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.

The arts focus gave humanistic theories of creativity a particular ideological shading, for art was traditionally understood as the antidote to the ills of industrial society. The Romantic artist was putatively (if never really actually) outside the realm of capitalist production, and as such represented an exception to modern alienation.