se 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 as 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, t