Jon Caramanica

NEW YORK — Playboi Carti — slender as a string bean, flexible as a yogi, his dreads dyed almost the same beige as his cropped jacket — bounded onto the main stage at the Rolling Loud festival Saturday night to rile up his faithful. Carti is an impressionist rapper, slurring together syllables and murmurs into cloudy chant-along mantras. But onstage, he was a dynamo — jumping wildly, curling his body into a parabola as he shouted to the sky, and inciting his tens of thousands of fans to mosh.

This was something like the platonic ideal of a Rolling Loud performance — modern, young, deconstructed, riotous.

This traveling hip-hop festival made its New York debut in the parking lots of Citi Field in Queens on Saturday and Sunday for what was almost certainly the largest multiday rap event ever in the city; 60,000 tickets were sold for each day.

It was a bold success, and reflected some truths about the genre. First, it has melted — its essential stars and innovators all but eschew traditional structure in favor of songs that reduce hip-hop to something primal and instinctual. Second, all bow before the wisdom of the mosh pit — the huge crowds here were their own character in the festival’s narrative drama. And though it took place in the shadow of the 7 train, the weekend was a reminder of just how far New York is from the center of contemporary hip-hop.

That gap was exacerbated by the New York Police Department, which insisted that five rising rappers from the New York area — Pop Smoke, Casanova, Don Q, Sheff G and 22Gz — be dropped from the lineup because they had “been affiliated with recent acts of violence citywide.” (Tariq Cherif, a founder and owner of Rolling Loud, wrote on Twitter, “If we want RL to return to NYC, we have no choice but to comply. That’s the position we’re in.”)

In 4 1/2 years — beginning small in Miami, and now promoting Coachella-size events around the country — Rolling Loud has established itself as a playground for the young. The aesthetic is relentlessly 2010s, even mid-to-late 2010s. The lineups, especially earlier in the day, depict a rapid feedback system: This time last year, many of the rappers now drawing crowds of several thousand were barely known.

Even the most established rappers had an improvisational flair and a knack for bending words to their whim: Playboi Carti, and the performer who followed him on the main stage, Travis Scott, whose set was far less centered but even more volcanic. (Scott injured his right knee while performing, but hobbled on anyway.) On Sunday night, Young Thug and Lil Uzi Vert performed back to back, one splashy eccentric supplanting the other.

There is an emergent pop-minded generation following in their footsteps, represented at this festival by Juice WRLD, that writes sterling melodies about heartbreak; the squeaky sing-rapping of A Boogie Wit da Hoodie; and Lil Tecca, who had a rapturous midday audience for his sweet-voiced boasts.

Excellent sets by the young rappers Polo G, Lil Tjay and Calboy included standout melodic songs about tragedy. Suicideboys and City Morgue channeled an urgent, gothic misery. Blueface persisted with his viral antics. And there were ample female rappers: Saweetie was impressively focused, Rico Nasty was energetically unhinged, and Megan Thee Stallion was briskly efficient.

Rolling Loud suffered from not atypical festival logistics issues — some performers going on early, or late, or not at all. Not enough spacing between big-name performers. A barrier that was no match for the crowd’s intensity during Ski Mask the Slump God’s set.

Which is to say, the kids came to rage. Meek Mill complained about the limp energy of his crowd, but to be fair, he’s a rapper of a different ilk — while he was having trouble whipping his fans into a frenzy, Scott was on another stage inciting mayhem.

That split also played out via the music the DJs chose between sets. Some opted for New York classics like Nas and Big Punisher, to little interest. Others played to the crowd’s interests, emblematized by the staccato pugnacity of NLE Choppa’s “Shotta Flow” and the reliably explosive Chief Keef chestnut “Faneto” from all the way back in 2014, a time that was effectively the birthplace of this generation’s taste.

Almost all of them consistently — and pointedly — played music by the absent Pop Smoke, who has had a handful of rowdy hits this summer. Rolling Loud’s New York debut in part was going to be a showcase for new talent from the city, but the NYPD’s request laid waste to that section of the lineup, preventing some of the most promising young New York rappers from performing at a signature hometown festival.

That said, there is a difference between a rap festival that takes place in New York and a New York rap festival. For years, the city’s closest approximation of the latter has been Summer Jam, hosted by the radio station Hot 97, a once-a-year accounting of changing local taste and declining local influence.

There were several New York rappers of earlier generations booked for Rolling Loud. The Wu-Tang Clan performed a focused set of old hits. ASAP Rocky, the festival’s headliner — a triumphant homecoming after his recent legal troubles in Sweden — was joined by 50 Cent during his set, which was otherwise a tug-of-war between a conventional star turn and an embrace of the unruliness of the generations that came after him.

But notably, many of the older New Yorkers — and the rappers influenced by them — were shunted to the third and smallest stage on the far side of the parking lot: Fabolous, Pusha T, Wale, Jim Jones, Action Bronson. Watching them was like sampling a regional delicacy.

Toward the end of Saturday night, the New York veteran Fat Joe was performing to maybe 1,000 people there, stringing together hits from a decade ago. Midway through, he brought out the Lox to perform “We Gonna Make It.” That song is something of a New York tradition — the Lox must have performed it hundreds of times at other people’s shows over the years, the opening horns and strings ringing out like a call to arms. In this context, it felt particularly defiant: For a brief moment, for just a few people, the home team was victorious.

This article originally appeared in

Rolling Loud Brings Melting Rap Songs and Moshing Crowds to New York

(Critic’s Notebook)

In August, Detroit rapper Teejayx6 made his way to California for his first Los Angeles concert, at Rarehouse. In videos from the event, he lumbers around the stage, head down, clutching his microphone like it was an enemy. But then something bizarre happens: Two burly men in navy jackets reading “U.S. Marshal” stomp onto the stage, speak some stern words to the rapper, then take him into custody. They march Teejayx6 outside to a waiting car and drive off.

Within minutes, footage of the incident hit Instagram and Twitter. And within hours, internet sleuths discovered a website with actors for hire playing police officers, including one who was photographed arresting Teejayx6, making it clear the whole bust was a sham.

And yet everyone got what they wanted, more or less. Fans at the show saw a concert, and also a bit of performance art. Fans on the internet got to solve a mystery. And Teejayx6 took what could have been a small show that left a minimal mark and made it into an event that ricocheted across social media.

In Teejayx6’s relatively rapid rise to internet notoriety over the past few months, he’s made scamming central to his music; his best songs are like “10 Crack Commandments” for online financial crime. But it also manifests in his image: He courts the meme economy assiduously, playing a character in an ongoing social media drama that’s just as important as his music, probably more so.

The same is true of many of this year’s most important breakout rappers — DaBaby, Blueface, Megan Thee Stallion, NLE Choppa and others — who understand that in an era in which social media and streaming are interwoven amplifiers, playing a character is as important as making great music. Being loved (and sometimes laughed at) on social media — see 6ix9ine, Lil Pump and other anime characters of the SoundCloud era — is just as important as any song. Creating micromoments that fans can organize around may be the most robust currency of all.

This is true even of the most technically skilled rappers of the current generation, DaBaby and Megan Thee Stallion. DaBaby’s impressive new album “Kirk” just debuted at the top of the Billboard album chart. But just a couple of years ago, he appeared at South by Southwest wearing a diaper, planning to go viral. When he performed his breakout hit, “Suge,” at the BET Awards this summer, he appeared onstage in a muscle shirt, looking like a pumped-up Popeye. His compact toughness is a frequent subject of memes: There’s one that likens the shape of his head to a PT Cruiser, another that shows a furiously stomping Topsy Cat and reads “DaBaby on his way to beat somebody” up.

Megan Thee Stallion’s entry into the meme slipstream has been slightly less direct, but no less effective. Her catchphrase “hot girl summer” birthed endless tweets, Instagram captions and memes. And Megan leaned into the phrase, releasing a song with that title in August and successfully applying for trademark protection for the phrase.

Earlier this year, LA rapper Blueface helped structure this pathway during the supernova that was “Thotiana,” one of 2019’s biggest yet most evanescent rap songs. As he was becoming a rap star, he was becoming a bigger viral sensation, nailing a few signature gestures — mopping the floor, slicking his eyebrows — that became easy memes. And he’s proven adept at maintaining a spot in the social media conversation, even if he’s been less present on hip-hop radio, as seen in his recent public discussion about his throuple home life.

And he’s already sprouting influence. You see some of Blueface’s eagerness to entertain in NLE Choppa, whose breakout hit this year was “Shotta Flow.” In the song’s video, Choppa wields an improbably long gun, but he also dances with athletic verve and comic timing. And it’s those sharp-elbowed moves that have become his signature — in one hilarious clip circulating online, he previews music for legendary music executive Birdman, one of hip-hop’s great stoics, herking and jerking wildly while Birdman maintains a cool distance. Unsurprisingly, the remix of “Shotta Flow” features Blueface. In the video, the two rappers go verse for verse, and dance for dance, each trying to out-GIF the other.

Teejayx6 has said that he has looked to Blueface as an influence, especially in his rapping, which is more spoken than straightforwardly rhythmic. His best songs — “Dark Web,” “Swipe Story” — are like recitations full of hacker-speak and scam lessons: “The government tried to ban me from the dark web/I downloaded Tor browser and got back in/Went and got a VPN, just bought another BIN.”

He’s released three albums this year, and his music is improving. But he’s committed to stirring up online conversation as well. The day after the LA show, he stuck with the bit, posting a video of himself at a Wells Fargo with the caption “Bonded out back on the same [expletive].” Later, the caption was changed, and then the video was deleted — a cycle that’s become part of his strategy.

In late September, Teejayx6 came to SOB’s for his first concert in New York. It was an unruly, almost reluctant show — brief and appealingly raw. The act of rapping for an audience appeared to irritate him. One member of his crew handed out ski masks to audience members like the one Teejayx6 was wearing so they, too, could become the meme.

The next day, his representative began circulating a #FreeTeejayx6 hashtag, suggesting he’d been arrested. Soon after that, a self-evident fake mug shot made the rounds, as did a fake New York Times tweet announcing the news of his arrest: “He was caught with $50,000 cash &amp; fraudulent bank checks.”

It was all false, but also plainly entertaining — how many times could someone fake his own arrest before diminishing returns set in? But Teejayx6 may be the ideal rapper for this age of pervasive disinformation, for an era of almost-true and could-be-factual. When you’re never certain what you’re seeing is real, an artist who freely bends and invents the truth feels prescient. And even if you can no longer trust your eyes, you can still trust your ears.

How Rap's Class of 2019 Lives and Dies by the Meme

Fortuitously, he was soon introduced to Freestyle Love Supreme, an improv-rap troupe started by Lin-Manuel Miranda with Thomas Kail and Anthony Veneziale.

“Pups from the same litter,” Ambudkar, 35, said of the group, which presented him with an almost too-good-to-be-true opportunity: “I get to rap as good as I can rap? I don’t have to dumb it down? And I get to be as funny as I am? And I don’t have to dumb that down? Or tough that up?”

Since 2005, Ambudkar has been a part of the FLS performing lineup, which has appeared at Joe’s Pub, TEDxBroadway and on the Pivot TV network, among many other places; he has a tattoo of the FLS logo on his ribs. And when the group’s key players began working on other projects, including “Hamilton,” Ambudkar was involved: He played Aaron Burr in an early workshop and some readings.

But during that early-to-mid 2010s stretch, Ambudkar was struggling with alcohol addiction, which made him too erratic and unreliable for the quickly moving train that turned into the biggest Broadway breakout of this decade, cementing rap’s place on theater’s most prestigious stage.

“What we didn’t know as friends was that he was struggling in the way he was,” Kail said. “The stakes were high, and I didn’t know why he wasn’t responding.”

Ambudkar said he wasn’t being professional. “It was ego; it was being a daily marijuana user; it was partying at night; it was being preoccupied, growing up as a brown person, feeling unattractive and seeking validation of the opposite sex to sort of fill a hole, my self-worth.”

“Hamilton” became “Hamilton,” and Ambudkar, in 2014, became sober.

His career has taken a different path. He’s played memorable parts on television shows including “White Famous,” “The Mindy Project” and “Brockmire”; starred as the romantic lead in the recent independent film “Brittany Runs a Marathon;” and steadily released his own music.

And now, finally, he’s made it to Broadway — as one of the featured players in the limited engagement of “Freestyle Love Supreme,” which opens Wednesday at the Booth Theater.

That it took this long is bittersweet. “The biggest failure in your life is everywhere, ubiquitous. It’s inescapable,” he said, explaining the stresses of watching the success of “Hamilton” from afar — including Leslie Odom Jr.’s Tony win for portraying Burr — as well as the low-grade annoyance of friends constantly asking if he could help get them tickets.

But he prefers the silver lining: “Dude, what a gift. You almost drank yourself to death, and now here is such a clear, painful, concise, deep wound for you to see the importance in staying sober.”

“FREESTYLE LOVE SUPREME” is essentially a series of improv comedy games performed via rapping, relying on skills Ambudkar has been honing since he was a teenager, when he would make up songs as his friend played guitar.

“It’s probably a little bit — ‘embarrassing’ is the wrong word — but it’s a little weird to admit that freestyle rap comedy is probably the thing that I’m best at,” he said.

But that skill set is rare and difficult to fake. Ambudkar has an easy charisma and a clear-eyed candor. He uses his body stealthily and brings his voice into sharp focus on a dime. Freestyling is about alertness, timing and wit — it can provoke anxiety for spectators when it’s not done well, but Ambudkar rarely falters. For him, rapping is much like talking.

“He’s a new version of the classic entertainer — he can rap and dance; he can act great and be funny,” said comic Hari Kondabolu, an old friend.

Ambudkar has been onstage since a wrist injury in high school derailed him from playing basketball. He grew up outside Baltimore, where his parents, both research biochemists at the National Institutes of Health, settled after emigrating from India in the 1980s.

He took to hip-hop early, soaking up A Tribe Called Quest and Snoop Doggy Dogg. And after white children called him a racist epithet, he was embraced by the black children in his neighborhood: “They’re, like, ‘Where you from?’ I’m, like, ‘India.’ They’re, like, ‘We don’t know where the [expletive] that is, but he just called you the N-word so you’re with us.’”

He also struggled with how to express his heritage. “I went through a phase in high school to make people like me, where I would call myself — because of the ‘Simpsons’ stuff — I would call myself, like, ‘Slurpee Boy,’” he said, referring to the animated series’s character Apu, who has been criticized as a mocking caricature. “I stereotyped myself.”

In college, where his occasional dorm-room freestyle partner was actor and musician Donald Glover, he made his passion for rap part of his studies. “Utkarsh was definitely one of the most experienced and had done the most amount of work already in terms of identifying himself within the performance elements of hip-hop culture,” recalled his hip-hop theater professor, Daniel Banks, who credited Ambudkar for providing part of the inspiration to create a course in live hip-hop performance for the theater studies program.

After graduation, however, apart from his work with Freestyle Love Supreme, Ambudkar was largely coasting. “It just sort of didn’t happen for me in the supernova way that I had assumed it would, based on how easily it had come to me,” he said.

His career had been moving in fits and starts — beatboxing and rapping in “Pitch Perfect,” playing Mindy Kaling’s younger brother on “The Mindy Project,” a stint in a pop-rap trio called the Beatards. (“It’s embarrassing that we chose that name. It does not age well.”) But sobriety gave him new purpose, and clarity, and his work blossomed.

On the Showtime comedy “White Famous,” he was the agent with pinball energy propelling Jay Pharoah’s up-and-coming comic. On the big screen in “Barbershop: The Next Cut,” he was a light-touch quick-wit barber, and in “Brittany Runs a Marathon,” he played a slacker turned romantic hero. On IFC’s “Brockmire,” he was Raj, a hypergenial sportscaster and a gleaming foil to Hank Azaria’s sleazy rendering of the title character.

Azaria recalled Ambudkar as a vivid improvisor, citing one scene where Brockmire tells Raj, “You’re a brown Joe Buck” — the well-known sportscaster — and Raj replies, “No, Joe Buck is a white me.”

“That came from his brain,” Azaria said with a chuckle.

Working on “Brockmire” put Ambudkar’s professional and personal political arcs on a collision course. For almost three decades, Azaria has been the voice of Apu on “The Simpsons,” and Ambudkar had just filmed Kondabolu’s documentary “The Problem With Apu,” about the psychic toll that character has left on the Indian American community. (And paradoxically, Ambudkar voiced Apu’s nephew for one episode in 2016.)

“What he had to say was completely thoughtful and insightful and kind — afterward we discussed it a lot,” Azaria said. He paraphrased something Ambudkar told him that strongly resonated: “Every time I take a role, I think about how I’m reflecting my people.”

“As a white actor — I’m Jewish — for the most part I never think about that,” Azaria said. “It’s one of the ways it all came home to me.”

Concern about how South Asian men are represented on screen and onstage is a central concern for Ambudkar. Despite being asked, he never considered changing his name to cater to unfamiliar audiences, or executives. “People learned Galifianakis,” he said, referring to actor Zach Galifianakis.

In the forthcoming Disney live-action remake of “Mulan,” Ambudkar plays Skatch, a new character who’s a “swashbuckling con man”: “I felt fun and cartoonish and handsome and caddish and dirty.” His character also has an Indian accent, which he worried may be “a dead end” in some professional circles: “When, like, Johnny Depp does a British accent, or Angelina Jolie does an accent, it’s acting,” he said. “But when I do an accent, it’s not.”

In part to avoid such problems, Ambudkar has been working on writing his own projects, including one roughly based on his story: missing out on your biggest opportunity and trying to recover from the pain.

“I don’t think he has a personal ceiling,” Kondabolu said. “It’s about how hard everyone else makes it for him, what kind of parts are written for him.”

RAPPING IS AMBUDKAR’S release and his safe space. (His nom de rap: UTK the INC.) When he’s home and has free time, he’ll head to a friend’s studio to record songs. This year he self-released two albums of eclectic pop-rap, “Vanity” and “Petty.” On the set of “Barbershop: The Next Cut,” he spent downtime freestyling with Common, and Ice Cube took him aside to play him unreleased music. For the soundtrack of the movie “Blindspotting” — which he also appeared in — he recorded a song with Krayzie Bone. (“Unreleased,” he said sadly.)

Rapping with Freestyle Love Supreme, performing new material for a new audience each night, awakens a different energy. “Actively fighting Alzheimer’s with every show,” he said. “Decalcifying the brain.”

At his first Broadway performance, a 10 p.m. preview show on a Sunday night, Ambudkar hilariously and impetuously played the central character in an audience-derived story from a woman who, as a child, was forced by her father to play on the all-boys basketball team he coached and then never touched the ball all season.

But his most natural moments came during a segment where each cast member delivered true stories inspired by the same word; on this night, the word was Champagne.

Initially Ambudkar looked a touch uneasy as his castmates shouted funny, triumphant tales. But on his feet were sneakers customized with his name and the dictum “Spit Truth.” So eventually he relented, delivering a long sermon about how he let his great opportunity slip away, but how sobriety saved and restored him. He ended his verse with a stunner: “I was a champion of pain/But now I toast with Martinelli’s instead of Champagne.”

It shushed the room. “It’s weird when I’m rapping under the guise of entertainment, but what I’m really doing is just unmasking and being really raw,” he said the next day. “I’ve been doing this 15 years, but in those moments I think, ‘I seek out new experiences, and I’m about to have one.’”

Utkarsh Ambudkar Finally Gets His Broadway Shot in 'Freestyle Love Supreme'

LOS ANGELES — In 2004, Utkarsh Ambudkar completed the acting program at New York University’s Tisch School of the Arts feeling disillusioned. He’d spent his days in class but his nights at clubs in the East Village, freestyling and battle rapping — in his mind, he was much more of a rapper than an actor. A life chasing down parts in an industry where talent mattered less than “the amount of roles for people that look like you” seemed grim, he said recently, over a gargantuan bowl of chili at ...

“I can retire. How many Grammys do I need, right?” he asked from behind the wheel of his black Subaru WRX STI. “That’s 10 Grammys right there.”

He drove up to Hillcrest Drive, where he and his parents used to live in a prefab home, then picked up his cousin Brad in the McDonald’s parking lot before heading to his family graveyard, which sits on High Top Mountain, which he named his first album after six years ago. He went to the White Flash diner on Main Street, ordering two cheeseburger sliders and fries, almost sneaking out unnoticed before signing a pair of guitars for the owner and his son.

“Musically speaking this is the most culturally rich pocket of American existence outside of jazz,” he said of the region where bluegrass was forged. But the coal industry’s decline has left things precarious, and he’s been thinking through ways to meaningfully offer help.

Simpson, 41, moved away from this stretch of Appalachia when he was 7, but its ethic and spirit remain bone-deep in him. It’s where he watched his family play music, at a friend’s house with a stage built into the living room. Where he first picked up his grandfather’s guitar. Where he learned to hold a grudge.

Those are all things that served him well later in life, as a singer who found success in Nashville only to retreat from the country music business and its demands, and as someone whose zigzag path has been idiosyncratic and misunderstood.

On Sept. 27, he’ll release “Sound &amp; Fury,” his fourth album, and first since “A Sailor’s Guide to Earth,” which went to No. 3 on the Billboard album chart in 2016 and later won the Grammy for best country album.

“Sailor’s Guide” was an intimate song cycle about fatherhood that became one of the most acclaimed country — or country-adjacent — albums in recent memory. “Sound &amp; Fury” is an album full of songs fired in the caldron of that new success: resentful, agonized, seething.

It is also not a country album. It’s high-viscosity Southern rock a la ZZ Top, with a potent rhythmic undertow. “A sleazy synth-rock dance record,” he said, citing John Mayall &amp; the Bluesbreakers’ album with Eric Clapton, and also the Bee Gees, Cheap Trick, T. Rex and La Roux as touchstones.

Along with the album comes an anime film, released on Netflix the same day, conceptualized by Simpson and directed by some of the leading figures in the world of Japanese animation. Both the album and the film are about how vicious systems take advantage of the people who must live by their rules. In the film, a female warrior battles savage underworld bosses, and wins. On the album, most songs are preoccupied with taking a stand against the casual cruelties of the music business — Simpson is the warrior. On the rollicking and cheerily defiant “Last Man Standing,” he sneers,

Well Momma didn’t raise nobody’s dum-dum

Not trying to win a medal for being the most humdrum

And you know Daddy likes his alone time

That’s why he doesn’t have any friends

But watch and see, you’ll be looking at me

Last man standing in the end

It’s hard to think of another recent artist who, at the peak of his success, jerked so sharply away from the decisions that had led him to that point. But while Simpson’s star was rising, he was chafing. Nashville wanted him to be a poster boy for outlaw country, a tag he rejected. (In 2017, he busked and wryly answered fan questions outside the Country Music Association Awards ceremony, streaming the escapade on Facebook Live.) The pressures of the road began to conflict with the demands of fatherhood. He grew weary of the team of people he’d hired to protect his interests.

Nominated for two Grammys in 2017, he tussled with the show’s producers over whether he’d even be allowed to perform. (He did, with the Dap-Kings.) And he was anxious about the possibility of a Grammys-style upset in which — up against Adele, Beyoncé, Justin Bieber and Drake — he’d win album of the year. If he’d won, his plan was to hand the trophy to Beyoncé, then walk out of the building.

To capitalize on the attention from his nominations, he announced a string of performance dates. “We weren’t going to be on the road at all that year, but you kind of have to go keep your face out there,” said Miles Miller, who has drummed in Simpson’s band since 2012. “It was a loooong year.”

Miller continued, “The No. 1 thing he always says is it’s hard to be inspired when you’re not inspired.”

Out on tour rather than at home with his young children, Simpson was miserable: “Honestly, there was a point in 2017 where I thought I was just going to just go away,” he said plainly. Simpson’s music career didn’t begin in earnest until his mid-30s — he knew what life was like before it, and was mentally prepared for life after it.

He chose to write it all down. “I knew I had to cathartically process it all and get it out,” he said. “And a really, like, laid-back country record was not the way to do that, you know? I needed to purge a lot of emotion that I’d been carrying around.”

In 2017, after the Grammys, Simpson had sinus surgery and, during his weeks of recovery, took to listening to the music he was raised on, while high on medical-grade edibles. One day, he was reading “Macbeth”: “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

“I was like, that’s how I feel right now,” he recalled. “Like, what is all this really for other than making a bunch of strangers happy and trying to let people have fun?”

Recorded at a vintage-equipment-packed studio in a motor inn in Waterford, Michigan, about 45 minutes north of Detroit, “Sound &amp; Fury” is, he said, the product of “therapeutic indignation.” For two weeks, he holed up there with his engineer Paul Cossette and his touring band — Chuck Bartels on bass, Bobby Emmett on keys, Miller on drums — and, with Kurosawa films playing on mute, pushed the creaky gear past its comfort zone: “I wanted it to hit like a Wu-Tang record.”

Whereas Simpson’s prior albums were emphatically ruminative, this one is about bodily abandon. His vocals, snarling and aggrieved, are buried under layers of processing. They’re a secondary concern to the saltiness of his guitar playing, the shuddering synths approximating a catastrophic weather event, the multiple layers of percussion (including some looped from several years ago, when Simpson flew out the legendary soul drummer James Gadson to Nashville to record some preliminary tracks).

“I could’ve very easily probably made the same record five times by now and just gone right down that middle lane and played it safe, and I’d have $80 million in the bank,” Simpson said dryly. “And I’d probably be hanging from a [expletive] rope on one of these trees over here by now, you know what I mean? So it’s not worth it.”

By the middle of 2017, the core of the record was complete. But Simpson had grander ambitions for it. For part of his time in the Navy, he was stationed in Japan, where he was introduced to anime. With the help of a well-connected friend, he made overtures to some of its leading creators in hopes of securing one of them to make a video.

He got a meeting with Hiroaki Takeuchi, a well-connected producer, who subsequently introduced Simpson to Junpei Mizusaki, the director of “Batman Ninja,” who told Simpson, “I deal with these things, these feelings,” the musician recalled. “I know exactly what you’re singing about.” Soon after, a dream team of collaborators divvied up the album song by song: Mizusaki; Takashi Okazaki, the creator of “Afro Samurai”; Koji Morimoto, an animator on “Akira”; and others.

Rather than make the film directly autobiographical, Simpson created a hyperreal world of evil: “hegemonic structures, politics, corruption, greed — you know, things that usually lead to really [expletive] music,” he said. “Basically, we made ‘Yojimbo’ set in a dystopian future,” he explained, referring to the 1961 samurai film.

Simpson traveled to Japan six times to supervise the creation of the movie, which cost around $1.2 million to make — “Something they just had to do to get me to turn the record in,” he joked about his record label’s involvement.

During this period when he wasn’t actively recording music, Simpson found himself pulled in another direction: acting. In 2017, an audition with a casting director quickly led to an unlikely place — reading alongside Mahershala Ali for the third season of “True Detective.”

He didn’t get the role. “Everybody was understandably terrified, I’m sure, about the thought of some dude that’s never done that [expletive] being in arguably the most anticipated season of television in quite some time,” he said. But dominoes started to fall. He appeared in “One Dollar,” a drama on CBS All Access. He played a zombie (and wrote the theme song) for “The Dead Don’t Die,” the Jim Jarmusch zombie film. He appeared in “The Hunt,” the horror satire that was recently pulled from distribution following the mass shootings in El Paso, Texas, and Dayton, Ohio.

Most propitiously, Simpson appears in “Queen &amp; Slim,” the feature-film directorial debut of Melina Matsoukas (Beyoncé’s “Lemonade”), as a white police officer who pulls over a black couple on a date, gets into a confrontation with them and then is killed, setting the film’s arc in motion.

Simpson, Matsoukas said, was a revelation: “Somebody white who understood, as black filmmakers, as black people, our story, our narrative. Who wanted to push that forward, who wanted to show the complexities of the black experience in America, and was comfortable playing in that role and wouldn’t think twice about it, wouldn’t be ashamed, and it actually is part of their activism. He’s very much an activist.”

Simpson’s home in southeast Tennessee, where he recently moved with his wife and three sons, is miles away from anything resembling a town. It is, in every way, far from Nashville. The ceilings are high, the kids have the run of the place, and the Wi-Fi is spotty. “When we walked into it, I was just, like, this is it. I want to die in this house,” he said. “Soon as I get to this place I feel like my whole disposition downshifts about three gears.”

It is, if not an attempt to recreate his own childhood, then at least an effort to provide his children a life not predicated upon his success. “I had such a normal, anonymous, peaceful life for so long, and then it was just such a sudden transition,” he said. “I knew myself well enough to know I probably won’t do this forever, and I want to be able to maintain some semblance of that when I decide to just be a normal dude.”

Having felt the pressure of taking on too much, he is brutally selective about what he’ll give his time to. Rather than set out on a grueling yearlong arena tour, he’ll begin the album’s promotion with a handful of small shows, paid for out of pocket, with all proceeds going to the Special Forces Foundation, a charity that supports Green Berets and their families. Next year, he’ll do 40 shows starting in February. (Simpson’s original idea for an opener: Sleater-Kinney.)

“I can safely say I have probably turned down as much money as I’ve made,” he said, “just because the price of it also came with things.”

He has no immediate plan to record new music, because his record deal was for two albums and further negotiations haven’t begun. “How much are they willing to pay to hang my little credibility trophy on their wall?” he said, laughing but not exactly joking.

So for the time being, he’ll stay here, out of reach of anyone who might ask him to do anything other than exactly what he wants.

“I just don’t think I need to make compromises or sacrifices to attain things that ultimately I don’t care about,” he said. “I don’t really know what I would [expletive] do up there in the stratosphere anyway, man, you know?”

Sturgill Simpson Leaves His Old Sound (and the Spotlight) in the Rear View

JACKSON, Ky. — Earlier this month, Sturgill Simpson headed eastward from Lexington until he hit Highway 15, which he drove until it dead-ended into Highway 30. This was the way into Jackson, the sparse, hilly town of around 2,000 people he grew up in. Just before the intersection, a small sign announced that he was in the right place: “Hometown of Grammy Award Winning Artist Sturgill Simpson.”

CHICAGO — There is one room in “Figures of Speech,” the Virgil Abloh exhibition at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, that vividly demonstrates how his aesthetic principles, emotional range and commercial ambitions all cohabitate cozily.

On one wall is an Inez &amp; Vinoodh triptych of a young black child playing with Louis Vuitton items, from Abloh’s first ad campaign as the artistic director of Louis Vuitton menswear design. The most striking is the middle image, in which a girl wears a psychedelically colorful sweater with a “Wizard of Oz” theme — is draped in it, actually — with small, fragile origami paper boats strewn at her feet. Her left arm is outstretched and she’s gazing off into the distance — it’s beatific.

But step to the other side of the room and see these photographs anew. On the floor in front of you will be a sculpture of a sort, an array of 16 numbered yellow markers, the kind used to denote the location of evidence at a crime scene. (What’s not on any information card is that 16 is the number of shots a Chicago police officer fired at Laquan McDonald in 2014, killing him.)

On the floor, there is tragedy. On the wall, there is hope.

It was also striking just how many people stepped right around the ghost on the floor — barely noticing it, if at all, as they snapped photos of an ad.

This midcareer retrospective of Abloh’s work turns on unanticipated juxtapositions — visual, sociopolitical and even structural. As an artist, he’s a light-touch conceptualist, his work a series of small disassemblies and reassemblies. Abloh trained as an architect and was Kanye West’s right-hand man for several years before branching out and becoming a fashion designer for Louis Vuitton and his own line, Off-White; a DJ; a visual imagineer for other clients; and a collaborator with Nike, Ikea, the Red Cross and others.

He is the standard-bearer for the internet-speed globalization of haute post-hip-hop style, suggesting that the chasm between taking a marker to your shoes and ending up the head designer at an iconic fashion house may not be as vast as it once seemed.

That he has achieved so much so rapidly is its own provocation, one amplified by “Figures of Speech.” It is his first museum exhibition, and fundamentally it asks how a museum — by practice, a static institution — can capture and convey the work of someone who moves quickly, has prodigious output, and who isn’t nearly as preoccupied with what he did yesterday as what he might do tomorrow.

Hip-hop, streetwear, skateboarding and graffiti are all art practices born of resistance, and by the time Abloh found them, they were eking their way into institutions. More than any of his generational peers, he has applied their disruptive urges in new contexts.

His art is about besting capitalism — from within. He has a just-make-it ethos; the essence of his work is process as much as product. In a 2017 lecture at the Harvard Graduate School of Design — published as a book, “Insert Complicated Title Here” — he focused on “shortcuts,” about how changing an existing thing just 3% is often enough. “I’m sure that you’re trying to challenge yourself to invent something new, trying to be avant-garde,” he told the students. “Basically, that’s impossible.”

For Abloh, there is no art practice outside the mode of consumption. You sense that for him, the sneaker in the store (which costs you money) and the picture of the sneaker in the store that goes on Instagram (which costs you time) serve effectively the same purpose.

That same blitheness is at work in “Figures of Speech,” curated by Michael Darling, which gives equal weight and space to Abloh’s most meaningful work and his loosest-conceived projects. Perhaps most jarringly, the space given over to his signature work — his fashion design for Louis Vuitton and Off-White, his various sneaker prototypes for Nike — is rather small.

In the second gallery, clothes hang on racks that make it tough to appreciate the unusual details — whether in terms of silhouette, or design in-jokes — that Abloh has made his stock in trade. At the end of one rack are some prototype Vuitton pieces with a strip of paper attached that reads “LEWIS VUITTON,” an intriguing in-house tweaking of a design lineage that could also fit in at a group exhibition at a Bushwick art gallery. (Such garments were never actually produced.)

Later, a grid of Abloh/Nike prototype sneakers has been set at ground level. Presumably artifacts like these are what draw many people to the exhibition, but the presentation minimizes their importance and their strengths.

There is a kind of exhibition that’s effective for work like this, something more process-focused that shows the inspiration and the innovation side by side — a display of tools, techniques and gambits.

In places here, that happens — mentioning Calder on the wall text next to a mobilelike sculpture made of pink insulation foam, or pointing out the Caravaggio that was referenced in his earliest clothing line, Pyrex Vision. But some are obscured: the oversize version of the clear CD case Abloh designed for Kanye West’s “Yeezus” album is missing any mention of Peter Saville, a mentor of Abloh’s, who did something similar for New Order.

Borrowing is in Abloh’s DNA, and one of the unlikely pleasures of this exhibition is the way he freely absorbs the work of others. One wall is completely pasted with posters of the Chicago rapper Chief Keef wearing a Supreme T-shirt, photographed by Ari Marcopoulos — it all clings to the wall like a proud stunt, one of several places where Abloh imports a vernacular context into the museum setting. Similarly, there are works made of concrete cast to resemble outdoor benches that would be manna to skateboarders.

Abloh also applies that mode of creative direction to his own emotions. In one case, he displays some of his gold and platinum paper-clip jewelry (by the celebrity jeweler Jacob Arabo), made-real versions of pieces he once fashioned for himself out of actual paper clips, an aspirational nod to the luxury rapper chains he never expected to be able to afford.

Just across the gallery from those pieces is one of the show’s most convincing arrangements. On the left is Abloh’s DJ setup — austerely beautiful wooden speakers (by Devon Turnbull), glimmering CD turntables (by Pioneer DJ) — presented as a shrine. And hanging on the wall to the right is a cease and desist letter from the United Nations chiding Abloh for using its logo on flyers for DJ gigs.

There it is — reverence and flippancy all together, and a reminder that flippancy can often be a byproduct of reverence.

And yes, Abloh is in on the joke. A biographical video near the end of the show includes a scene in which he waters, with a hose, the “WET GRASS” rug he made with Ikea. By the gift shop, I spied some tickets on a table that read “Virgil Abloh: ‘Bathroom Pass.’”

Abloh even folds critique into his work — a rug in the first room is imprinted with an arched-eyebrows quotation from a Four Pins story about Pyrex Vision in 2013. An information slide in the fashion gallery alludes to some unkind things the fashion designer Raf Simons once said about Abloh: “Simons described Off-White as not bringing anything original to fashion. Abloh immediately responded with the collection ‘Nothing New.’”

When Abloh is playful, he can be exhilarating — there’s serious joy in the gallery that includes a pile of his Ikea collaborations, which looks as if it were assembled via tornado. When he works in the métier of consumer goods, he understands how to differentiate just enough from the norm to stoke passion. But the pieces here that hew closest to traditional artistic disciplines are the least inspiring.

More than a dozen are marked as having been made in 2019 and as belonging to a private collection. Mostly they are room fillers: grand-scaled billboards, an all-black Sunoco sign sinking into the ground, and so on. Taken together, they betray an anxiety about what type of work might belong in a museum exhibition. They eat a lot of space, but don’t communicate a lot of information.

Abloh’s best work could fill these rooms several times over, just in a very different fashion. He is a tinkerer. Rather than a simple grid of sneakers, what about a video of him drawing on them, or cutting one up and making something new? Instead of racks of largely obscured clothes, what about the WhatsApp messages between him and his colleagues that led to his creative decisions? For Abloh, paterfamilias to a generation that understands garments are to be modified, not simply worn, that would have been apt. (The show’s hefty, excellent catalog embraces this spirit, deploying a titillating level of detail.)

As this exhibition is standing there, still, Abloh is plowing through ever more references on his Instagram stories. What about a screen that displays his real-time preoccupations? The notion that the museum can only hold finished works is an obsolete one.

Although there is no room for true hands-on interactivity in this exhibition — probably a crowd control measure — at least two works elsewhere in the museum do invite interaction: Felix Gonzalez-Torres’ “‘Untitled’ (The End),” an endlessly replenished stack of paper that you can take freely from, and Ernesto Neto’s “Water Falls From My Breast to the Sky,” basically a divan you can sit on, covered by crocheted nets extending to the top of the building.

But Abloh still found ways to break the borders of a museum show. Security guards wear limited-edition cool-blue Nike Air Force 1’s that he designed for the occasion. One guard told me he’d been offered $7,000 for his pair. (They’re currently going for around $2,000 to $3,000 on resale sites.) And the exhibition extends into the gift shop, which sells a rotating collection of T-shirts, posters, art pieces and $5,000 gradient-painted chairs — almost everyone I saw bought something.

Millions of people rarely, if ever, experience art in a museum setting. They see it on the streets, in their clothes and sneakers, on the walls around them. The way for art to have wide impact is to set it free — Abloh understands that his real museum is the world outside these walls.

Capitalizing on his relationships with established brands, he set up de facto satellite locations for the show. At the NikeLab installation next to the Nike store on Michigan Avenue, a few blocks away from the museum, there was an ocean of shredded sneaker bits in the windows and walls. Inside, you could piece together DIY projects with markers, rubber ink stamps and various embellishments — I filled in a coloring book outline of an Air Jordan Spiz’ike in shades of pink, green and brown, and pocketed a couple of pink chenille swooshes.

Louis Vuitton opened an orange-themed pop-up location in the West Loop neighborhood carrying select items from the FW19 collection. (New York had a similar green-themed one a few weeks later.) The space was filled with life-size (and larger) mannequins that were surprisingly emotional, and wouldn’t have been out of place at the museum.

But perhaps the greatest provocation — the most ineffable artistic moment — came at the main Louis Vuitton flagship store on Michigan Avenue, which was carrying several pieces of Abloh-designed clothing emblazoned with references to Martin Luther King Jr.’s “I Have a Dream” speech. One varsity jacket had a hand-embroidered patch on the back in the shape of Africa. In this temple of high fashion were clothes that shouted their radical intentions, locating black history at the very center of the aesthetic conversation. It was moving, and also undaunted — a dash of capitalist conceptualism hiding in plain sight.

—

Exhibit Information:

Through Sept. 29 at Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago; 312-280-2660, mcachicago.org. The exhibition will come to the Brooklyn Museum in 2020, after making stops at the High Museum of Art in Atlanta and the ICA Boston.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/08/22/arts/design/virgil-abloh-mca-chicago.html" id="dc2ee35b-8d1a-3cd0-adc7-8c610ee56478">The New York Times</a>.

(Exhibition Review)

Can Virgil Abloh Fit in a Museum?

<h1>(Critic’s Notebook): In its 12th week atop the Billboard Hot 100 chart, “Old Town Road” has become as vaporous as the faint din of car honks emanating from the street outside a closed window — it’s there, but not really there. A hazy memory of a sugar-rush headache. The song you’ll sing at karaoke, or your kid’s birthday party, or your high school reunion, to remind everyone how silly and carefree you once were.</h1>

Its reign — first as a SoundCloud loosie that turned into a viral meme hit, later as a simpatico duet with Billy Ray Cyrus — has been mighty, and also meaningful. New songs by Taylor Swift, Billie Eilish, Post Malone, Shawn Mendes and Justin Bieber have had to settle for second. And “Old Town Road,” a casual hip-hop production shrink-wrapped in a pastiche of Western-themed catchphrases and sounds, forced some kind of reckoning — maybe lip service, maybe deeper — in and around the country music business about just what its boundaries are, and why.

An auspicious start to a career, no? The 20-year-old Lil Nas X split the difference between prankster and proselytizer and — for a moment, at least — seemed equally good at both.

At the BET Awards on Sunday, Lil Nas X performed with Cyrus. It was uncomfortable, neither of them even able to muster a rote exuberance. And last week, Lil Nas X released “7,” an EP that is his first real body of work — a glum eight-song set bookended by the two key versions of his hit.

It’s ... not good. A haze of half-gestures and amateur missteps. A deflated balloon. The songs end quickly, as if embarrassed. Apart from the nonsensical yet warm electro-trap song “Panini,” none of the new tracks display even a stray ember of creative curiosity. If anything, Lil Nas X sounds anxious: “Pack my past up in the back, oh, let my future take a hold/This is what I gotta do, can’t be regretting when I’m old.” And he concludes a clunky defense of his artistry, “Kick It,” with “get weed from me/It’s good.”

There is maybe no less fulfilling creative path than going from someone who pokes at orthodoxies — and not even half seriously at that — to becoming someone who offers straight-faced defenses of his artistic integrity.

And so the best advice is to ignore “7.” What Lil Nas X does excel at is rapid commentary, the warp-speed micro moments upon which viral fame is constructed. You see it on his Twitter feed, which is a steady stream of memes and in-jokes and unlikely celebrity hangs. He is a modern celebrity in the sense that the ballast of his success isn’t any particular artistic expertise, but rather a capacity for reaction. Wonder, awe, skepticism, snickering — it’s all there. He seems utterly affable, and just self-aware enough to understand that his house is made of cards, but still, what a house.

Given that he’s been blessed with wild success at such a rapid rate — his career is roughly six months old — it’s completely understandable that Lil Nas X is mostly just happy to be here. But it’s also time to think about what’s next. “Old Town Road” proved Lil Nas X could be a Weird Al Yankovic-style hip-hop conceptualist, loyal to a meta approach more than to a sound. That alone would be an intriguing spark for a career.

When he commits to the bit, it’s effective. The most vibrant part of his rise has been his fashion, which in just the last a couple of months has evolved from ambivalent Western-esque flourishes to fully camp haute-cowboy get-ups and a collaboration with Wrangler. Six months from now, who knows? Maybe he’ll be a heavy metal thrasher, or a chain-smoking big-tent techno DJ, or something else built wholly from internet parts and scraps.

However, the fact that the motivations behind “Old Town Road” weren’t completely sincere doesn’t undermine its very real impact. Most viral hits of the last few years began in their specific genre (think “Bad and Boujee,” or “Thotiana”) and then spread into the meme ecosystem; “Old Town Road” took the opposite route, forcing staid institutions like the country music industry to adjust to its radicalism on the fly. For that alone, “Old Town Road” is one of the year’s signature songs.

It didn’t always work. Lil Nas X did not perform at this month’s CMT Awards — the celebration organized by the Country Music Television cable network, and historically the most flexible of all the Nashville fetes — despite “Old Town Road” being at the white-hot apex of its reign. And after its initial blip of an appearance on Billboard’s hot country songs chart, “Old Town Road” never appeared there again, squelched by conservative country radio.

In that sense, Nashville won. But even though some country performers questioned whether the song belonged in the genre, the loudest were the ones who chose to embrace it. First came Cyrus, of course — an opportunist, but a genuine one. Cyrus was a meme artist two decades before memes, so if any country star was primed to grasp the power of “Old Town Road,” it was him.

But after him came others, Nashville stars who made clear on their own, like dissident politicians, that they appreciated the song. Keith Urban posted a moody banjo cover. Caleb Lee Hutchinson, a young country traditionalist who came in second on “American Idol” last year, shared a cover on YouTube that, with his lustrously rich voice, is stone-hard country — he should release it as a single.

Now, inevitably but crucially, there is far more conversation about the consonances between hip-hop and country than ever before, even at Sam Hunt’s peak, when it seemed as if country singers adroitly incorporating rapping would become fully normalized. And others are trying to gallop in his boot-steps.

On TikTok, the video app where “Old Town Road” exploded, “The Git Up” by Blanco Brown — who is signed to the country label Broken Bow — has lately taken hold in that quasi-authentic, quasi-engineered manner of second-wave adopters (though according to Billboard, the song was recorded a year ago, before “Old Town Road”). It’s a hokey dance instruction song; it should come with a dance-step diagram. It likely portends more genre fusion on the horizon.

And that may be Lil Nas X’s surprising legacy — inspiring a wave of artists and listeners who, despite his very pronounced wink, chose to take him at face value.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/06/26/arts/music/lil-nas-x-old-town-road-7.html" link="null" target="_blank">The New York Times</a>.

The short rise and long tail of Lil Nas X

An auspicious start to a career, no? The 20-year-old Lil Nas X split the difference between prankster and proselytizer and — for a moment, at least — seemed equally good at both.

<h1>(Critics Pick): When Megan Thee Stallion raps, the words arrive like jabs: confident, precise, disorientingly direct. Especially in an era in which other skill sets have taken priority in hip-hop — melody, character development, absurdity — the mere clarity of the rhymes is jolting, the blue-collarness of the craft invigorating. Megan Thee Stallion came to spar.</h1>

With whom? Anyone who gets in her way. Or anyone who happens to be nearby. “Hottest out but you already knew that/Even if I brought him to you, still couldn’t get your boo back,” she taunts on “Simon Says,” one of the rowdier songs on her very pleasantly rowdy new album “Fever,” her first on a major label. Most of this bold record continues in similar fashion: one head-turning, gleefully profane bar at a time.

Megan Thee Stallion, 24, is from Houston, and learned to rap by observing her mother, who rapped under the name Holly-Wood. As a result, she is a technician, as interested in structure as she is in attitude, as focused on unexpected turns of phrase as on how to deliver them. On “Cash ____,” she opts for a homonym rhyme that arrives like a quick swerve, an unlikely image crash landing into a conventional boast: “I’m a finesser and I’m a fly dresser/Move to the top floor and flew in my dresser.”

Often, though, it’s less the specifics of what she says than her presence, which is authoritative and take-no-guff. It’s an approach that was already clear two years ago, when she released “Stalli Freestyle,” a bracing, two-minute hurricane of arched-eyebrow, seen-it-all boasting with arrestingly raw subject matter and a casually inverted power dynamic: “He wanna keep it/like, lock it and key it/I tell him to bring me my money then beat it.”

Before this album, Megan Thee Stallion’s standout moments have come via radio-appearance freestyles — a familiar proving ground for rappers of an earlier generation, and one where she has thrived. Last year, she released an EP, “Tina Snow,” that only hinted at her gifts. “Fever” (1501 Certified/300), however, is more cohesive, polished and forceful than her previous releases. The production — especially the songs by Lil Ju (“Ratchet,” “Cash ____,” “Realer”) — is ominous and spacious, a foundation that’s sturdy and not distracting.

There has long been a numbing calculus at work in hip-hop that has largely only afforded oxygen to one female rapper at a time, or at most, two. The internet has exploded that logic, thankfully — Megan Thee Stallion is part of a robust generation of women with wildly differing styles, though many of them share an affinity for sexual frankness. Megan Thee Stallion’s sex raps (“Pimpin,” “Sex Talk” and many more) are raw, luridly detailed and completely unfazed. (And largely in newspaper-unfriendly language.)

On “Fever,” there are only two guests, both men: Juicy J, a pioneer of hip-hop filth, and the up-and-comer DaBaby. Both provide verses that, had they appeared on their own albums, might have seemed unduly crass or cringey. But here, the ridiculous brags seem almost charming — they’re just trying to keep up.

This article originally appeared in <a id="ca97b29e-cffe-4ee8-8fcd-3b761d2df7c7" href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/22/arts/music/megan-thee-stallion-fever-review.html">The New York Times</a>.

The old-fashioned, high-impact rhymes of Megan Thee Stallion

Megan Thee Stallion, 24, is from Houston, and learned to rap by observing her mother, who rapped under the name Holly-Wood.

Its success was a challenge to hip-hop’s prevailing business model, its aesthetic principles and its relationship to emotion. The group — RZA, GZA, Ol’ Dirty Bastard, Method Man, Inspectah Deck, Raekwon, Ghostface Killah, U-God, Masta Killa and sometimes Cappadonna — was a collection of performers who could be fantastical superheroes or of-the-soil narrators, often both at once. And as a collective, they had an almost mystical veneer.

In “Wu-Tang Clan: Of Mics and Men,” an intimate four-part docuseries directed by documentarian and former music journalist Sacha Jenkins debuting on Showtime on Friday, they are human-scaled — determined, gifted, anxious, fallible. It is less a film about the group’s sui generis success and more about how individuals use art as a lifeline.

For the first half, at least, this is a tale of conquest. The Wu-Tang Clan was a coat of armor, a group identity rooted in martial-arts mythos that reimagined hip-hop as a site of wild mystery and grungy mien. Especially in the period from its 1993 debut album “Enter the Wu-Tang (36 Chambers)” through the 1997 follow-up “Wu-Tang Forever,” with several solo releases in between, it expanded the genre’s sense of possibility more than any of its peers, all while muscling it toward the pop mainstream.

The film traces how, from the beginning, the members saw their creativity as a means of escape from the Staten Island projects that most of them grew up in, and the persistent, seemingly ubiquitous racism of 1980s New York. “Mini-Mississippi,” Inspectah Deck says of a neighborhood he often had to traverse.

“Of Mics and Men” has ample early-era video footage and photos that capture the group in its raw joy, taking in the world that was opening up to them. The disagreements among members — and over the years, there have been countless — don’t kick in until the third episode, and even then, they’re refracted through the lens of resilient brotherhood.

That generosity of spirit is also embedded in the filmmaking, which is patient and lets people speak their piece. Often, rather than hard cuts away from interviews, the camera lingers for a second or two, capturing the softening of a pose.

Given space to breathe, the members tell disarmingly, and sometimes disturbingly, frank stories about their lives: Method Man recalls a stretch of his childhood living in a shelter for battered women; RZA remembers sharing four pairs of pants among three brothers; U-God speaks about his 2-year-old son getting shot; Ghostface Killah talks about helping care for his younger siblings who had muscular dystrophy.

Time and again, Ghostface is the urgent emotional pulse of the group, the arbiter of principle and the quickest to call out what he perceives to be injustice, whether financial or personal, like when he tells off influential New York radio powerhouse Hot 97 at the station’s own concert, leading to a ban on the group’s music.

The second episode opens with a humorous segment: the group disagreeing over where its name came from. It’s a reminder that “Of Mics and Men” is both historical record and personality sketch. And given the group’s fundamental unruliness, it is also an impressive feat of logistics. (Just ask any journalist ever tasked with interviewing the whole crew.)

RZA serves as something of an omniscient narrator, even for the parts where he’s at odds with other members. One of the most important reveals in the film is the nature of the tug-of-war between RZA and his brother Divine, who served as CEO of Wu-Tang Productions, the icy businessman behind the visceral music. When the group begins to splinter, RZA tells Divine to let everyone out of their contracts, essentially collapsing the company. Divine, sitting on his boat for a rare interview years later, remains incredulous.

The most heart-rending moments come in the third episode, which lingers on the decline and death of Ol’ Dirty Bastard, the jester whose tragic unraveling became a wound that the group could not bear. This was the mid-2000s, and almost everything was being filmed: Ol’ Dirty Bastard calling Divine to complain about being penniless after getting out of jail, and Ol’ Dirty Bastard’s new manager failing to recognize RZA when they first meet.

And then he’s gone. In many ways, that’s when the story of the Wu-Tang Clan ends as well — the group has released albums since then, but its centrality to the genre has vastly diminished. Its rootlessness is embodied in the fourth and final episode, which is unsure of the story it wants to tell: mistrust, instability, redemption.

In the early episodes, almost no time is spent on the group members’ solo albums, which include some of the most important music of the 1990s: Ghostface Killah’s “Ironman,” Raekwon’s “Only Built 4 Cuban Linx ...”. But several minutes are given to “Once Upon a Time in Shaolin,” the sole copy of which was auctioned off in 2015 for $2 million. The buyer was reviled pharma bro Martin Shkreli, and, uncomfortably, he gets about as much screen time as Masta Killa, the group’s least visible member.

These days, the Wu-Tang Clan is an abstraction — a symbol, a logo, shorthand for a kind of unpredictability that mainstream hip-hop has largely abandoned. The group members only convene as a unit for business purposes, they admit. But to call this tale cautionary is to miss the point. As “Of Mics and Men” makes clear, survival itself is a kind of triumph.

This article originally appeared in <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/09/arts/television/wu-tang-clan-of-mics-and-men-review.html" id="c8f1017f-864c-32da-aefc-5955b382fc37">The New York Times</a>.

There was no precedent for the Wu-Tang Clan insurgency in the early and mid-1990s, and, if we’re being honest, there’s been nothing quite like it since.

Jon Caramanica

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