Though hip-hop celebrated its 50th birthday this year-commemorating a legendary August 1973 party in the Bronx-she realizes that the genre isn’t exactly courting middle-aged moms. Her home thrums with indie rock and NPR news, not Kendrick Lamar or Ice Spice. Now wild turkeys wander past the rhododendrons in her yard. When she first visited friends there, shortly after the birth of her daughter, in 1996, she experienced a new kind of calm: “I didn’t even know what it felt like for a place to bring you peace,” she told me. Although she was born in Detroit, and made her name in New York City, she now spends much of the year on Martha’s Vineyard. Her reluctance is partly a reflection of the life she leads in her early 50s. A profile of her focused on hip-hop, she’d texted me, would be her “nightmare”-a stance that had softened only slightly by the time we met. She is now primarily a filmmaker and an activist.
She has publicly, repeatedly, broken up with hip-hop. Yet I’d arrived two days earlier thinking that the many artists who’d crossed her path would be mostly off-limits for discussion. Kelly, the R&B star who contributed many horny refrains to rap songs, in prison after decades of unpunished sexual predation. She co-wrote Jay-Z’s landmark 2010 memoir she produced the 2019 documentary that is widely credited with landing R. As hip-hop ascended to global dominance, hampton-whose lowercase byline is inspired by the Black feminist critic bell hooks-challenged it from the inside, treating rap music with the seriousness it deserved while calling out its materialism and misogyny. She started out writing for the hip-hop magazine The Source in the 1990s before becoming a contributor to Vibe and The Village Voice. Hampton is arguably the most significant music journalist of her generation. She’d said it would be weird to view her younger self with me I was surprised that she was willing to show me the footage at all. I watched the footage this past June in the basement of hampton’s house on Martha’s Vineyard.
“What’s the problem? Do we need to do something before we go on the road? Take this outside?” The video cut to static. “Why are you going at me today?” she asked. Annoyed at the interruption, Biggie mocked her question. View Moreįrom behind the camera, hampton asked whether he intended to consume their entire bag of weed. Check out more from this issue and find your next story to read.
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