Rapper Jay-Z’s lyrics are displayed on the art deco facades of Brooklyn’s Great Library; Yankee Stadium is preparing to host a concert event with the pioneers of the genre: the cradle of hip-hop, New York is celebrating the 50th anniversary of a trend 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 “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.
Visitors listen to records by Jay-Z, star of an exhibit at the Great Brooklyn Library, on July 17, 2023 in New York City
AFP
“I haven’t really been to a lot of exhibitions. So seeing that, for my favorite rapper, is pretty mind-blowing,” savors Jamarly Thomas — “or Jay-T,” he smiles — a 31-year-old warehouse worker from the Bronx.
In his lifetime
“For a lot of young African-Americans who come, he (Jay-Z, editor’s note) can show them that they can become taller”, adds Jamarly.
Brooklyn-born Amanda Brown, 28, appreciates Jay-Z “getting all that accolades” while she was alive.
Inside the tribute exhibit to rapper Jay-Z, at Brooklyn’s Great Library, July 17, 2023
AFP
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).
Free, the exhibition “The Book of HOV” (one of the nicknames of Jay-Z), opened Friday and long lines formed all weekend to visit the places or to register at the library to collect one of the thirteen unpublished models of membership cards of the “Brooklyn Library”, stamped with album covers of the artist.
In the Bronx
Inside Brooklyn’s Great Library, which honors rapper Jay-Z, July 17, 2023
AFP
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 50th anniversary of a movement born in the Bronx to escape poverty and discrimination against African-Americans and Hispanics, and become a phenomenon brewing billions of dollars, which inspires music, but also sport and fashion.
Ralph McDaniels, the hip-hop coordinator for the Borough of Queens Library, in New York on July 13, 2023
AFP
“Celebrating 50 years is extraordinary. Because it all had no value. When we started, nobody wanted to hire a DJ, an MC or breakdancers,” said Ralph McDaniels, hip-hop coordinator for the Borough of Queens Libraries, whose TV show “Video Music Box” was a staple 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.
Auction
DJ Chuck Chillout spins the decks at the Library in Queens, New York on July 13, 2023, as part of celebrations for 50 years of hip-hop
AFP
The anniversary is set for August 11, 1973. On that day, on the ground floor of a public 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.
A mural by Brazilian artist Sipros pays tribute to New York rapper Biggie Smalls, or Notorious BIG, in the Bushwick neighborhood of New York on June 6, 2019
AFP
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, 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.
2023-07-20 00:01:00
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