Against Everything: Essays

ISBN-13: 9781101971741

Media Type: Paperback

Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group

Publication Date: 08-08-2017

Pages: 320

Product Dimensions: 5.20(w) x 8.00(h) x 0.70(d)

Mark Greif is co-founder of the literary and intellectual journal n+1. He is also currently an associate professor at The New School in New York.

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LEARNING TO RAP

It’s a fortunate fate to have your lifetime be contemporary with the creation of a major art form. Embarrassing, then, not to have understood it, or appreciated it, or become an enthusiast, even a fanatic, from the first. Especially shameful when it could have carried you, if only in imagination, across a racial barrier in America—at least as far as you can go without kidding yourself, when you’re white, and therefore approaching from the wrong side. I came of age at the same time as hip-hop. But like some other ostensibly politically minded middle-class white Americans of my generation, I made a historical mistake: I chose to believe in punk rock exclusively. This meant pledging allegiance to a minor tributary (post-punk) of a minor genre (punk), to squeeze the rind of a major genre, rock, that had been basically exhausted by 1972, instead of committing to a new world-historical form.

My mistake also meant in practical terms that I didn’t learn to rap properly when my mind was supple, at an age when language is effortlessly absorbed. Not that I am completely incapable or innocent of rapping. But I had never applied myself.

I tried to make up for the deficiency, finally, last year. I vowed that I would not rap in front of anyone else, ever, and that I would not try to write my own raps. I just had the idea that I could fix myself, privately. The immediate irritant was that I can hum rock, and of course I can sing along. I know a good part of the lyrics to all kinds of old songs: “Sunshine of Your Love,” “(How Much Is) That Doggie in the Window?” But I couldn’t rap along beyond a few simple refrains, not even to hip-hop songs I thought I knew well, which seemed to be increasingly occupying my head in the first year of Obama’s presidency. This disability began to seem sinister, not to say racist.

I really didn’t know how hard it would be to rap along until I tried. I had projected a straightforward plan of study. I would begin with the classics. I didn’t want to go around on training wheels—I’d start immediately with the best. I wanted my repertoire to include songs I could live with forever. So I started with the first track from the first Nas album, “N.Y. State of Mind,” which had lived in the back of my mind as a blur for a long time.

“I think of crime when I’m in a New York state of mind”—that and other easy lines, I already possessed in memory. And the famous aphorism “I never sleep, ’cause sleep is the cousin of death,” which gets quoted often enough. Plus boasts like “It’s only right that I was born to use mics,” which gave the title to a Michael Eric Dyson book. But I suffered the illusion that a chorus or a standout aphorism was comparable to a verse. I thought I would just start at the beginning and roll through, rewinding the song and memorizing, as if it were a classic rock song or a folk ballad. I went for a walk outside on a hazy day in July, with my headphones, and pressed play:

Rappers, I monkey flip ’em with the funky rhythm I be kickin’—
“Rappers I . . .” what?
Rappers, I monkey flip ’em with the funky rhythm I be kickin’—
“Rappers I—mubbliggithm . . .”
“Rappers I go up in ’em . . .”
“Rappers I grow up with ’em . . .”

I think what Nas is saying is that his rhythmic flow has such force that it sweeps his rivals’ legs out from under them. He whirls them over and lands them on their backs, as Bruce Lee knew to judo dumb opponents. That Nas can do this just with his musical skills, he confirms in line two:

Musician, inflictin’ composition

But I couldn’t get past the impossibility of line one. The first line is seventeen syllables in just over two bars, across eight beats in a quick 4/4 tempo—at eighty-four beats per minute. The delivery is shifted slightly, as I hear it, so that it starts with a quarter-rest and crosses into the next two bars on the last syllable. Rather than marching in the iambs of most English versification, the meter sounds subtly trochaic, suggestive of falling rhythm. And seventeen syllables! By contrast, think of the first line, over a comparable two bars, of Elvis’s “That’s All Right,” a kind of entry into the story of rock:

Well, that’s all right, Mama

Six syllables, slowed by a caesura, delivered in the same length of time as Nas’s seventeen. If that seems an unfair comparison—Elvis is just getting warmed up!—there’s also “All Shook Up”:

A-well-a, bless-ah my soul-a, what’s wrong with me?

Twelve syllables in two bars.

Obviously it’s not the number of syllables that should impress anyone about a lyric. That would be like judging opera by the number of people onstage. It’s the implication of the words and, for the pleasure of the ear, the way they’re laid across the rhythm and the breath. One thing that registered immediately about hip-hop, at a minimum, once I tried to accompany it, is that it’s a more difficult and complex lyrical art in performance than just about anything that has ever been known to rock, and it has been so for about twenty years. I guess all hip-hop listeners already know this, and I fear they will be narrowing their eyes now with distrust. But I notice that some white people my age, but especially those a decade or two older, when they try to rap, fall into end-stopped, nursery-rhyme couplets, when such rhythms haven’t been common in MCing for more than two decades. It’s like thinking of rock ’n’ roll exclusively as the era before solid-body electric guitars predominated— say, 1963 and earlier.

It took a week of repetition for me to get the Nas song right. I still can’t point the accents correctly when I do it at full voice. My delivery is made worse by the fact that my rap voice is very much a white person’s voice, therefore unappealing to me, as I suspect it would be to anyone else. Rapping involved muscular tasks my mouth was not yet practiced enough to do, plus a mental focus and precision that’s hard to sustain, and simply isn’t called for with rock lyrics, not even, like Bob Dylan’s, the most verbose.

I should add that I had to look to the Internet to find the most plausible construction of Nas’s first line. There are now countless hiphop-lyric exegetical sites that try to resolve what is being said. Even so, interpretive disagreements persist.
 
 
I grew up Jewish in the Boston suburbs. New York was the home of my father’s side of the family. If my grandmother didn’t take the Amtrak from New York on the weekend to visit us, we drove to the apartment, in the co-ops for workers in the garment trades, on the Lower East Side.

The New York City Housing Authority had erected the Samuel Gompers housing projects just across Delancey Street, twenty years before. They razed half of the neighborhood to do so, including the tenement in which my grandfather had been born. This was slum clearance. It created tensions, between the low-income Orthodox Jews in workers’ housing, erected by the unions, on our side of the street, and the low-income black and Puerto Rican residents of the public housing erected by the city on the other. My grandfather had managed to keep the family on the street on which he’d been born, but now looked back on it from the reverse direction, toward the new buildings that sat on top of his remembered home.

One zone of contact was underneath my grandmother’s first-story window, in Sheriff Park. From its picnic tables, I heard beatboxing and rap for the first time in 1980 or 1981, when I was five and six. I hung at the window to wait for the groups that gathered around batterypowered boom boxes (at that time white people called them “ghetto blasters”). This competed with the J/Z trains on the ramp of the bridge overhead. This rolling canvas for graffiti is now nostalgized, but at the time it seemed Martian to me. My grandmother’s paper was the Daily News, which carried a front-page report of someone pushed onto the tracks or dragged into a subway tunnel and beaten, seemingly daily—at least, every time I visited—up through 1984, the year of Bernard Goetz, the subway’s white vigilante. I laid my head on the sill listening, like a spaniel, or leaned my face into the screen, at risk of tearing it, until my father would call me to Shabbos dinner.

The first song I tried to rap—learning the chorus at least—came from a K-tel compilation on cassette. K-tel was a music-repackaging service that compiled a month’s radio hits on cassette for sale on nighttime television and by mail order—also in drugstores, where I got my copy of Get Dancin’, or whatever it was called. That number was Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message” (1982). Lying on my bed in the suburbs, in my seven-year-old voice, I rewound and repeated, and never forgot (this is accented in slow, elementary notes, on the beat, over more complex syncopation):

Don’t—push—me—’cause—I’m—close—to—the—edge
I’m—try—in’—not—to—lose—my—head Ha ha ha ha
It’s like a jungle sometimes,
It makes me wonder how I keep from goin’ under.
 
A cliché of hip-hop memorialization—for both fans and artists—is the anecdote of the first time one heard rapping of real duration and realized one was hearing something unknown and transformative. Kids who would later become rappers place the moment in firsthand experience, one artist watching another. So it is in Jay-Z’s autobiography, Decoded, where he recounts child Jay seeing a teenager freestyling a capella in a circle in the Marcy housing projects—the opposite end of the Williamsburg Bridge from Delancey Street, and four subway stops away.

Even I, knowing nothing, can confirm that there really was something about hip-hop’s early arrival that made it feel seismic. I guess that’s what it means to be in the presence of a major new art form. And even I, as I got just a little bit older, wanted to read values into the new music to make it “real,” political, an answer of rival values to the grinning pumpkin head of Ronald Reagan on the evening news, a face I had learned by 1984, and his re-election, was going to get all of us killed with an arms race and his MX missile, but was busy jailing and killing black people among us and selling out Latin America in the meantime.

I find it surprising how many musical moments in early hip-hop I did hear as the years passed, despite being in no sense committed as a fan. Kids notice things that aren’t like everything else. I remember waiting up at night for a short-lived local video station in Boston, a free rival to MTV, to play Run-D.M.C. in 1985. I knew to procure N.W.A’s Straight Outta Compton on cassette in 1988, with no radio airplay, because of newspaper denunciations of the songs “Fuck tha Police” and “Gangsta Gangsta”—if it made the newspapers so deranged, it had to be speaking some truth. A Tribe Called Quest’s People’s Instinctive Travels and the Paths of Rhythm I knew by heart, along with De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising. White people would bring the gossip that these last were mysteriously denigrated as “hippie rap” or “backpack rap” in the black community (how did we know?). I actually saw a few golden-age acts perform, basically by accident—Black Sheep, Ice-T—as I later saw the Wu-Tang Clan, on bills with rock bands or at public events and free concerts. But this same sense of an open secret, of constant unused knowledge, is probably true for other white people my age. I had every chance to lose my heart to the music, despite barriers. I just failed to do so when the time came when everyone has to make the choice of music that will define him, or the subculture indexed to it, not for the private pleasures of bedroom listening, but by his clothes and manner and friends and public identity. At that critical moment of conversion in the teen years, I blew it.

I know the exact moment of the mistake. It was the first year of high school, and older white students started giving me tapes. This was mostly music not available in any store I had ever been to. In the decisive week, one friend handed me Minor Threat’s Minor Threat (Complete Discography), and another gave me Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back.

Public Enemy had built a place already in my consciousness. I had heard Public Enemy the summer before I started school, in the long opening sequence to Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing, with Rosie Perez fly-dancing to “Fight the Power.” I saw the movie at a Tuesday matinee, took the train home, knowing it was the best new movie I’d ever seen, and went back to see it again at the same time the following day. “Fight the Power” included a refrain that probably—secretly—means nearly as much to me as the national anthem, and plays over and over in my mind, though I can still only mumble it with terrible embarrassment even when I’m by myself (“Fight the power / We’ve got to fight the powers that be”). I recall how the verses awakened my childish mind from suburban slumbers:

Elvis was a hero to most, but he never meant shit to me
Is he straight out racist a sucker or simple and plain
Motherfuck him and John Wayne
Cause I’m Black and I’m proud
I’m ready, I’m hyped plus I’m amped
Most of my heroes don’t appear on no stamp . . .
 

Who were those heroes, I wondered. Shouldn’t mine be the same?

Hearing Public Enemy and Minor Threat, I was scared by both, and I knew that I wasn’t wanted in the world of either one. But I gave myself up to punk, and I didn’t at that moment give myself up to rap. Why? I couldn’t say to myself then, “Because I’m white,” though surely that’s the quickest way to state the complication. Even now, I don’t want to say it. Not in my head, and not out loud. What kind of resistance (in the psychoanalytic sense) or vanity is that? I want to not say it because for as long as I remember, seeing the way race divided things in my grandparents’ world, I knew it was bullshit, because I could see that they wanted to be white, and they weren’t. They were poor, Orthodox Jewish, and weird. My parents, in taking us out to the suburbs, had let me gain the habits and self-confidence of vanishing identity, which even they—first to go to college, first to leave the ghetto—never gained. I got to be the first in my family to be effortlessly white, and thereby also the first to obsess on how whiteness is bogus and unfair, not something you’d want to creep in and poison your mind. Or maybe it was the success of black education: canonical American literature, which now includes Douglass, Sojourner Truth, Du Bois, Hurston, Wright, Ellison, Dr. King, Malcolm, Baldwin, Stokely Carmichael, Ishmael Reed, Morrison, Audre Lorde, and more. To ever say “I am white”—even though I was reaping the rewards of being seen as white—would be like pulling a sheet over my head as a mental Klansman. On the other hand, what else am I? I wasn’t minoritizing myself again; I wasn’t putting on a yarmulke and tsitsith. Sometimes I worry the whitest white people of all, the most unmarked and heedless, who pay the least price and gain the most unfair freedom, are those like me who get to be both “raceless” and antiracist, never having to fight it out in the mud of poverty, sidestepping the system, pretending to have no skin in the game.

I think I knew, in a way, that the really courageous thing would have been to step across the line, to become a white appropriator of black hip-hop music, if I could still force myself really to stay wrong: to be always a white face in black crowds, to be a faker and conscious of crossing, and know it and suffer it. To acknowledge becoming an outsider and a clown, without a hope of ever belonging. Not to be one of those Caucasian hip-hop heads who took it back to the suburbs, who felt they did own it. I might have needed the thrust of compulsion and mad love.

Or courage beyond what I had.
 

So many stupidities really stem from inexperience. As I worked on my rapping in 2009, I felt I newly understood a phenomenon of the streets of New York, Boston, every American city I’d ever lived in—why you’d run into young black men, quickstepping on the sidewalk or standing on the subway, rapping at full voice to songs that leaked out of the cups of their overloud headphones. You don’t hear people singing along on subways or downtown pavements to other genres with the same degree of frequency, except for aging crazies. “Hmmm,” I would have thought once upon a time, “what is the proper liberal explanation for what seems otherwise like rudeness?” At hand, I had the old explanations I learned as a kid for inner-city graffiti and suburban skateboarding: This is a way of reclaiming public space when it is segregated, owned by absentees, or dominated by adults.

But now that I had lyrical skills to acquire, I thought I could see a different truth—you had to practice! Rapping along in public was practical and necessary. The learning process is hard. The rehearsal is vitiated when you do the words under your breath and don’t rap loudly enough for performance. Even the breathing is different. And there is just so much to learn at this point, the entire canon of previous rhymes and performances, so much to memorize, from “Rapper’s Delight” to “B.O.B. (Bombs Over Baghdad)” that you really ought to be rehearsing all the time. You’re like a Homeric bard, who will have fifteen thousand hexameter lines to run through before a warlord or a king someday. No doubt doing this in public, and on the subway, is part of overcoming a kind of performance fright. Perhaps it’s a way of becoming scary oneself, as James Baldwin once in The Fire Next Time characterized the need to adapt to oneself the expectations that other people will hang on you: “One needed a handle, a lever, a way of inspiring fear.” All bystanders know that the emphatic quality of rapping really can be jarring, when someone is walking up behind you or standing by you on the subway, rapping “Protect Ya Neck.”

The songs I was working on after Nas were Snoop Dogg’s “Tha Shiznit,” from his first album, and the Notorious B.I.G.’s “Party and Bullshit.” The latter is canonical, a song I felt I ought to be able to do, ostensibly a happy song:

I was a terror since the public school era
Bathroom passes, cutting classes, squeezin’ asses
Smokin’ blunts was a daily routine
Since 13, a chubby nigga on the scene.
I used to have the tre-deuce and a deuce-deuce in my bubble goose
Now I got the Mac in my knapsack loungin’, black . . .
..........................
Honeys wanna chat, but all we wanna know
Is where the party at? And can I bring my gat?
If not, I hope I don’t get shot
Better throw my vest on my chest, cause niggas is a mess . . .
 
So: Biggie was a cutup in school; all he and his crew want to do is party and get with girls. But the rhythmically difficult lines to deliver (“I used to have the tre-deuce and a deuce-deuce in my bubble goose”) focus your mind on the .32 and .22 pistols he says he hid at age thirteen in his wintertime parka, like the MAC-10 submachine gun he boasts he’s moved on to now, at twenty-one—kept still in his schooldays knapsack, along with his bulletproof vest.

Maybe it was the juxtaposition of kiddie banality and too-real mortality, but this song got me worrying again. It was too strange to blithely rap through things now that had been obstructions to me twenty years earlier.

First, to start with the personal, there was the problem of making sure not to say “nigger.” This has always had a curiously powerful effect for white listeners, and I think it was meant to. “Nigger” is the word that righteous whites will not use—to the point where whites of the civil-rights generation, grown adults in their sixties or seventies, almost literally cannot say it, blushing, stammering, even when quoting from history (or reading from Adventures of Huckleberry Finn). They will call it “the n-word”—write it on a chalkboard rather than pronounce it— clear their throats and give meaningful looks or avoid people’s eyes. This was a sort of victory for antiracism. But the conspicuous theater of it, the sheer ostentation of the one word I will not speak, also has wound up showing off how little it can mean in comparison to all the racism white people don’t give up, and equally won’t name or speak. White people in authority are okay with seeing black people profiled, demonized, and terrorized by police. They just won’t say one word, which of course they can say perfectly well. I should add, I don’t think white people should be taking “nigger” back up, even to “join in” to black songs—which is part of its point in rap, because it hammers home a fundamental claim that white people shouldn’t be rapping. Like other formal developments of hip-hop, the place of “the n-word” in the music, after a certain point in its history, can be thought of as a clever collective strategy to forestall white cooptation.

The comedian Richard Pryor’s voice is still, if I’m identifying it correctly, a voice often quoted and sampled in the now-long tradition of hip-hop songs reflecting on the meaning and use of “nigger.” He called his 1976 best-selling stand-up comedy album Bicentennial Nigger. I like to think of a televised exchange, transcribed later in The New Yorker by Hilton Als, when Pryor is being interviewed by Barbara Walters, lovable paragon of the white liberal television establishment, and she is asking him about his controversial word choice:

WALTERS: When you’re on stage . . . see, it’s hard for me to say. I was going to say, you talk about niggers. I can’t . . . you can say it. I can’t say it.
PRYOR: You just said it.
WALTERS: Yeah, but I feel so . . .
PRYOR: You said it very good.
WALTERS: . . . uncomfortable.
PRYOR: Well, good. You said it pretty good.
WALTERS: O.K.
PRYOR: That’s not the first time you said it. (Laughter.)
 
I think only after 1988 did hip-hop really make use of the word “nigger” ubiquitous. I can’t tell if its historians date it that way; I keep looking for a good discussion of the question. But I get the impression you can’t rap along to anything of significance produced after 1988 without running across this word that whites ought not say, whereas you can do so earlier. It can’t be accidental that it came at a moment when the white audience for rap was growing enormously; when in absolute numbers of record sales, whites were outpurchasing blacks in hip-hop releases, and people said so, and worried about it; when Vanilla Ice was on his way. The arrival of “nigger” was like an ingenious fail-safe. If you were a white pretender, you could not rap for real, as blacks did; you could not train on the official rhymes. Either you could not rap in public, period, or you could never rap right, never fully, always marked off, mildly excommunicated. But probably also, in ways I can’t see, it worked as an internal rebuke over respectability, and who was getting ahead and who left behind, in those years of disputes on whether the black middle class had abandoned a black “underclass.”

It must be said, “nigger” makes an extremely flexible two-beat metrical insertion in rap and wide-ranging rhyme in English. It rhymes with all sorts of terms of lyrical boasting, with “bigger,” “trigger,” “figure,” “did her,” etc. N.W.A amplified the turn with a group name that was unpublishable and unsayable except as an acronym (by reputation it stood for Niggaz With Attitude). The word appeared in titles and choruses, from the most “conscious” and peaceable rappers (A Tribe Called Quest’s “Sucka nigga, nigga nigga”) to the grittiest (the WuTang’s “Shame on a nigga who try to run game on a nigga”).* The repetition itself seemed to serve a function. Jay-Z proved himself the most adept, as in so many other self-branding maneuvers: creating a primary nickname for himself (“Jigga”) to multiply his own rhymes with “nigga,” and producing an unequaled run of relevant titles and choruses—“Jigga That Nigga,” “Nigga What, Nigga Who,” and the earliest, “Ain’t No Nigga.” This last, cleverly, was not about Jay-Z saying he was not no nigga (as in Sly and the Family Stone’s 1969 “Don’t Call Me Nigger, Whitey”), but rather that there is no nigga as great as Jay-Z. So there were formal dividends for what might also have been a class divider and an anti-cooptation strategy.

The basic justification for reviving the word was simply that racism persisted and white folks treated young black folks like shit. If white America treated them like niggers, making life in the city jobless, serviceless, and abandoned, why shouldn’t they announce it? This was how N.W.A explained it at the start. “Niggaz 4 Life” is not a great lyric, but it’s direct:

Why do I call myself a nigga you ask me?
Because police always wanna harass me
Every time that I’m rollin’
They swear up and down that the car was stolen
Make me get face down in the street
And throw the shit out my car on the concrete
In front of a residence
A million white motherfuckers on my back like I shot the President
 
Another obstacle to identifying with hip-hop at the moment it was turning into an epochal art form was the lethal quality of African-American city life in the late 1980s and early 1990s. When you rapped along to lyrics about homicide twenty years ago, it felt as if you were talking about homicides that were rising beyond all limits and that nobody knew how to stop.

Pre-1988 hip-hop—again, before its truly world-historical phase— hadn’t seemed to be notably about shooting people to death. Guns do turn up in lyrics, and MCs speak of planning to shoot back if shot at— inevitable details of music that started in neighborhoods that were poor and thus robbery-prone. You’d carry a gun, too. Public Enemy spoke of guns differently, in the context of revolutionary self-respect, the tradition of rifle-bearing Black Panthers.

Post-1988 hip-hop seemed increasingly concerned with boasting how many bodies one had to one’s name, and some of the grandest music was developed in lyrical fantasies of shooting rivals, not for self-defense or politics, but for business. The conceit that the rappers were themselves drug kingpins, thugs, and murderers, “gangsters,” was maintained with Dr. Dre and Ice Cube and Snoop Dogg in Los Angeles, and did not diminish in the wake of the two most tragic real-world murders in hiphop: those of New Yorker the Notorious B.I.G. and the originally San Francisco–based Tupac Shakur. Biggie was shot to death in March 1997 in his car in LA after the Soul Train Music Awards. Tupac had been killed in September 1996 in Las Vegas following a Mike Tyson fight. If anything, the gangster persona settled in further as Tupac and Biggie became “classical” references. Their life stories were ones that television liked to retell with especial relish, until it was hard not to suspect that the white music media might like some of its black rappers best once they had been shot to death.

To be a white teenager, singing along with what were—supposedly— realistic depictions of life in a black ghetto, in the actual situation of the early 1990s, was callous and ghoulish; indifferent to what you saw on the news, which was a world of crying mothers and angry preachers who had been, in effect, abandoned by wealth, government, the economy, the justice system, and charity. If you watched nightly news in the late 1980s and early 1990s in any city in the United States, what you mostly got to see from black neighborhoods was people weeping. This was because their sons, daughters, brothers, husbands, and best friends had been victims of homicide or crossfire. (This, alongside The Cosby Show and In Living Color—twin lenses on fractured times.) By 1988, it was known that the New York murder rate had exceeded any previous known record for the city, since records were kept. Homicide became the leading cause of death for African-American men in their twenties, above heart attack, accident, etc. The murdering peaked nationally in 1991. As many as one-twelfth of each year’s murders, though, were being committed in New York City alone, where hip-hop had originated and from which it mostly still emanated. The other hip-hop center was then the black ghetto of Los Angeles, which televised America took a look at finally in helicopter flyover footage of the riots of 1992. The murder rates would never be so high again, as they began dropping precipitously in 1995 and have dropped steadily since. But we didn’t know that then.

“Don’t ever question if I got the heart to shoot you / The answer is simply too dark for the user.” “Shoot point blank, a motherfucker’s sure to die.” “Beef is when I see you, guaranteed to be in ICU.” “Let’s picnic inside a morgue/ Not pic-a-nic baskets, pic-a-nic caskets.” “From the Beretta/ puttin’ all the holes in your sweater.” These were lines in the songs I was practicing, twenty years later.

Of course the songs were obviously a combination of street report and fantasy. But, really, what business would I have had back then, singing along? I hear the songs, now that they have just become “lyrics” again, and I wonder if my recoil then was ignorance or ethics, whether I have more depth now, or less. Should I be singing along? I find that when I have my headphones on, I too now practice rapping on the subway, though silently. Each time “nigger” comes up, I have to make a decision. Sometimes, I’ve discovered, I wind up substituting “brother”— especially when I’m in public, though no one is going to hear me. Maybe they can read lips? This is embarrassing and shameful, but so is a white person, nearing middle age, rapping. I cover my mouth with a fist as if I’m coughing, and keep it there.
 
 
In the midst of this, the Roots took over the job of backing band for Late Night with Jimmy Fallon, a reputable hip-hop outfit taking a key role in what is fundamentally one of the squarest and most ordinary middle-class institutions of television. The undeniable task of the late show is to make