![]() ![]() ![]() It’s filled with as much macabre imagery - demons, vampires, spirits - as film and sports allusions ( Do the Right Thing, Gilbert Arenas, Mo Vaughn, Donald Sutherland, and Boomer Esiason all make appearances). Elucid and billy woods - the two rappers who have joined together to make Armand Hammer - have crafted a potent record about life, art, sex, drugs, politics, and violence. In short, “Down at the Cross” is expansive and omnivorous, even a bit strange. ![]() But “Down at the Cross” was not a straightforward piece of political reportage - Baldwin paired an account of meeting the Nation of Islam leader Elijah Muhammad with a slightly mysterious memoir about his dalliance with organized Christianity as a youth in Harlem, also touching on sexuality, psychology, and global affairs. Baldwin’s “Down at the Cross” was an extended reflection on the state of race relations on the 100th anniversary of the Emancipation Proclamation, and you could say that Race Music is also a kind of summa of black experience in America another half century later. James Baldwin seems a fitting intellectual and spiritual lodestar for Armand Hammer. The Brooklyn-based rap duo Armand Hammer also recently reproduced part of “Down at the Cross,” in the liner notes for their first official album together, Race Music. It is artful without being too showy or ornamental. And Baldwin is a good writer to study: his writing in “Down at the Cross” is dense and idea-driven but still artful. This past summer, I sat at my computer and typed these words, the opening sentence of James Baldwin’s 1962 essay, “Down at the Cross: Letter from a Region in My Mind.” I find it instructive to retype other people’s prose - it forces you to think about their word choice, their sentence structure, in more depth than you would if you were simply reading it. “I underwent, during the summer that I became fourteen, a prolonged religious crisis.” ![]()
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