"Look up, look up—seek your Maker—’fore Gabriel blows his horn"
- Bob Dylan
"Gather round hustlers—that's if you still livin'"
- Jay-Z
On September 10th, 2001, I only had enough money to afford one of the many tempting albums releasing the next day. I was a 17-year-old college freshman who didn’t take his then-girlfriend out on a date the weekend before, just so I would have enough money to buy an album. This was not new; I come from a place where everyone often only had the money to buy one album on Tuesdays. Poverty isn’t always romantic, but it makes your choices meaningful. It makes what you choose to carry with you last longer than just a week, month, or a year. I miss going to a proper record store and buying an album, so much that I even do it now from time to time, even with endless access to any music I could desire right at my fingertips, far more accessible than it was in the fall of 2001. There is something more complete about physically handing a person money that you worked for, and in exchange, getting a copy of something that an artist believes in. When I fell asleep on the night of September 10th, 2001, I truly thought that the biggest problem I would face upon waking was not having enough money to buy all of the albums I desired.
The truth is that music alone doesn’t decide who gets to live and die in America. It shows up and feeds on what is already present. Our fear, our violence, our love and lovemaking, our sadness. Still, there is no song that can un-bury a body, send a dead loved one back, living, to your arms. Music, at its best, has to face the world it arrives in, and whoever is still left alive in it, eager to be carried away from whatever new long-held innocence is being ripped from their hands.
I like to think that Jay Z has always known and understood this. Especially the Jay Z of 2001, who dragged himself through the hail of bullets and shiny suits that rained down on hip-hop in the mid- to late-'90s, and emerged as the heir to the throne. A king without a fully formed crown, still looking for a mid-career masterpiece to transition him seamlessly from the block to the boardroom. The Blueprint still holds up as the album we needed before we knew we would need it. A love letter to reinvention, an ode to being rebuilt as a newer and stronger machine. In the aftermath of an unimaginable violence, I believed in "The Takeover" as more than just a diss track, but also as a meditation on fear and fearlessness. A flag of our own making, stuck in fragile ground. This is not a wholly patriotic statement, rather, what it can feel like to wrestle power back from overwhelming anxiety. Owning your space while you still have it, even if it’s only for three minutes. I find this in hip-hop more than anywhere else, even now. It could be due to the idea that so many rappers are making music to legitimize their lives, or become less feared in a country that has always used its fear of them to justify their death. The Blueprint was a brave and immensely sad album, at a time when both of those things were equally felt, and equally needed. I say all of this without even mentioning The Blueprint as the Jay Z album that contains the best rapping from front to back. The album that birthed the Jay Z that coasted into his prime dominance, the smooth storyteller, the boastful lyricist, the MC who finally stopped bowing to production and made the production bow to him. And still, everyone I knew needed to hear "The Ruler’s Back" just as much as they needed to hear "Song Cry", we needed both of those doors opened for us to walk through. More than any other song, "Heart of the City" rolls every sentiment into one. Boastful and longing, nostalgic for what was, but still firmly planted in the present. Eager for a simpler time, but still surviving in its own, reaching for a new and promising sky.
What Bob Dylan knows is something different. I don’t speak from experience, but I imagine that to come from the Midwest and conquer your country’s grandest city is to be always hungry for the most calm and silent memories that you have. I have always heard that in Dylan’s music, a lens on the America that he felt most guilty about not waking up in. Love and Theft, by most critical standards, is the central piece in Dylan’s second great trilogy of albums, preceded by 1997’s Time Out of Mind and followed by 2007’s Modern Times. In Dylan’s wild and relentlessly fading America, there is always an outlaw, or a bad man. There is always an apocalypse on the horizon, endless foreshadowing with no answers to be had at the end. Love and Theft is probably the Dylan album that has the least amount of hope to be had, amplified by when it arrived to us. I trembled while listening to "Mississippi", Dylan growling out the line "sky full of fire/ pain pouring down," the eerie way the album itself crafted the idea of panic and uncertainty felt at the time. The way the apocalyptic "Sugar Baby" closes out the album, stripped down and urging listeners to look up and seek their maker. It seems prophetic only until you remember that this is what Bob Dylan’s America always looks like. The clouds are always gathering overhead, as they are through the eyes of most poets. In regards to what he could do for us, Bob Dylan in the fall of 2001 wasn’t much different than Bob Dylan in the fall of 1964. The musician who doesn’t pull us back from the brink, but the one who moves us even closer to the edge, and shows us what lies below. The world that is as bad as we think it is, the other reality that we often need, the honesty that we are going to have to recover from, whether we like it or not.
In America, especially in times of emergency, people find it easy to convince themselves that we are the world’s underdog. The one who will rise to the top, despite all manner of resistance. When I first heard Fabolous, it was on DJ Clue’s 1998 mixtape The Professional, when he went by the name Fabolous Sport, hailed as the leader of a brand new, sharper era of Brooklyn MCs. By the time his 2001 debut was primed to come out, most people in my circle of "serious" rap fans had dismissed him as an extension of the status quo: a punchline rapper with a sleepy flow, devoid of substance, draped in jewelry. In retrospect, he was absolutely all of those things; his first music video appearance was complete with all of the era’s staples: large rims, even larger throwback jerseys, bright colors. We saw these things with most mainstream rappers of the era, but the feeling around Fabolous in 2001 was "who does THIS guy think he is?"
I love hip-hop as an instant proving ground. While that’s slightly less true now than it was in 2001 (and in 2001, it was slightly less true than it was in 1991), the fact is still that your body of work talks so that you don’t have to. And if it doesn’t, you’re not going to make it. Ghetto Fabolous is one of my favorite debut albums. Admittedly, I was rooting for Fabolous. I probably believed in the idea of being an underdog in the midst of feeling helpless, and I needed the album to be more than an afterthought. It is the perfect debut for a New York MC facing a new century. The scope and range of the album was impressive, opening with a fierce warning shot, "Click and Spark", becoming more calm and introspective as the album goes on, peaking in the middle with the unapologetically romantic "Trade It All".
The Fabolous I remember best existed in that September. The mixtape superstar with a world of expectations, and more than enough people hoping he wouldn’t live up to them. Showing up, and delivering a small triumph.
I don’t pretend like any of this can erase tragedy. I don’t get to pretend like in 2001 and beyond, I didn’t sit in fear as both a young American and a young American Muslim. Still, I had the luxury of turning my face away from the burning in a way that not everyone else in this country did. It is a privilege to press a button on a television and re-enter your world, still fractured, but not on fire. None of us should be carried through tragedy alone. None of us should be encased in grief, and not have a small window to some better place. Music was the window where I was, in Ohio, afraid of what came after The Month That Changed Everything. Late in September 2001, I borrowed my roommate’s copy of Ryan Adams’ Gold, and watched autumn descend on the city. It opened with "New York, New York", a love song to the city and its flaws, a city most in need of such an ode. As the song ended with Adams singing, "I’ll always love you, though/ New York, New York, New York," I brushed a lone leaf from my shoulder, walked down to the record store, and gave the person behind the counter my last twelve dollars.