Rambling - Culture - The Atlantic

Ta-Nehisi Coates - Ta-Nehisi Coates is a senior editor for The Atlantic, where he writes about culture, politics, and social issues for TheAtlantic.com and the magazine. He is the author of the memoir The Beautiful Struggle.

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Born in 1975, the product of two beautiful parents. Raised in West Baltimore, not quite The Wire, but sometimes ill all the same. Studied at the Mecca for some years in the mid-90s. Emerged with a purpose, if not a degree. Slowly migrated up the East Coast with a baby and my beloved, until I reached the shores of Harlem. Wrote some stuff along the way.

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Rambling

Jul 14 2010, 1:00 PM ET | Comment

I think, even in my younger more hardcore hip-hop days, I was a contrarian in my circles. I always had a visceral dislike for the earnestness of back-packers, for people who insisted on reciting the four elements of "hip-hop culture," and for nostalgia in general. I'm not immune to any of those feeling, but I can remember sucking my teeth at people who identified themselves as "hip-hop journalists." Looking back on it now, I was--and in some respects continue to be--a kind of snob. In fact, all movements have their puritans and dutiful adherents. I was too young to know this, and thus thought it said something about hip-hop itself.

But I think I've come full circle now--as most of you know I'm in the midst of working on a book about the Civil War. Like all things, this could well or it could go to pieces. I don't think I have much choice in such matters. What's shocked me is how, as I've worked, the literary aesthetic, and even the musical aesthetic, of hip-hop has stuck with me and how I can't stop thinking about it. I understood that that would be true of my first book--a work deeply influenced and infuses with language and history of hip-hop. I did not expect it when thinking about the Civil War.

As I have said, I am utterly enchanted with the language of mid 19th century Americans--black and white, enslaved and freeborn. But this is what rings in my voice every night

Politicking, plus vicking, sticking these Dominicans,

Eating good, had to shoot my way up out of Bennigan's.

That's life, to top it all off, beef with wife,

Pulling bleach out trying to through it in my eye-sight.

That is, of course, Raekwon from the beautiful, beautifuRambling - Culture - The Atlantic