Celebrating this anniversary, the Brooklyn Public Library has decided to retrace the career of the American rapper. A mega-concert will also be organized on August 11, including Snoop Dog, Lil Wayne and Kurtis Blow.
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 exhibit traces the iconic career of the Brooklyn child, who built his legend like a modern fairy tale: a former drug dealerMarcy 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 empire of entertainment, 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», savoure Jamarly Thomas -, «ou Jay-The smiles – a 31-year-old warehouse worker from the Bronx.
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«For many 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 that Jay-Z “get all the praise” in 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).
Free, the exhibition The Book of HOV (one of Jay-Z’s nicknames), opened on Friday and long lines formed all weekend long to visit the premises or register at the library to collect one of the thirteen models unpublished membership cards of the “Brooklyn Library“, stamped album covers of the artist.
«Celebrating 50 years is extraordinary»
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 which has become a phenomenon brewing billions 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 district of Queens, and whose television program 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.
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Mega-concert at Yankee Stadium
The birthday 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 percussions and makes them last in the speakers, prefiguring the “breakbeat», an essential component of 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. 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 “West CoastCalifornian – but born in Harlem – and murdered in 1996. Jewelery estimate: 200,000 to 300,000 dollars.
2023-07-20 09:43:23
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