What Normalization Means

In the early two-thousands, I was assigned to profile an up-and-coming Atlanta rapper named Killer Mike, for the magazine Vibe. It wasn’t my idea, but I needed the money and he was touring with OutKast, so I figured that at least I’d get to see them live. I met him backstage at the amphitheatre, hoping to get enough material as quickly as possible, and then return to the show. But our conversation went everywhere: inequality, Nietzsche, union labor, Atlanta, drug dealing, his favorite books. Mike was luminous, pulsing with insight. At one point, he became deeply reverential about the power of hip-hop. People of a certain age, he noted, had grown up fearing that hip-hop would eventually get extinguished by the powers that be. But here it still was, bringing together two twenty-somethings who had taken radically different paths to this moment, in this dressing room, sipping a couple of OutKast’s beers. Hip-hop is so big, he said, that we would someday have a President who grew up listening to it. We talked for so long that he nearly missed his cameo verse on “The Whole World.” (Somehow, this all ended with me onstage during “Bombs Over Baghdad,” but that’s a story for another day.)