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      Jay-Z’s ‘Black Album’ Reconsidered

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      Tally Abecassis and Phyllis Fletcher and Jay-Z at his studio in Manhattan in 2003.Chester Higgins Jr./The New York TimesIn 2003, Jay-Z announced he was retiring at 33 years old. He had several platinum records under his belt and a budding relationship with Beyoncé. Then, he released the album intended to be his last: “The Black Album.”Reggie Ugwu, a Culture reporter for The New York Times, was a senior in high school when “The Black Album” came out, and it became the soundtrack of his life. He loved not just the music, but the message: that being indisputably excellent was the only way to make it.But after the summer of 2020, as a global Black Lives Matter movement took off in response to the police killings of George Floyd and Breonna Taylor, Reggie started to revisit the lessons of the album.“There was something that was missing from my understanding of how the world worked and my place in it,” Reggie said in this episode.Nearly 18 years later, Reggie reflects on “The Black Album” with Dodai Stewart, a deputy editor. Listen to their conversation.In this podcast episode:Dodai Stewart, a deputy editor for Narrative Projects at The New York Times.Reggie Ugwu, a pop culture reporter for The Times. More

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      Chucky Thompson, Hitmaking Producer, Is Dead at 53

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      He brought a range of musical influences to bear on the tracks he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G. and many others.“My mind is always on ‘Record,’” the producer Chucky Thompson once told an interviewer, explaining how he was able to bring such a wide range of musical influences to the hits he helped create for Mary J. Blige, the Notorious B.I.G., Nas and other stars.For any particular track, he might draw on the soul records his parents used to play, or his time as a conga player in Chuck Brown’s go-go band, or some other style in his mental archive, as he sought to realize the vision the performer was after, or perhaps take him or her in a whole different direction.Mr. Thompson helped forge the hip-hop and R&B sound of the 1990s while in his mid-20s. He showed his versatility with his work on Ms. Blige’s second album, “My Life,” and the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die,” both released in 1994. The next year he was a producer on almost all the tracks on Faith Evans’s debut, “Faith,” another hit.In this period he was working for Bad Boy Entertainment, the influential label Sean “Diddy” Combs founded in 1993, as part of the producing team known as the Hitmen. But he continued to produce for a range of artists after the Hitmen dissolved later in the 1990s. If he — unlike some other producers in those years — defied categorization, that was deliberate.“In my brain, as a producer, I never wanted a sound,” he said in a 2013 video interview with Rahaman Kilpatrick. “That’s why you hear me on so many different records.”Mr. Thompson died on Aug. 9 in a hospital in the Los Angeles area. He was 53.His publicist, Tamar Juda, said the cause was Covid-19.Mr. Thompson was different from many of his contemporaries in that he was a multi-instrumentalist, often contributing guitar, piano, trombone or other flourishes to the tracks he produced. To get a particular effect for the 2002 Nas track “One Mic,” he flipped a guitar over and banged on the back of it.“He’s a true musician and doesn’t like to program heavily — just like me,” Mr. Combs told Billboard in 1995, when that publication included Mr. Thompson in an article on “the next crop of hotshot producers.” “Chucky has so many melodies in his head and produces from the heart.”Carl Edward Thompson Jr. was born on July 12, 1968, in Washington to Carl and Charlotte Thompson. In the 2013 interview, he said that his mother recognized his innate musical ability early.“She used to sit me in the kitchen and — you know how kids would just be banging and making noise? I was actually on beat with it,” he said. “She knew from there that something was different.”At 16 he was touring with Mr. Brown and his band, the Soul Searchers, playing the funk variant known as go-go, which was popular in and around Washington. It was a time when traditional live performances by bands were losing ground to D.J.s, who could keep the music constant rather than breaking between songs and thus keep people on the dance floor. Mr. Brown had his young conga player try to compensate.“He decided, ‘I’ll put a percussion break in between songs,’” Mr. Thompson told Rolling Stone in June. “So we would finish a song, then I’d do a percussion break, and I’d do a call and response — ask the crowd, ‘Y’all tired yet?’”The year 1994 was a big one for Mr. Thompson. Among the albums he worked on that year was the Notorious B.I.G.’s debut, “Ready to Die.”Bad Boy AristaThat same year, he co-produced much of Mary J. Blige’s “My Life,” the Grammy-nominated follow-up to her successful debut, “What’s the 4-1-1?,” with Ms. Blige and Sean Combs.Uptown RecordsBy the early 1990s he was in New York trying to market himself as a producer, and Mr. Combs and Ms. Blige were looking for material for the follow-up to her successful first album, “What’s the 4-1-1?” (1992).“She picked my song out of a ton of tracks from new and previous producers,” Mr. Thompson said in an interview with the website StupidDope.com in June. “I was truly honored. That track was ‘Be With You,’ and at that time it was very different for her and her sound. I felt at that moment we were onto something that would be special.”He ended up co-producing much of the album with Ms. Blige and Mr. Combs. Ms. Blige had a tough hip-hop image that defied female-singer stereotypes, and some people didn’t care for it. Mr. Thompson took that reaction into account as he helped her create the songs for her second album.“I didn’t like people throwing stones at something they didn’t understand,” he told Rolling Stone. “So I was like, on this record, people are gonna know you’re a singer. You’re the real deal.”“My Life,” full of confessional songs exploring Ms. Blige’s personal struggles, received a Grammy nomination for best R&B album and helped establish her as a star. In June, Amazon Prime unveiled a documentary about her career and the record, “Mary J. Blige’s My Life.”Over the years Mr. Thompson also produced for Usher, Raheem DeVaughn, Total and many others. He produced some of the final tracks for his early mentor, Mr. Brown, who died in 2012 at 75.Mr. Thompson’s survivors include five children, Ashley, Emille, Myles, Quincey and Trey Thompson. More

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      Pink Siifu Releases 'Gumbo'!,' a Nod to Southern Rap

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      The prolific 29-year-old rapper, singer and producer returned this month with “Gumbo’!,” a hat tip to the soulful Southern rap that inspired him.In 2018, Livingston Matthews landed in New York for a series of gigs and was low on money after having to unexpectedly check a bag on his flight. So he hopped a subway turnstile, only to be detained by a police officer who wanted to put him in his place.“He was just O.D. extra, bruh,” Matthews said in a relaxed Southern drawl between bites of cinnamon-sprinkled oatmeal in a Brooklyn cafe recently, visiting from Baltimore. “He was like, ‘You’re dead meat, I can do anything I want with you.’” The incident led him to write “Deadmeat,” the fiercest track from his 2020 album, “Negro,” which scolded racism and police brutality through an aggressive mix of rap, punk and free jazz.The album arrived just as Covid-19 cases surged globally and a month before protests arose following the police killings of Breonna Taylor and George Floyd. For Matthews, a 29-year-old rapper, singer and producer who records under several names, mainly Pink Siifu, “Negro” was the most fearless album in his vast catalog of equally experimental music. It was also the most intense.“That record? It was Allah and my ancestors,” he said. “I was damn near crying after each track.”His most recent album, “Gumbo’!,” came out at the top of this month and flashes back to an even earlier musical moment: the trunk-rattling bass and downtempo Southern rap that Atlanta’s Dungeon Family crafted in the 1990s.“Their records sounded like everything,” Matthews said of the cornerstone collective that has counted Outkast and Goodie Mob as members.The poet Ruben Bailey, known as Big Rube, a Dungeon Family member who appears on “Gumbo’!,” said he hears the group’s influence in Matthews’s sound. “He’s got a Southern type of style, but at the same he’s lyrical,” Bailey said in a phone interview. “When I first saw his name, that tripped me out because it sounded like he was really creative, and it turned out he was.”Wearing a white sweatshirt, denim coveralls, glitter-gold-painted fingernails, beaded braids and a white durag beneath a brimmed leather kufi hat, Matthews looked like his influences all at once: Sly Stone, Andre 3000, Sun Ra. He spoke with the same laid-back cadence that he employs in his music, and he lit up when talking about his upbringing.He’s not always so chill, though: His live shows are filled with perpetual movement. Sometimes he’ll hop on speakers, and at other moments he’ll walk in a nonstop loop onstage or occasionally through the crowd. It’s as if all the music he has taken in over the years were trying to come through concurrently.Matthews grew up between Birmingham, Ala., and Cincinnati in a family that exposed him to all kinds of music. His mother loved ’90s R&B, and his father, a saxophonist, played old records by Charlie Parker. He got into rap through his older brother, Hardy, who liked the New Orleans-based Cash Money Records — Lil Wayne, especially — and decided to follow suit.“I always wanted to be like my brother, so I was like, ‘Wayne’s my favorite rapper, too,’” Matthews said.“You can lump me in with anybody you want to, but my music is everything,” Matthews said. Schaun Champion for The New York TimesHe took up the trumpet, then the drums, and he played in marching bands from fifth grade through high school. (The cover art for “Gumbo’!” is a caricature drawing of Matthews in a marching band uniform.) He didn’t get serious about music until he got to college where, as a theater major at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, he started performing poetry while quietly honing his image as a Cash Money acolyte who sang like the R&B vocalist Macy Gray — “I really want to work with her,” he said — but also admired the balladry of conscious rap.“I heard what they were saying, and I thought, ‘They’re just rapping poems!’” Matthews said. “Then I was like, ‘Oh nah, I can rap my poems.’”Featuring a who’s who of experimental musicians, including the soul vocalists Liv.e, Georgia Anne Muldrow and Nick Hakim, “Gumbo’!” is a comedown from the raw emotion of last year’s LP, designed to showcase the full breadth of Matthews’ artistry. The sound is bigger and more bass-heavy, but the focus remains his deep admiration for family and the companionship of friends, full of voice mail messages from relatives and recorded conversations with pals. On a run of tracks near the end of the album, songs like “Living Proof” and “Smile (Wit Yo Gold)” slow the tempo to a stroll that feels like summertime barbecues when the sun starts to dip and the temperature cools to perfection.“I didn’t want people to box me in,” Matthews said. “I was trying to make something that reminded me of those drives from Birmingham to Cincinnati.”His overall goal is to keep working to try to reach the heights of two of his idols: Prince and George Clinton. “You can lump me in with anybody you want to, but my music is everything,” he said. “It’s a slow meal. You at grandma’s house, you ain’t gotta rush.” More

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      The Lox, Triumphant at Verzuz

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      In early August, Verzuz — the pandemic-era staple that began on Instagram Live and within a year morphed into a multi-platform content powerhouse with artists “battling” hit for hit — held its first live, ticketed, in-person event. The night featured two of New York’s most historically vital hip-hop crews, the Lox and Dipset, facing off at the Hulu Theater at Madison Square Garden.From a distance, it seemed like a light mismatch — Dipset, Cam’ron and his extended crew, are flashy and theatrical, and the Lox are workmanlike and relentless. But the battle took place in a boxing ring, and that set the tone: The Lox emerged triumphant.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about New York rap in the 1990s and early 2000s, the long-forgotten tension of pop crossover, and a night that brought the spirit of battle back to Verzuz, which had begun to turn into a lovefest.Guests:Jayson Rodriguez, a longtime hip-hop journalist and writer of the Backseat Freestyle newsletterJayson Buford, who writes about music for Rolling Stone, Pitchfork and others More

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      Nicki Minaj and Husband Sued, Accused of Harassing Sexual Assault Victim

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      Jennifer Hough said in a lawsuit filed in New York that the couple pressured her to recant her account of the rapper’s husband, Kenneth Petty, sexually assaulting her in 1994.A woman who accused the rapper Nicki Minaj’s husband, Kenneth Petty, of sexual assault during high school filed a lawsuit on Friday against the couple, alleging that they harassed and intimidated her while trying to convince her to recant her account.The case dates back to 1994, when Jennifer Hough, then 16, reported to the police that Mr. Petty — a 16-year-old she had known growing up in Jamaica, Queens — had raped her after leading her into a home at knife point, the lawsuit says. Mr. Petty was arrested that day and was charged with first-degree rape, and subsequently pleaded guilty to attempted rape, said Kim Livingston, a spokeswoman with the Queens district attorney’s office. He served about four and a half years in prison, according to inmate records.According to the lawsuit filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of New York, Ms. Hough, 43, and her family members started to receive communications from people claiming to be connected with Ms. Minaj and Mr. Petty shortly after Mr. Petty was arrested last year for failing to register as a sex offender in California. The lawsuit alleges harassment and witness intimidation, as well as intentional infliction of emotional distress by Ms. Minaj and Mr. Petty, and seeks unspecified damages. It also alleges sexual assault and battery against Mr. Petty, referring to the mid-90s case.A representative for Ms. Minaj did not immediately respond to requests for comment. A lawyer for Mr. Petty, Michael Goldstein, declined to comment on the lawsuit.The lawsuit says that an intermediary offered Ms. Hough $20,000 in exchange for signing a prepared statement recanting the accusation. At one point last year, the lawsuit says, Ms. Minaj called Ms. Hough, saying that she had heard Ms. Hough was willing to “help out”; days later, it says, Ms. Hough and her family members received an “onslaught of harassing calls and unsolicited visits” from people she believed to be associated with the couple.Ms. Hough “has not worked since May of 2020 due to severe depression, paranoia, constant moving, harassment and threats from the defendants and their associates,” the lawsuit says. “She is currently living in isolation out of fear of retaliation.”According to the lawsuit, Ms. Hough was on her way to school on Sept. 16, 1994, when she ran into Mr. Petty, a boy she knew from the neighborhood. The lawsuit says that Mr. Petty held a knife at her back as he led her to a house around the corner, where Ms. Hough said he raped her. The suit says that Ms. Hough escaped, ran to her high school and told security guards, who called the police.In an interview, Ms. Hough said that as her case was prosecuted, she faced harassment and retaliation in the neighborhood, prompting her family to force her to attend a court hearing for Mr. Petty and request that the charges be dropped — a request that was denied. At the time, the suit says, Mr. Petty had already accepted a plea deal.Ms. Hough said in an interview that she left New York City after the ordeal, and for years, it remained in the past: “I didn’t think it would be something that would come back and slap me in the face 20-something years later.”But in 2018, Ms. Minaj — a chart-topping rapper with a fiercely loyal social media following — posted about her relationship with Mr. Petty on Instagram, and questions about his status as a sex offender surfaced.Ms. Hough said in an interview that she had spoken to YouTube bloggers to defend herself and respond to an Instagram comment from Ms. Minaj that stated that Ms. Hough and Mr. Petty had been in a relationship at the time of the assault and that Mr. Petty was younger than Ms. Hough. (They were never in a relationship, and they were the same age, according to the lawsuit.)After Mr. Petty was arrested in 2020, Ms. Hough reconnected with a childhood friend from Queens, the lawsuit says, and told him she “wished it could all just go away forever.” Ms. Hough said that the friend replied, “I can make that happen.”The suit says that a few days later, the friend told Ms. Hough that Ms. Minaj had asked for her phone number, and the rapper later called her and offered to fly Ms. Hough out to Los Angeles or fly her publicist out to Ms. Hough; Ms. Hough said she declined and told the rapper, “I need you to know woman to woman, that this happened.”The lawsuit says there were then a series of encounters where Ms. Hough or her family members were offered inducements if she would recant: $500,000 at one point, $20,000 at another, with a proposed bonus that Ms. Minaj would send birthday videos to Ms. Hough’s daughter. Ms. Hough said she declined.Ms. Hough said in the interview that she never expressed interest in a bribe and was adamantly against recanting her story.“If I lie now and say that I lied then, you know what that does?” she said. “Do you know what that’s going to say to my two little girls, or even my sons?”Ms. Hough said in the interview that at one point she told the intermediary that the $500,000 offer was “not good enough.” She said she had been trying to deflect the conversation, not to express interest in a bribe. Tyrone Blackburn, a lawyer representing Ms. Hough, said Ms. Hough’s comment was an effort to dissuade the intermediary from thinking she would accept anything.At one point last fall, the suit says, Ms. Hough was contacted by a lawyer for Mr. Petty, who asked her about a recantation letter. In response to threatening calls and her own growing paranoia, the suit says that Ms. Hough moved three times in one year.“I feel like I’m living in secret,” she said in the interview, “like I can’t tell people my exact location.”Joe Coscarelli contributed reporting. Alain Delaqueriere contributed research. More

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      Robert Plant and Alison Krauss Team Up Again, and 10 More New Songs

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      Hear tracks by Lizzo featuring Cardi B, Machine Gun Kelly, Brandee Younger and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Robert Plant and Alison Krauss, ‘Can’t Let Go’Robert Plant, Alison Krauss and the guitarist and producer T Bone Burnett, who released “Raising Sand” in 2007, have joined forces again for an album due in the fall called “Raise the Roof.” They’ve turned Lucinda Williams’s “Can’t Let Go” into a rockabilly rumba, singing close harmony and sharing the spotlight with a twangy lead guitar. The lyrics are about heartbreak and loneliness, but the performance flaunts camaraderie. JON PARELESJade Bird, ‘Candidate’No slow burn here: The English roots-rocker Jade Bird vents against every man who “takes me for a fool,” flailing at her acoustic guitar and quickly summoning a full electric band, counterattacking both her own past naïveté and everyone who’s ever exploited it. PARELESLadyhawke, ‘Think About You’The New Zealand musician Pip Brown has been releasing music as Ladyhawke since 2008, but the light, infectious “Think About You” proves she’s still got some fresh ideas up her sleeve. Buoyed by a disco-pop bass line and a Bowie-esque riff, the song is a dreamy ode to the timeless feeling of being crush-struck: “Try as I may I can’t seem to shake away this crazy feeling inside.” Don’t overthink it, commands the song’s breezy vibe. LINDSAY ZOLADZKaty B, ‘Under My Skin’Ten years ago, the British pop singer Katy B released her effervescent debut album “On a Mission,” which helped usher in an era of sleek dance-floor reveries from kindred spirits like Disclosure and Jessie Ware. She’s been relatively quiet for the past half decade, returning with a sultry mid-tempo affair that retains her voice’s soulful grit. “The beginning of the end, the moment that I let you in,” she sings, the ruefulness of this realization balanced out by her charismatic sass. ZOLADZBrandee Younger, ‘Spirit U Will’In a group setting, the harp can seem a separate element, becoming something like the air around an ensemble sound — proof of a higher atmosphere, or simply a foil. In Brandee Younger’s hands, and in the pieces that she writes and performs, the harp is something different: It’s the scaffolding, the very bones of the larger sound. On “Spirit U Will,” from her just-released Impulse! debut, “Somewhere Different,” Younger and the bassist Dezron Douglas build the foundation of a bobbing, West African-indebted beat, stenciled out by the drummer Allan Mednard’s muffled snare patterns and given lift by the soaring trumpet of Maurice Brown. GIOVANNI RUSSONELLOLizzo featuring Cardi B, ‘Rumors’Here’s a natural alliance: two boisterous performers who know that all attention — admiring or disapproving, prurient or censorious — pays off. “All the rumors are true,” Lizzo boasts, stifling a giggle, as a cowbell thumps and horns punch a riff; Cardi B revels in her international fame — “They lie in a language I can’t even read” — and vows, “Last time I got freaky the FCC sued me/But I’mma keep doing what I’m gonna do.” Together they share the last laughs. PARELESNas featuring Ms. Lauryn Hill, ‘Nobody’Nas collaborated with Lauryn Hill (before she added the Ms.) 25 years ago on “If I Ruled the World (Imagine That).” Their reunion, from the new Nas album “King’s Disease II,” cruises on a mid-tempo beat and easygoing electric-piano chords. It’s an elder-generation complaint. Nas longs for privacy and recalls an era “Before the internet energy and social decline/Destroyed the vibe, foolin’ us with the headlines, keepin’ us blind.” Ms. Lauryn Hill bats away old complaints about her long absences from performing and her lack of careerism: “Now let me give it to you balanced and with clarity/I don’t need to turn myself into a parody.” They’re not defensive; they’re calmly proficient. PARELESKodak Black featuring Rod Wave, ‘Before I Go’Death and paranoia loom in multimillion-streaming hip-hop tracks like “Before I Go.” Two sing-rappers, Kodak Black and Rod Wave, trade verses over descending minor chords, hollow drum-machine beats and a quavery repeating keyboard line. Kodak Black confesses to problems, says he still listens to his mother and wonders, “I don’t know why but they be plotting to kill me.” Rod Wave details his safeguards but expects the worst. Neither one counts on a happy ending, even if Kodak insists, “Everybody gonna die before I go.” PARELESMachine Gun Kelly, ‘Papercuts’Machine Gun Kelly delivers the verses of his gloriously pummeling “Papercuts” in a classic pop-punk drawl, and the towering, crunchy guitars recall the heyday of ’90s alternative rock. (The distorted chords almost sound like a direct homage to Green Day’s “Brain Stew.”) The first single from his upcoming sixth album, “Born With Horns,” continues in the straight-ahead rock lane that suited him well on last year’s “Tickets to My Downfall,” and it arrives with a surreal music video directed by Cole Bennett. The clip features MGK strutting down the streets of Los Angeles in sequined pants and a tattooed bald cap, cutting a silhouette that’s a little bit Ziggy Stardust, a little bit Kurt Cobain. ZOLADZBig Thief, ‘Little Things’There’s a warm, feral energy to “Little Things,” the A-side of a new single from the Brooklyn folk-rockers Big Thief. Adrianne Lenker murmurs a string of nervous, vulnerable confessions — “Maybe I’m a little obsessed, maybe you do use me” — but the rest of her band creates a textured, woolly atmosphere that swaddles her like a blanket. By the middle of their rootsy jam session, she’s feeling both frustrated and free enough to let loose a cathartic primal scream. ZOLADZPRISM Quartet featuring Chris Potter and Ravi Coltrane, ‘Improvisations: Interlude 2’The PRISM Quartet is four saxophonists, anchored in Western classical, whose catholic interests have brought them into contact with European experimental composers, Afro-Latin innovators and jazz improvisers. On the group’s new album, “Heritage/Evolution, Volume 2,” the quartet is joined by Chris Potter, Ravi Coltrane and Joe Lovano, three of the leading saxophonists in jazz, each of whom contributes original material. Potter wrote his “Improvisations” suite by capturing himself extemporizing on saxophone, then turning some of those improvisations into a layered composition. Partway through the suite, on “Interlude 2,” he (on tenor sax) and Coltrane (on soprano) tangle and nip at each other, while the PRISM Quartet tunnels into a syncopated groove, not unlike something the World Saxophone Quartet might’ve played in the 1980s. RUSSONELLO More

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      Bobby Shmurda’s New Lust for Life

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      The Brooklyn rapper, fresh off nearly seven years in prison on gang conspiracy charges, is plotting his dance-heavy comeback — slowly.Bobby Shmurda just can’t sit still.Since being released from prison in February after nearly seven years, the high-energy, loose-hipped Brooklyn rapper born Ackquille Pollard, 27, has made dancing a priority, busting out his trademark shimmies and thrusts anywhere he turns up.In clips that have lit up social media, Shmurda has jerked and rolled at clubs, exclusive parties and onstage last month at the Rolling Loud festival in Miami, his first concert appearance as a free man. At the studio in New York recently, he showed off a video of himself engaging in a dance battle with an Instagram influencer, but it was nearly impossible to see, because he was wiggling along in real time, shaking his cellphone.Later, as the rapper’s new songs played over the industrial-grade speakers, he kept rollicking, like Elvis in an office chair, an itch he attributed to his Jamaican heritage.What Shmurda, who pleaded guilty to conspiracy and weapons charges in 2016, hasn’t done in the nearly six months he’s been out is release any new music of his own. This slow, deliberate game plan stands in stark contrast to the prevalence of the “first day out” song in hip-hop, with artists and labels alike typically wanting to take advantage of a surge in interest around a finished prison sentence.“Instead of saying, boom, ‘I want to go in the streets and cause hell,’ I’m saying, ‘I want to go in the streets and give back,’” Shmurda said. “I feel like that’s gangster.”Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York Times“I just knew I had to get my business together,” Shmurda said in late June about the delay. “You can’t be walking around outside and your kitchen stinks.”But with a freshened-up record deal and a new, top-shelf management team — including the Roc Nation professionals who helped reinvent Meek Mill, post-prison, as an A-lister and activist — Shmurda is about ready to get going. He recently appeared with J Balvin and Daddy Yankee on a mostly Spanish-language drill remix, and he’s been working on a pile of his own singles and videos in an attempt to capture some late-summer momentum.At the mostly empty offices of Roc Nation, Jay-Z’s all-purpose talent company, Shmurda was hyperactive yet solicitous, offering around his own water bottle one sweaty evening. In the coming weeks, the rapper will perform at Summer Jam in New York and the Made in America Festival in Philadelphia.In preparation, Shmurda has recorded with artists like Swae Lee, DaBaby and Migos, but the common denominator is rhythm and movement. “We’re going to be dancing 24/7,” Shmurda said. “When I dance, it’s to show you that I came through the struggle, but I overcame it and we’re still overcoming it.”The intricacies of the rapper’s life story — and his boundless charisma — made him something of a hip-hop folk hero in absentia. Regarded as part meme, part cautionary tale, part political prisoner, Shmurda saw his legend grow in line with those of once-incarcerated rappers like Gucci Mane, despite the fact that he had released just five songs (plus a smattering of guest appearances) before he got locked up.Already, Roc Nation is fielding offers from distribution platforms for a documentary or a feature film about Shmurda’s saga.Shmurda pleaded guilty to conspiracy and weapons charges in 2016 and served nearly seven years.Kevin Hagen for The New York Times“Hip-hop loves an underdog story and a hero’s journey,” said Sidney Madden, an NPR Music reporter and podcaster whose series about rap and the criminal justice system, “Louder Than a Riot” (co-hosted with Rodney Carmichael), dedicated three episodes to Shmurda’s case. “His rise and fall felt so rapid and a little bit Shakespearean. It really left people wanting more because of the way he got jammed up.”“It felt like he was ripped away from the hip-hop world and the community that made him,” Madden added, noting Shmurda’s obvious showmanship, which was apparent even when she and Carmichael interviewed him in prison. “I truly hope whoever’s around him now can harness that energy.”Shmurda’s current position has been hard-earned. Raised in the working-class immigrant community of East Flatbush, his father incarcerated for life on a murder charge from the year after he was born, Shmurda opted for gang life. In and out of juvenile detention as a teenager, he returned from an upstate facility in 2012, hoping to find an off-ramp.“I was young, wild, bad,” Shmurda said. “When I came home that year, they was investigating us, so I started rapping, trying to get out.” He recalled detectives who would “pull up on the block, call us by name, take pictures.” That’s when he started taking music seriously.It almost worked.When Shmurda hears his early music now, he experiences “love, pain, everything — a bunch of mixed emotions knowing where it took me, where it got me,” he said. Rose Marie Cromwell for The New York TimesIn the summer of 2014, Shmurda released a music video, “Hot Boy” in its edited form, that was equally grimy and catchy, threatening violence even as he rocked those hips and grinned big with his neighborhood friends. One clip, isolated and looped, showed the rapper throwing his fitted cap in the air and doing his trademark Shmoney Dance. It went viral on Vine, and then everywhere. Even Beyoncé mimicked the move.“Hot Boy” — with lines like, “I’ve been selling crack since like the fifth grade” — would go on to score Shmurda a seven-figure record deal with Epic, along with agreements for some of his East Flatbush associates, and the song reached No. 6 on the Billboard Hot 100. But its success was too late and, according to the authorities, had not stemmed the violence that continued to surround the rapper.That December, New York gang prosecutors conducted a sweep, arresting Shmurda at a Manhattan studio and eventually locking up more than a dozen others they said were part of GS9, an offshoot of the Crips. Though Shmurda was not accused of committing the most serious acts himself, prosecutors used racketeering statutes to argue that he was “the driving force” and “organizing figure within this conspiracy,” which they said was responsible for multiple shootings and at least one murder.Nearly two years later, at 22, Shmurda pleaded guilty to two counts — six others filed against him were dropped — and he was sentenced to seven years in prison. While incarcerated, Shmurda was disciplined for violations including fighting and possessing contraband in the form of a shiv, which he later told a parole board was for self-defense, calling Rikers Island “just a crazy place.”When Shmurda hears his early music now, he experiences “love, pain, everything — a bunch of mixed emotions knowing where it took me, where it got me,” he said. “You feel all the times that you thought about the brothers who aren’t here or who are locked up.”Shmurda has been working on singles and videos of his own in an attempt to capture some late-summer momentum.Corey Jermaine Chalumeau for The New York TimesBut he wears little of that angst in public, swearing that his relationship with his parole officer is great — even if he can’t yet get a passport because of the terms of his release — and that his prison sentence saved him. The current restrictions on his life, Shmurda said, are “not holding me back from nothing — they’re keeping me out of jail.”“I ain’t mad about going to jail, because my mind-state now versus my mind-state before — I probably would’ve been in jail for life before,” he added. “The stuff that’s going to get you in trouble or put you in that situation, you can see that from miles away.”“When I was young, I used to run towards it,” he continued. “I was a full animal. So I feel like being locked up, it made me smarter. It made me stronger. And it made me badder, but in a good way. Instead of saying, boom, ‘I want to go in the streets and cause hell,’ I’m saying, ‘I want to go in the streets and give back.’ I feel like that’s gangster.”Mike Brinkley, a senior vice president of artist management at Roc Nation, said that Shmurda has been a curious and active participant in plotting his comeback. “He’ll ask questions and not just ask but actually comprehend,” the manager said. “Meeting him for the first time, you can’t even fathom what he went through because he doesn’t wear it. He’s like, ‘I’m here to work, what do you need me to do?’”Recently, Shmurda had to be caught up on the glut of streaming services and social networks that bloomed while he was gone. “My godkids got me TikToking!” he said.But he is still finding his voice — which has deepened — and his place in the current rap landscape, with “Hot Boy” having given way to Brooklyn drill and New York stars like Cardi B and Pop Smoke, who was killed last year. Shmurda is even teaching himself how to produce beats, wanting a hand in all parts of his debut album.The rapper described his day-to-day life, post-prison, as “music, girls, family, music, girls, more girls,” but he now only pops over to East Flatbush for brief visits. “Anybody in the streets is looking over their shoulder 24/7,” Shmurda said. “And they’re also taking a risk. That risk ain’t worth it.”But at the studio in Manhattan, an old friend came with a piece of home in hand — jerk chicken from one of Shmurda’s former go-to spots. The rapper was instantly transported, and he insisted everybody try a bite. More

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      Reggaeton’s History Is Complex. A New Podcast Helps Us Listen That Way.

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      “Loud” asks us to reconsider mainstream histories of the genre, and reveals critical conversations about its roots and evolution.In Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic, marquesinas are centers of convocation, where family and friends gather to drink, dance and talk. Intimacy and conviviality are cultivated at these open-air garages and courtyards, a staple of middle-class homes. They’re where you gain an education. Where you learn the curves of your body when you dance to reggaeton for the first time and start to understand the language that the music offers: the ecstasy and uncertainty of youth, sexual self-discovery and the freedom of movement.Even at early 2000s marquesina parties, reggaeton carried certain myths. If you grew up at the crest of the genre’s commercial rise like I did, you were taught certain ideas about the genre early on. The notion, for example, that it is just vulgar party music. Or that it was invented solely in Puerto Rico. Or that it is a feel-good example of global cultural crossover, imploding language and cultural barriers and ushering Latinos into the mainstream.But these are deceptive and simplistic assumptions. They mask the knotty power dynamics embedded in popular music, especially if a genre emerges from a place of struggle. They perpetuate reductive ideas about reggaeton, obscuring the prismatic conditions of its past and present.As a movement that is shaped by the displacement and migration of Black diasporic sounds and their people, reggaeton is difficult to pin down with a firm definition. But there are some essential coordinates: the circulation and metamorphosis of Jamaican dancehall, Panamanian reggae en español, hip-hop and Puerto Rican underground.Many locate the seeds of reggaeton in 1980s Panama, where the children of West Indian canal workers experimented with translating Jamaican dancehall, Trinidadian soca and other Afro-Antillean genres into Spanish. New York dancehall and Panamanian reggae en español traveled to Puerto Rico, where the genre evolved alongside hip-hop en español as a movement called underground. Reggaeton always contained lyrical multiplicity: it was a genre for partying, but also for talking about life on the street: drugs, racism, crime, romance — stories of pleasure and protest.“Loud,” a new podcast produced by Spotify in partnership with Futuro Studios, chronicles the evolution of reggaeton head-on and at a critical moment, after a long period of neglect by the English-speaking media. Today, its global influence is too large to ignore: There is the success of artists like Bad Bunny, who was Spotify’s most-streamed artist in 2020; the once inescapable “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi and Daddy Yankee, a watered-down, popetón smash with a Justin Bieber cameo that tied for the longest-running No. 1 in Billboard’s Hot 100 history; as well as endless reports that detail the genre’s ascendance on streaming platforms.“Loud” unpacks all of this context, while fighting the narrative impulse to collapse intricate realities. Conversations about reggaeton usually include the never-ending debate about whether the genre started in Puerto Rico, which overlooks layers of diasporic musical exchange. There is the ongoing argument about reggaeton’s political utility, which suggests that political expression must be easily identifiable in order to be valuable. And there is the continued idolization of the “crossover” — songs and artists that achieve success with English-speaking listeners — a marketing narrative that celebrates reggaeton as some sort of Latino victory in the face of marginalization, without exploring everything that fraught concept entails.The thorough “Loud” is deeply aware of the textures of reggaeton. Over 10 episodes, it traces different chapters of the genre’s development: its Panamanian roots, its industry takeover in the early and mid-2000s and its rebirth in Medellín, Colombia. The bilingual podcast embraces nuance and respect for legacy artists; its narrator, Ivy Queen, is reggaeton royalty, one of the few women in the industry who garnered commercial recognition.In the first episode, the project firmly highlights the genre’s Afro-Caribbean provenance and defiant beginnings: “For some people, reggaeton is just party music. But the real story of reggaeton is about la resistencia. Resistance,” Ivy Queen states with piercing clarity. “About how kids who were young or poor, Black or dark-skinned — kids who were discriminated against in every way — how we refused to be quiet.” As the episode comes to a close, she puts an exclamation point on the show’s larger argument, stating that reggaeton is a “Black sound with roots from the English-speaking world.”The 10 episodes of “Loud” include a majority of the music being discussed.It’s a position statement about the music’s creators, ethos and identity that holds throughout the series’s run. There’s no shortage of rebellion in “Loud.” This is a project that immerses listeners in dissent.It tells of how underground artists fought back against the criminalization they faced in the ’90s and early ’00s in Puerto Rico, when the police raided public housing projects and confiscated cassettes from record stores under the guise of curbing drugs and violence. It describes the fearlessness of Tego Calderón, who made pro-Black reggaeton anthems and scorched the public consciousness with his condemnations of colonial thinking. It reminds us how Anglo major labels and radio stations stumbled as they tried to cash in on a movement that they didn’t understand, and that couldn’t be tamed. For an industry that often renders arrival in the United States as evidence of ultimate career triumph, this narrative pivot is as curative as it is urgent.“Loud” has rights to most of the music it analyzes, and knows it holds a gold mine. In one chapter, the show demonstrates how the game-changing producers Luny Tunes infused reggaeton with melody and strings through the lens of Ivy Queen’s virtuosic “Te He Querido Te He Llorado.” Listening to the episode, as the song’s bachata guitar and dembow drums slashed through each other under Ivy’s guttural wail, I was moved to stand up and belted her requiem of resentment and heartbreak to no one in particular.But “Loud” tackles the difficult parts of this music’s history, too: the homophobia embedded in Shabba Ranks’s “Dem Bow,” which serves as the genre’s percussive foundation; the vilification of the music, which led to government censorship campaigns in Puerto Rico; and the racist and classist bias of traditional Latino media, which did not book reggaeton acts at the outset of its mainstream ascent. A few moments that surround the genre’s history would benefit from further reflection here; a discussion of the racial ideology of mestizaje, for example, is a little too brief to treat the subject with enough depth.Of course, it is impossible to sketch a complete portrait of any popular music genre over the course of a podcast. And reggaeton is a genre of transformation, a movement that has refused stasis and undergone constant reinvention over the course of its existence. “Loud” asks us to reconsider the collective stories we heard about the music at the marquesina parties that shaped some of our early understanding of its contours. It chips away at reggaeton’s canon, urging us to take a closer look at the depth and the insurgency it has promised all along. It forces us to listen to reggaeton with complexity — as much complexity as the music and its history hold in the first place. More