Jay-Z’s texts are displayed on the art deco facades of the great Brooklyn library, Yankee Stadium is preparing to host a concert event with the pioneers of the genre: New York, the cradle of hip-hop, is celebrating 50 years of a movement born in its ghettos and which has become dominant.
Inside the library, a vast and laudatory exhibition retraces the emblematic career of the child of Brooklyn, who built his legend like a modern fairy tale: former dealer of the Marcy Projects, the housing estate where he grew up, Shawn Corey Carter – alias Jay-Z – became in the 1990s and 2000s one of the greatest American rappers, then a billionaire businessman at the head of an entertainment empire, Roc Nation, who designed the retrospective. “I haven’t really visited many exhibitions. So seeing this, for my favorite rapper, it’s pretty mind blowing“, savors Jamarly Thomas – “or Jay-T”, he smiles -, a 31-year-old warehouse worker from the Bronx.
“For many young African Americans who come, it can show them that they can grow taller“, adds Jamarly. Brooklyn-born Amanda Brown, 28, appreciates that Jay-Z “get all the praise” during his lifetime. The rapper, who forms with Beyoncé one of the most famous couples in popular culture, has multiplied the hits – Hard Knock Life (Ghetto Anthem), Izzo (HOVA) – and crossed the borders of rap with the ode to New York Empire State of Mind. He also placed during his career 14 of his albums at the top of the American reference classification Billboard 200 (only the Beatles did better, with 19).
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A public at the rendezvous
Free, The Book of HOV (one of Jay-Z’s nicknames) exhibit opened on Friday, July 14, and long lines formed all weekend long to visit or register at the library to collect one of thirteen never-before-seen Brooklyn Library patron card designs, stamped with the artist’s album covers.
The tribute to the rapper precedes the inauguration, on August 2, of another immersive retrospective on the history of hip-hop at the Hall of Lights, the New York branch of the Culturespaces network. Graffiti or breakdance sessions in libraries, “block parties”, concerts… many other initiatives are flourishing to celebrate the fifty years of a movement born in the Bronx to escape poverty and discrimination against African-Americans and Hispanics. A phenomenon brewing billions of dollars, which inspires music, but also sport and fashion.
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“Celebrating 50 years is extraordinary. Because all of that had no value. When we started, nobody wanted to hire a DJ, an MC or breakdancers“, underlines Ralph McDaniels, hip-hop coordinator for the libraries of the borough of Queens, and whose TV show Video Music Box was an essential meeting of the local rap scene in the 1980s and 1990s, which shone the spotlight on future stars like Jay-Z, Nas, LL Cool J or The Notorious BIG, killed in 1997.
At the origins of the current
The anniversary is set for August 11, 1973. On that day, on the ground floor of a low-rent housing building at 1520 Sedgwick Avenue, in the Bronx, a DJ of Jamaican origin, Clive Campbell, alias DJ Kool Herc, innovates: by spinning the same disc on two turntables, he isolates the sequences of rhythms and percussion and makes them last in the speakers, prefiguring the “breakbeat”, an essential component of the hip hop music. Fifty years later, on August 11, 2023, DJ Kool Herc will share the poster for a mega concert at Yankee Stadium, where other veterans like Grandmaster Caz, Kurtis Blow, The Sugarhill Gang, pioneer Roxanne Shante, but also Lil Kim, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and Run DMC are announced.
A sign of its influence, hip-hop even feeds auctions. Since Tuesday, July 18, we can afford at Sotheby’s a ring set with rubies and diamonds worn by Tupac Shakur, icon of the Californian West Coast – but born in Harlem – and murdered in 1996. Estimate of the jewel: 200,000 to 300,000 dollars.