hopeful that we could bring attention to the

from-the-headlines songwriting.) I don’t remember if either Blind Willie Johnson or Minnie Wallace ever came up while we were making Game Theory, but those were the kinds of songs we had in mind: outward blues. The world had just gone wrong, was continuing to go wrong, whether it was the breached levees in New Orleans or the murder rate in