Alex Abramovich

Most MCs rap on beat. Saafir didn’t. He swung.

Security footage showed the suspect stopping at a Starbucks before the shooting. He’d worn surgical gloves to handle his coffee cup. While the police were searching for him, something else – a ‘ceaseless feast of schadenfreude’ – was spreading online: ‘Prior authorisation is required for thoughts and prayers’; ‘Does he have a history of shootings? Denied coverage.’ 

The Dallas Penn I knew was always figuring out new ways to use the internet, blogging and vlogging (about Ghetto Big Macs, bodegas, baseball stadiums, sneakers) before blogging or vlogging were much of a thing, and co-hosting a pioneering hip-hop podcast, the Combat Jack Show. He’d come a long way from his stomping grounds but never forgot them or left them behind.

A meme bounced around Brooklyn last summer: ‘What if we kissed at the Tom Verlaine book sale?’ Verlaine, who formed and fronted the band Television, died on 28 January 2023. Over the years he had acquired fifty thousand books.

Robert Johnson’s Complete Recordings came out in the summer of 1990. It sold so well that the phrase on a sticker attached to the cellophane became inextricable from Johnson’s legend: ‘This is where it all began.’ Bad history maybe, but good marketing.