Today in Hip-Hop: Malcolm X Turns 101 Today — And Rap Has Been Restaging Him for 40 Years

May 19, 1925. University Hospital, Omaha, Nebraska. Earl and Louise Little’s fourth child is born Malcolm Little — the man who’d become Malcolm X, then El-Hajj Malik El-Shabazz. He never cut a record. Doesn’t matter. No single voice has been looped, quoted, and physically restaged by hip-hop more than his. A hundred and one years later, the culture still moves to his cadence.

Why rap can’t quit Malcolm

Start with the deepest receipt: Boogie Down Productions, By All Means Necessary, 1988. KRS-One didn’t just bend Malcolm’s “by any means necessary” into an album title — the cover is a shot-for-shot restaging of Don Hogan Charles’ 1964 photograph. Malcolm at the window, curtain pulled back, M1 carbine in hand, watching the block. KRS swapped the carbine for a pistol and pointed the same message at a new decade — on the first BDP record made after Scott La Rock was murdered. That’s not a shout-out. That’s a citation, sprayed in full color.

Then the sample everybody quotes and almost nobody sources. Public Enemy’s “Bring the Noise” kicks off on two words in Malcolm’s voice — “Too black, too strong.” It’s not a random clip. It’s lifted from “Message to the Grass Roots,” the speech he gave at King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit on November 10, 1963 — the same address where he broke down the house and the field. Chuck D didn’t grab a slogan. He grabbed the most surgical speech in the catalog and made it the door you walk through to get into Public Enemy.

By the early ’90s it was the whole air supply — X Clan, Brand Nubian, Paris, the entire conscious wave, and Spike Lee’s Malcolm X putting that silver-on-black cap on every corner in America. The straight line from Rakim’s vocabulary explosion through the golden-age Brooklyn pioneers to conscious rap runs through Malcolm: the idea that an MC is supposed to teach, not just entertain.

The record that carries his actual voice

Of every Malcolm sample in the canon, the one that still hits hardest is the one that opens “Bring the Noise” on It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back. We made an It Takes a Nation of Millions tribute tee for the heads who know “too black, too strong” was never a Public Enemy line — it’s Malcolm’s, on loan, handed back louder.

Also today in hip-hop

• 1998 — DMX, It’s Dark and Hell Is Hot: the Yonkers growl arrives. The Def Jam / Ruff Ryders debut crashes in at No. 1, 251K week one — the first of five straight No. 1 debuts, a streak no other rapper has matched. 28 years today.
• 2009 — Eminem, Relapse: the first album after the pills and the silence. Dr. Dre produced every track but “Beautiful,” it moved 608K in seven days, and “Crack a Bottle” hit No. 1. 17 years today.
• 1981 — Yo Gotti born in North Memphis. The CMG boss who turned a regional mixtape grind into the label that broke GloRilla turns 45.

Stay creative — The Custom Creative Team