Niela Orr

The percolating instrumentation of ‘New York’, Ja Rule’s piercing 2004 posse cut, was playing on my TV, and Zohran Mamdani strolled out to deliver a rousing victory speech: ‘New York City, breathe this moment in. We have held our breath for longer than we know.’ 

D’Angelo, that Pentecostal preacher’s son, the man Robert Christgau called ‘R&B Jesus’, has died, and, with him, a way of seeing and interpreting the world has been withdrawn. Every one of his records was rapturous. There are few people with a singing voice as sensitive, as patient, as sensuous. 

Kendrick Lamar, who calls himself a ‘certified boogeyman’, is a contemporary Dracula guy, wending his way onto the dance floor; he’s someone who ‘wiggled through that sentence’, as he puts it in one of his new songs, then into your subconscious. Lamar’s latest album, GNX, released unexpectedly on Friday, 22 November, is both a music box and a jack-in-the-box in the tradition of ‘Bad Times’: a forum for groovy, spooky, electro-influenced West Coast sensibilities and a meditation on ego death, false humility and braggadocio.

De La Soul’s 3 Feet High and Rising is to Public Enemy’s It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back what Bob Kaufman’s Abomunist Manifesto is to Allen Ginsberg’s Howl: a text that’s less a rallying cry than a high-concept hosanna for outliers. Where Kaufman was surveying the Bay Area’s brain fog, the Cold War and the menace of the A-bomb, De La Soul looked out at the macho rap landscape and added their small-pond sensibilities and day-glo colours to an overwhelmingly leather and gold NYC rap scene.