From the New Yorker

Hip-hop was born in the seventies and keeps evolving––radically evolving. As Kelefa Sanneh notes in his piece on Jay-Z and the rise of corporate rap, hip-hop has become a little bit like rock and roll in the nineteen-sixties: a term constantly invoked but elusive in its definition. The passage from Grandmaster Flash to Kendrick Lamar is as varied and rich as the one from Louis Armstrong and his Hot Fives and Hot Seven to Ornette Coleman. The form is too complex, too protean, to pin down. The New Yorker pieces presented today, samplings of what has been written about hip-hop in the magazine over the years, get at only small, glittering shards of the over-all diversity of the music and its language, its geography and creative personalities. There’s the great Missy Elliott, who was “energetically redefining the boundaries of rap music” when Hilton Als wrote about her, in 1997, and there’s Daniel Dumile, in his guise as MF Doom, observed by Ta-Nehisi Coates in a piece that is part memoir, about growing up listening to the music in West Baltimore, part Profile, and part critical appreciation. Odd Future’s steep ascent, beginning in 2007, took place almost entirely online, with the members becoming viral stars long before they sold albums. Their success, though, arose from a more old-fashioned source, which Sanneh describes as “an earnest devotion to the old-fashioned craft of hip-hop.” In his piece on Earl Sweatshirt, the group’s elusive front man, Sanneh writes about a music of subtle rhythms, unexpected rhyme endings, do-it-yourself beat-making, and engrossing storytelling. The pieces also include Ben McGrath on Hot 97, the radio locus of hip-hop, and Rebecca Mead on Lin-Manuel Miranda, who has somehow managed to meld American history, rap, and musical theatre. Just as the Public Theatre brought rock and roll to the stage with “Hair,” in 1967, Miranda, working at the very same theatre just months ago, unleashed his thrilling life of Alexander Hamilton in a hip-hop mode. As Mead makes plain, even an eighteenth-century Cabinet meeting can be material for a musical form first developed at block parties in the Bronx.

—David Remnick articles: Gettin' Paid by Kelefa Sanneh Jay-Z has succeeded by treating hip-hop above all as a corporate enterprise, by embracing ruthless professionalism as his guiding aesthetic. As he once put it, “What y’all about to witness is big business, kid.”   The New Negro by Hilton Als Unlike the majority of rappers, who try to approximate in their live performances the exact sounds and movements they’ve used in their videos, Missy approaches rapping the way jazz musicians approach jazz—as an improvisational musical form.   Where Hip-Hop Lives by Ben McGrath Hot 97 has adopted a defiant business strategy that consists, in effect, of converting its production facility into a stage set of the hood. “We don’t emulate the life style; we are the life style,” the station’s programming director said.   Where's Earl by Kelefa Sanneh In the middle of an extraordinary ascent, Odd Future’s standout act, Earl Sweatshirt, was missing. The band made cryptic Web posts and distributed concert flyers with Earl’s name crossed out and a terse explanation: “Will not be there due to mom.”   All about the Hamiltons by Rebecca Mead In his musical, Lin-Manuel Miranda creates an Alexander Hamilton of incandescent focus and barely suppressed fury. Onstage the rap soliloquy feels startlingly apt as his preferred mode of self-expression.   The Mask of Doom by Ta-Nehisi Coates A rap album is an autobiographical comic book, whose author styles himself as an anti-hero. When Dumile began performing as MF Doom, he extended hip-hop’s obsession with façades. He did literally what most rappers only do metaphorically: he wore a mask.