![]() Lethem offers no explanation for Super Goat Man’s fantastical leap (“fall from grace,” Everett calls it) from comic book pages to real world Brooklyn where Everett first indifferently meets him. Similarities end there, since, to the best of my knowledge, neither my wife nor I ever had sex with Super Goat Man. We married in 1993, same as Everett and his wife, a fellow medievalist. Everett is postdocing at Rutgers, where my wife and I met as undergrads. If I’m doing the math right, that’s 1993, same year my wife landed her current academic position. Like me, Super Goat Man and his narrator became professors in “the harmless pantheon of academia.” Everett ends his tale on the job market. Everett’s birth also parallels the escalation of U.S. I was born in 1966, Lethem a little earlier, his narrator Everett a little before that-not the start of the Silver Age, but the start of its relevancy. ![]() Why were literary Avengers assembling in 2004? I’ll get back to that. Jonathan Lethem’s short story “Super Goat Man” appeared in The New Yorker in April 2004, and Deborah Eisenberg (also a New Yorker fav) published “Twilight of the Superheroes” that fall. But this dynamic duo reveals more about the politics of superheroes than do the contents of most comic shops. ![]() To a fan coming up in the era of Cardi or Tyler or Polo G or Playboi Carti, the golden age is now.I know, you never heard of either. One of the incredible things about hip-hop is that it evolves and expands faster than any other genre in music history. to Houston to Chicago, and beyond.Īs we dug and listened, we found ourselves a little less swayed by “golden age” mystique than we might’ve been had we done this list 10 or 15 years ago. and Rakim and others, through the gangsta era, the rise of the South, the ascendance of larger-than-life aughts superstars like Jay-Z and Kanye West and Nicki Minaj, and on and on into more recent moments like blog-rap, emo-rap, and drill, from New York to L.A. The result was a list that touches on every important moment in the genre’s evolution - from compilations that honor the music’s paleo old-school days, to its artistic flourishing in the late Eighties and early Nineties with Public Enemy, De La Soul, Eric B. When confronted with a choice between the third (or fourth or fifth) record by a classic artist (Outkast, for instance, or A Tribe Called Quest) and an album from an artist who would make the list more interesting (The Jacka or Saba or Camp Lo), we tended to go with the latter option. Relatedly, a list of hip-hop-adjacent albums from the worlds of dancehall or reggaeton or grime would be fun and fascinating, and something for us to revisit down the road. That’s one reason we limited our scope to English language hip-hop. ![]() But the history of rap LPs is so rich and varied, we were forced to make some painful choices - there are so many iconic artists with deep catalogs, so many constantly evolving sounds and regional scenes. Two hundred seems like an almost luxuriantly expansive number when you’re making an albums list, and in any other genre, maybe it would be. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |