s a listener, who found it, and finds it still, a bangin' track, but one that doesn't feel like a joke, or not only a joke, not quite.
What is telling, though, is that without question, were it not for the insistence of hip-hop on making explicit what too often is implicit in our culture—racism and misogyny—the capacity to have a conversation (if not in the public square, where a Pepsi passed to a policeman in a promotional clip is what, in the white-power world of corporate control, passes for discourse, then in one's own skull) on difficult, nigh-impossible subjects would have been impoverished. Hip-hop has made it possible, in my lifetime, to address the unaddressable, to speak the unspeakable, endure the unendurable, and question the questionable. In that mode of the making possible, no single artist has been more adept at inveigling a way of being—LWB: living while black—into the white world than Jay Z.
That is why Geraldo Rivera, on Fox, could say, "Hip-hop has done more damage to young African-Americans than racism in recent years," and why we would know he is wrong. And it's why Kendrick Lamar, an inheritor of the world Jay Z made, who was born just two years before Ice-T and Tipper Gore appeared together on Oprah, would, two and a half decades later, offer a rebuttal to Oprah's uneasiness with the n-word on To Pimp a Butterfly, and then, on his new record, sample Rivera's obscenities, in rage.
These matters—the weight of words, the worth of black lives—aren't resolved, however resolved we now are to see them settled, for good.
On February 6 and 7, 2012, Jay Z played two concerts at Carnegie Hall with a forty-piece orchestra. The proceeds were to benefit the United Way, to raise money for college scholarships for young students of promise in need of support. There are shaky videos of the event to be found online, and one mini documentary on Tidal, which is actually a music video for his as-yet-unreleased-on-record and enormously moving "Glory," a song about fatherhood, about making a baby with his wife, their difficulties, and the birth of their daughter, Blue Ivy.
In the video on Tidal, we see Jay Z rehearsing with the orchestra, rapping in a wool cap before a festival of strings, before a mixing console where a DJ is spinning, before friends to whom he's showing baby pictures on his phone as the song plays:
Last time the miscarriage was so tragic
We was afraid you disappeared but nah baby, you magic
So there you have it, shit happens
Just make sure the plane you on is bigger than your carry-on baggage
Everybody goes through stuff
Life is a gift, love
Open it up
The video ends with the arrival of the night of the first concert, with the arrival of the famous and not, with a prayer with the players led by Jay Z. White-tuxed, immaculate, he heads with mic in hand for the stage. That night, those nights, all reports are that, with the orchestra, with the crowd, exquisite music happened. Hits, mostly; "Glory," also, with Jay Z saying, "I didn't think I was gonna make it through that one," and one editorial change. On "Big Pimpin'," he elided the word whitey from the line "Comin' down and sippin' daily, no record till whitey pay me." I do not know why, other than what one might conclude: It no longer seemed the word that the song needed to say the thing he wished to say. And what he said was, as he took the stage, but before the audience could see him, as the orchestra was playing its overture and strings soared through the famous space, Jay Z's voice joining them before he did: "Sounds so beautiful, don't you agree?"
Darwin's perplexity over the matter of why humans make music is sweet, in retrospect, sweet in the way many of his other errors and examples of shortsightedness are not. He took a dim view of the capacities of women, and a dark view of the capacities of black people. Many of his lyrics, one could say, were racist and misogynistic. As Jay Z says, in "Glory," "God makes no mistakes, I made a few / Rough sleddin' here and there but I made it through."
So, to the matter of why humans make music, we would re