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 in the head of an entertainment empire, Roc Nation, which designed the retrospective. “I haven’t really visited many exhibitions. So seeing that, for my favorite rapper, is pretty mind-blowing,” relishes 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 bigger,” adds Jamarly. Brooklyn-born Amanda Brown, 28, appreciates that Jay-Z “gets all that accolades” while she’s alive. 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”.
Rapper Jay-Z’s lyrics are displayed on the Art Deco facades of Brooklyn’s Great Library.
ANGELA WEISS/AFP
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 on Friday and long lines formed all weekend to visit the places or register for the library in order to collect one of the thirteen unpublished models of membership cards of the “Brooklyn Library”, stamped with the album covers of the artist.
In the Bronx
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 billion-dollar phenomenon that inspires music, but also sports and fashion.
“Celebrating 50 years is extraordinary. Because all of that had no value. When we started, no one wanted to hire a DJ or MC or breakdancers,” said Ralph McDaniels, hip-hop coordinator for the Borough of Queens Libraries, and whose TV show “Video Music Box” was a unmissable 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.
KENA BETANCUR/AFP
Auction
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 percussion 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 such as Grandmaster Caz, Kurtis Blow, The Sugarhill Gang, pioneer Roxanne Shante, but also Lil Kim, Ice Cube, Snoop Dogg and Run DMC.
2023-07-20 06:23:48
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