In 1982, the year hip-hop began to make it seem like the ’60s might finally be over, oversized radios were pumping the utopian futurism of Afrika Bambaataa’s “Planet Rock” and the urban neorealism of Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five’s “The Message.” Downtown darling Jean-Michel Basquiat, known on the New York streets as SAMO, painted a memorial to Charlie Parker that read: most young kings get thier head cut off. The current owner of that painting is a relatively new player in the art-world bull market named Shawn Carter, known around the world as Jay-Z.
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