It’s tough being a hip-hop fan in your mid-30s. Your formative years took place entirely during the genre’s “renaissance”–roughly 1992 to 2000—when classics dropped weekly and before ringtone rap, singles-driven albums and J-Kwon came in and stunk up the whole joint. You know what quality and effort sound like. Some hip-hop heads—the portly dudes rocking…

Don’t let my Neon Carrot-crayon complexion fool you. Both of my parents are Negroes. Mind you, they’re also Neon Carrot Negroes: Pops is Louisiana Creole—a (literal) cotton-picking product of the rural Jim Crow South. Mama was raised around the housing project culture of Detroit in the 1950s and ’60s. I was born in Detroit near…