40 Over 40
Why Growing Up Is No Longer a Death Sentence for Rappers
Aging used to signal the end of a rap career — now it’s a way to forge a tighter bond with fans
Update 6/7/22: Level has a new home. You can read this article and other new articles by visiting LEVELMAN.com.
I don’t remember the first rapper I ever interviewed — a 20-plus-year career in journalism will do that — but I definitely remember the first rapper I thanked: Common, aka Lon-chikka-Lonnie Lynn. This was back in the Like Water For Chocolate era; as we sat there in a New York hotel room talking about everything and nothing at the same time, I realized that this dude had already made three albums that had hit me at different points in my young life. The hyperactive yawping on his debut, Can I Borrow a Dollar?, slid perfectly into my adolescent, Das EFX-loving ears. A couple of years later, Resurrection matched up with me being out of my folks’ house and learning how to think for myself. And with its first Soulquarian stirrings, One Day It’ll All Make Sense found me fresh out of college, navigating grown-man B.I. and wondering what my next step would be. It wasn’t that he was in my top five, or that I awaited each new album; it was that his music somehow acted as a soundtrack, in ways I hadn’t necessarily even…
