« Battle for Brooklyn, About Atlantic Yards Fight, To Screen Nationwide and In 5 Boroughs | Main | Looking at "The House That Hova Hyped," the Times T Magazine supplement feature on Jay-Z »
September 6, 2012
The House That Hova Built
The New York Times
by Zadie Smith
Synergy! You build us a new office tower, we'll run a big, softball, pseudo-literary fashion piece on your frontman and your arena three weeks before he opens it with a series of concerts.
With Tupac, you can hear the effort, the artistry. And Biggie’s words first had to struggle free of the sheer bulk of the man himself. When Jay raps, it pours right into your ear like water from a tap.
Or subsidies from the ESDC.
The fish sandwich arrives. Conversation turns to the schoolboy who was shot to death, Trayvon Martin — “It’s really heartbreaking, that that still can happen in this day and age” — and, soon after, to Obama: “I’ve said the election of Obama has made the hustler less relevant.” When he first made this point, “People took it in a way that I was almost dismissing what I am. And I was like: no, it’s a good thing!” He didn’t have Obama growing up, only the local hustler. “No one came to our neighborhoods, with stand-up jobs, and showed us there’s a different way. Maybe had I seen different role models, maybe I’d’ve turned on to that.”
Um, no. When local hustler Bruce Ratner came to his (former) neighborhood, he was all in.
Posted by eric at September 6, 2012 10:42 PM