Big Bill was touched by the transformation, trading the every-day struggle for The Struggle.  The same music that pulled me out of my fog, left him reeling.  Again and again he went back to the lab, reveled in mourning baselines, and crafted sweeping images of the great Satan's fall. They added Joey on the keyboard, changed the group's name to the Foundation, and switched their sound until it was holy and urging rebellion. I played his tapes along with all the others, and began to understand.

I was 12, but when I heard Lyrics of Fury—"A haunt if you want the style I posses/I bless the child, the Gods, the Earth, and bomb the rest"—I put away childish things, went to the pad, and caged myself between the blue lines. In the evenings, that summer, I would close the door, lay across the bed and put pen to pad.

Chuck D spoke beautifully in the lingua franca of our time.

My hand was awkward, and when I rhymed, the couplets would not adhere, punch lines crashed into bars, metaphors were extended until they derailed off beat. I was unfit, but still I had at it for days, months, and ultimately years. And the more ink I dribbled onto the page, the more I felt the blessing of the sacred order of MCs. I wrote everyday that summer, rhymed over B-sides instrumentals, until my pen was a Staff Of The Dreaded Streets, (plus five chances to banish fools on sight) and my flow, though flicted and disjointed, made my hands tingle.

I'd walk outside, and my head was just a little higher, because if you do this right, if you claim to be that nigger enough, though you battle only your bedroom mirror, there is a part of you that believes. That was how I came to understand, how I came to know why all these brothers wrote and talked so big. Even the Knowledge feared the streets. But the rhyme-pad was a spell-book, it summoned asphalt elementals, elder gods, and weeping ancestors, all of whom had your back. That summer, I beheld the greatest lesson of 88, that when under the aegis of hip-hop, you never lived alone, you never walked alone.

I felt a light flowing through me. I awoke, excited, hungry to understand this immediate world, the black people around me, and how they—we—had all fallen to this. Now I knew Lemmel in a fuller sense, that it was troubled because all things worth anything ultimately are. That my world, though mired in disgrace, was more honorable than anything, was more beautiful than the exotic counties way up Reisterstown and Liberty Road. All the ghettos of the world, with their merchant vultures, wig stores, sidewalk sales, sub shops, fake gold, bastard boys, and wandering girls, were my only home.  That was Knowledge and Consciousness joined, and when I grabbed the mic, that was the alchemy I brought forth. When I was done, I emerged taller, my voice was deeper, my arms were bigger, ancestors walked with me, and there in my hands, behold, Shango's glowing axe.

Ta-Nehisi Coates is a New York-based writer. This essay was adapted from his memoir, The Beautiful Struggle: A Father, Two Sons and an Unlikely Road to Manhood. (Spiegel & Grau, 2008).

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