I'm Nate Marshall and this is The Slowdown.

I love music.

From a young age I've always loved music.

First, it was the classic motown of my grandparents' youth and then later came the sions of early

90s R&B that my sister loved like Mary J. Blige and boys to men.

Eventually though, as I came into my own as a listener, I fell in love with hip-hop.

Hip-hop as a musical form has long been a site of controversy and creativity.

Even today, while some of the biggest stars in all of media come out of the genre, it can

still be used as a dog whistle to signal some latent gangsterism or shadiness in a performer's

personal life.

What these criticisms of the genre so often tend to miss is the way hip-hop is a connecting

and storytelling force at every level of composition.

When I first came to love hip-hop, it was still in the moment when you bought CDs or cassettes

as physical things.

One of the joys of the physical hip-hop album was the ability to look and see all the credits

and component parts out of which a song was made.

From those lists of cleared samples, you could begin to build a wider constellation of

musical lineage.

You could begin to see the historically-minded and future-facing impulses of the greatest

creators.

If you listened close enough, you could hear the conversations between the music of your

generation, with your parents and grandparents and beyond.

...