The Upcycled Self

Informationen zum Autor Tariq Trotter, aka Black Thought , is one of the most powerful voices in hip-hop. Winner of three GRAMMY® Awards and three NAACP Image Awards, he has delivered eleven albums with The Roots and leads the house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon . His albums outside of The Roots include the three volumes of Streams of Thought, Cheat Codes (with Danger Mouse), and Glorious Game (with El Michels Affair). He co-wrote, co-composed, and starred in the Off-Broadway play Black No More and boasts acting credits in The Deuce and Tick, Tick . . . Boom!, among others. With Questlove, Trotter launched the production company Two One Five Entertainment, home to Hip-Hop: The Songs That Shook America, Descendant, and others. Klappentext "In vivid vignettes, Black Thought tells the dramatic stories of the four powerful relationships that shaped him--with community, friends, art, and family--each a complex weave of love, discovery, trauma, and loss."-- Leseprobe Chapter 1 The Fire The story of my life starts with the fire. A lot of people know I burned down my family's home when I was six years old, but are not aware of the magnitude of that moment­and all that began to unravel after it. That, I have never spoken of publicly, and rarely even to those closest to me. You sometimes hear stories about people who have lost it all and rebuilt their lives, but what I learned at a young age is that sometimes shit is just lost forever, or the cracks are so bad the building blocks never quite Lego-­fit the way they once did. We lost everything we had in that fire. Yes, material goods are just things, but the things we collect and value­especially when we're young, or broke, or struggling­are extensions of who we are. Our visible, tangible losses, then, represent something deeper. In the fire, we lost ourselves. No one ever blamed me. My mother offered enormous grace, knowing that I was just a child. But once you've burned down your home, everything else is small in comparison. That experience of total loss became the basis of all that I am. Even though my mother can't see that now. Born Cassandra Cassie Goldsmith, my mother changed her name to Trotter and added a Muslim name, Saaliha, when she married my father, Thomas Lynwood Trotter. At the time of the fire, my mother was almost thirty years old with two sons, having finally escaped the negligence of the projects for the safety and greener pastures of middle-­class Mount Airy. She, my older half-brother, Keith, and I lived on the 1100 block of East Sharpnack Street, a row home in a city whose architecture tells nuanced stories of class, race, and legacy. Philly is known for its row houses­conjoined structures sharing a block-­long black-­tarred roof and gray pebbled-­concrete sidewalk­but there exist subtle differences depending on the presence (or absence) of a front porch, stoop, or lawn. North of North Philly and bordered by Germantown, Chestnut Hill, Cheltenham, and Olney, Mount Airy row homes not only had porches, they shared long, lush grass plots in the front. It wasn't exactly suburbia, but for us, coming from South Philly, the move to Mount Airy cued the theme song from The Jeffersons . Well, we're moving on up . . . We rented the house from my great-­aunt Vivian, Aunt Viv to me. Aunt Viv lived in South Philly but owned properties throughout the city. She was the younger sister of my maternal grandmother, Minnie, but so close in age to my mom that the two of them were like sisters themselves. Viv rented it to us, but for all intents and purposes, given all the sharing and overlap in our family, that house belonged to my mother. It wasn't fancy, but it was the house we needed, neat and clean with some beautiful pieces inside. We had a hi-­fi component set with a radio, an eight-­track play...

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Tariq Trotter, aka Black Thought, is one of the most powerful voices in hip-hop. Winner of three GRAMMY® Awards and three NAACP Image Awards, he has delivered eleven albums with The Roots and leads the house band on The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fallon. His albums outside of The Roots include the three volumes of Streams of Thought, Cheat Codes (with Danger Mouse), and Glorious Game (with El Michels Affair). He co-wrote, co-composed, and starred in the Off-Broadway play Black No More and boasts acting credits in The Deuce and Tick, Tick . . . Boom!, among others. *With Questlove, Trotter launched the production company Two One Five Entertainment, home to *Hip-Hop: The Songs That Shook America, Descendant, and others.

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*NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “One of hip-hop’s greatest MCs, unpacking his harrowing, remarkable journey in his own words, with enough insights for two lifetimes.”—Lin-Manuel Miranda, award-winning songwriter, producer, director, and creator of *In the Heights and Hamilton
 
From one of our generation’s most powerful artists and incisive storytellers comes a brilliantly crafted work about the art—and war—of becoming who we are.

upcycle verb
up·cy·cle ˈəp-ˌsī-kəl
: to recycle (something) in such a way that the resulting product is of a higher value than the original item
: to create an object of greater value from (a discarded object of lesser value)

Today Tariq Trotter—better known as Black Thought—is the platinum-selling, Grammy-winning co-founder of The Roots and one of the most exhilaratingly skillful and profound rappers our culture has ever produced. But his story begins with a tragedy: as a child, Trotter burned down his family’s home. The years that follow are the story of a life snatched from the flames, forged in fire.

In The Upcycled Self, Trotter doesn’t only narrate a riveting and moving portrait of the artist as a young man, he gives readers a courageous model of what it means to live an examined life. In vivid vignettes, he tells the dramatic stories of the four powerful relationships that shaped him—with community, friends, art, and family—each a complex weave of love, discovery, trauma, and loss.

And beyond offering the compellingly poetic account of one artist’s creative and emotional origins, Trotter explores the vital questions we all have to confront about our formative years: How can we see the story of our own young lives clearly? How do we use that story to understand who we’ve become? How do we forgive the people who loved and hurt us? How do we rediscover and honor our first dreams? And, finally, what do we take forward, what do we pass on, what do we leave behind? This is the beautifully bluesy story of a boy genius’s coming-of-age that illuminates the redemptive power of the upcycle.

Échantillon de lecture
**Chapter 1

The Fire

The story of my life starts with the fire. A lot of people know I burned down my family’s home when I was six years old, but are not aware of the magnitude of that moment—­and all that began to unravel after it. That, I have never spoken of publicly, and rarely even to those closest to me.

You sometimes hear stories about people who have “lost it all” and rebuilt their lives, but what I learned at a young age is that sometimes shit is just lost forever, or the cracks are so bad the building blocks never quite Lego-­fit the way they once did. We lost everything we had in that fire. Yes, material goods are just “things,” but the things we collect and value—­especially when we’re young, or broke, or struggling—­are extensions of who we are. Our visible, tangible losses, then, represent something deeper. In the fire, we lost ourselves.

No one ever blamed me. My mother offered enormous grace, knowing that I was just a child. But once you’ve burned …