e idiom in question? Its purest reading came thirteen days after the Carter-Knowles nuptials: April 17, 2008.
"When you're running for the presidency," candidate Barack Obama said, on the trail, to a huge crowd, on that day, "then you've got to expect it." The "it" was being attacked by one's rival, then Hillary Clinton, who'd been coming at Obama hard that season. And how did the candidate say one should handle it?
"You just gotta, kinda, let it"—and here, you recall, with his right hand, he mimed the brushing off of his right shoulder—"you know"—and then he mimed the same off of his left. "You know," he said.
Verily the crowd did know. The crowd went, as we say, wild.
"It's what you gotta do," Obama said.
Crowd going wilder.
"That's what you gotta do."
THE USES OF JAY Z
"It is natural to believe in great men," or so Ralph Waldo Emerson tells us at the start of Representative Men, his study of varieties of extraordinary human beings. Emerson offers chapters on Plato ("The Philosopher"), Swedenborg ("The Mystic"), Montaigne ("The Skeptic"), Shakespeare ("The Poet"), Napoleon ("The Man of the World"), and Goethe ("The Writer"), each a kind of autopsy of the particular bounty of being that each of these people willed to the human family. "The world is upheld by the veracity of good men: they make the earth wholesome," Emerson tells us. "Life is sweet and tolerable only in our belief in such society." If not for advancing the most perfect roster of human excellence—no representative women; none but white men—Emerson's essays endure for their capacity to establish what we mean when we call individuals "great." Yes, he makes clear, it's what such people do, of course; but really, it's what their doing licenses others to imagine. "Men exist," Emerson writes, "that there may be greater men."
LITERATURE AS TELEVISION CRITICISM
Jay Z, in Decoded:
I've met a lot of powerful people, but Oprah, as everyone knows, is in her own stratosphere. She's also someone who has been vocally skeptical about hip-hop for a long time because of the violence and rawness of a lot of the imagery and language, particularly the use of what she'd call the "n-word" . . . I can respect her position. To her, it's a matter of acknowledging the deep and painful history of the word. To me, it's just a word, a word whose power is owned by the user and his or her intention. People give words power, so banning a word is futile, really. "Nigga" becomes "porch monkey" becomes "coon" and so on if that's what's in a person's heart. The key is to change the person. And we change the person through conversation, not through censorship.
CONFESSION OF A LAZY CRITIC
I am a forty-eight-year-old white man who lives in rural farmland. Like Jay Z, I was born in 1969. Unlike Jay Z, I drive a Volvo station wagon, with its car seat in the rear. Through rolling hills and past cow- and chicken- and lamb-strewn pastures, not infrequently I listen to Jay Z. Or Lauryn Hill. Or Tupac. Or Kendrick Lamar. Not infrequently, at home with my wife and our infant daughter, we will rap along. And when Jay Z, or whoever, gets to certain words, we fall mute. But if, by accident, while streaming, I've inadvertently selected a CLEAN VERSION of a song, let's say "Nigga What, Nigga Who" or "Niggas in Paris," we will sigh, and I will find the unexpurgated version, to which we will rap along, until we come to certain words, at which point we mute ourselves as if we, ourselves, are the CLEAN VERSION, a clean version that itself feels dirty. To say these words, even alone, even in our house, feels, absolutely, wrong. It feels too explicit. And yet to hear them now seems, in a confusing way, necessary.
I should admit that I have been listening to "99 Problems," the Jay Z version, for quite some time, and I had not known, until I researched this essay, that Chris Rock had told Rick Rubin that it would be great if Jay Z used the Ice-T hook as the basis for a song. That backstory, of course, and the close reading of the track required to understand what its maker intended, are at odds with my experience a