2. Jay-Z. The career was so long, the hits were so consistent, the metaphors were always deep, the rhymes were always tight, the nigga was always right. He could rock a gangsta story, a love song, a funny memoir. He’s a sartorial innovator, a great songwriter, a guerilla entrepreneur, and a guy who wrote rhymes without pen and paper. That alone was amazing.

3. Biggie. Just a hair’s breadth below Jay on my list. (Jay gets the nod because his career is longer which, of course, isn’t Big’s fault, but a decision has to be made.) Incredible voice, incredible flows, and an incredible life. I’ll never forget sitting next to him in his mother’s kitchen in Bed-Stuy, Brooklyn circa his debut album Ready To Die. His homeboy called from jail and he took the collect call and quickly asked if his tape was getting love in the jail. To him that audience was central. By the way, they were indeed loving him in the jail.

4. KRS-One. A pioneer who’s still viable, KRS is the conscience of hiphop and the best live performer ever, period.

5. Nas. The street poet, the MC prodigy who’s returned to prominence after battling the greatest MC of his era, Jay-Z. I think Jay won that battle, but I think most of hiphop considers Nas to have won. I asked Jay who won and he said he did. I asked Nas who won and he wouldn’t say.

Vladimir Nabokov is the greatest American novelist of all time.
Wait, wasn’t he born in Russia? Didn’t he die in Switzerland? Yes, but America is a land of immigrants where an Austrian is the Governor of California and when Nabokov was living in America he wrote Lolita and Pale Fire and Pnin. All of them are about America, by a then-American, and are perhaps the greatest trio of novels that anyone’s ever written. No one loves, twists, or maximizes the English language more than my man Nabokov.

2. Oscarmulero.com
Beautiful site promoting DJ Oscar Mulero.

3. Theyrule.net
Lets you see who’s on the board of directors of various big companies and what other boards they’re on. Fascinating.

4. Thebricktestament.com
The stories of the Bible, Old and New Testament, told through legos.

5. Goultralightsgo.com
The home site of web artist Naoki Mitsuse who’s a brilliant animator. Check out the Sex Slave Decalogue, a hilarious and brilliant little series. The main character is a sex slave, but it’s not r-rated.

2. Colin Powell (Last Year - 1)
Could’ve probably won easily before, but his part in the WMD fiasco could cost him. However, I think the odds favor a black Republican before a black Democrat.

3. Jesse Jackson (Last Year - 2)
He paved the way, but his window of opportunity has passed.

4. Oprah (Last Year - 3)
The day Oprah decides she wants the White House is the day before her inauguration. She’s a billionaire with an army behind her and she’s pretty much unattackable. If Schwarzenegger can win California, Oprah can win the White House. Michael Moore discusses the viability of Oprah presidential aspirations in Dude Where Is My Country.

5. Cornel West (Last Year - 7)
He’s brilliant, charismatic, and tireless. Has leapfrogged over Jesse Jackson, Jr. and Harold Ford. (Rev. Sharpton is not in the top ten.)

People talk about President Clinton having been secretly black and that’s a cute little meme, but wrap your head around this: if George Bush were black he’d be an old school nigger. He’s an alcoholic, or a dry drunk, who proudly refuses to read and brazenly mangles English on a daily basis, who runs from war but, like the nigger who pulls a gun for stepping on his sneakers, he wants to beat up any country that twitches wrong.

This isn’t a rock band, it’s an art project which makes music—bluesy rock with soul and some devilish undertones—and videos and concerts all in red and white. I love Jack and Meg.

I wrote this about bling for NPR, but they didn’t run it. Brothers and sisters raise a glass! It’s time for a celebration. Your friend and mine, the great slang word bling-bling, has been voted into the dictionary! For slang like him to be immortalized in the dictionary is as good as making it into the Word Hall of Fame. I haven’t been this proud since ain’t got the call.

Say what you will about the concept of bling-bling, but linguistically, he’s invaluable. He conveys what it once took numerous words to express. He filled a void in the language. Ain’t that what we always tell the young slang when they first slink into the language with big ambitions? If ya want have a long life, ya can’t just be a synonym for some word already in the dictionary. Ya gotta fill a void in the language.

I remember the day bling-bling first came into this crazy party we call American English. He was just a little onomotopoeia. Nothing but a clever colloquialism from New Orleans. A single syllable said twice that put into words the gleam of a diamond. No one thought bling-bling had a chance to make it far in the language. But these kids today love their diamonds and Black people have always loved slang with repetition in it. Remember somethin-somethin and keep on, keepin on? Well, bling-bling got into a few rap songs and suddenly people everywhere wanted to use him in all kinds of sentences. He was fun to say, looked good on a page, and he had charisma. You couldn’t hate the word any more than you could hate non-conflict diamonds.

But then he grew up and matured linguistically. He moved from representing diamonds to the larger sense of being conspicuously consumptuous, of trumpeting your financial success, of wearing your bank account. Those were the years before the dot com bubble burst and the timing was perfect for bling-bling. He capitalized on how well he fit into the Zeitgeist.
Nowadays, every once in a while, you hear someone speak of a bling-bling generation. I’m not sure he’s a large enough word to define his times, but do you know what an honor it is for a word to be considered worthy of defining a generation, even if by just a few people? That’s a special moment. There were days we feared bling-bling was close to becoming a cliché, and maybe he did become one, but now he’s a superstar.

I’m sure bling-bling will want to share this triumph with the whole family, all the great black slang words for money that came before him. His grandfathers bread and dough. His uncles duckets, lucci, and dead presidents. And his famous older brothers ghetto fabulous and the Benjamins. See, this victory isn’t just about bling-bling. It’s about the entire hiphop community coming together and talking about themselves and their money with so much passion that they gave birth to language. And with bling-bling they done made some slang so bad the white folks had to put it in the dictionary! Amen.

Some have said that the era of bling-bling is over and the usage of him will decrease in the future because of the still slumping economy and the anti-SUV movement, which is an attack on the showy consumerism that’s behind bling-bling. But I say nonsense! We’re Americans. We supersize everything from french fries to SUVs. Bling-bling is as American as microwave apple pie, a baseball labor strike, and a Hummer that’s twice as big and runs half as well as its Japanese counterpart. As Martin Amis wrote in his novel Money, I am pussy-whipped by money, but then so is the United States. The Brit had it right. In America you work like a Puritan in hopes of spending like a Puffy. And in the bling-bling generation, if you’ve got money, you never leave home without wearing it.

I’m assuming you know this already. The brilliant cinematography, the story’s circular structure, the girl, the guns, Lil Ze?! Once, in LA, I drove past a movie theater and saw this double feature: City of God and the Passion of Christ. Crazy.

1. Richard Pryor. A comedian-artiste.
2. Bill Cosby. An incomparable storyteller.
3. Chris Rock. The comedian of his generation, the most quotable man in America.
4. Paul Mooney. A political scientist, a radical sociologist, a devilishly delicious funnyman. Someone please give him a show.
5. Eddie Murphy. Great storyteller, great wit, complete fearlessness, the prototype modern rock star comedian.

I love his writer-machismo, his towering self-confidence, and his mind always looking for the Big Pronouncement, the intellectual home run. Some call him arrogant and he is, but I abhor self-deprecating writers because that’s such a passive-aggressive lie. Writing is, in and of itself, an egotistical gesture: I’ve arranged some words and thoughts and you should read them. Writers should strive to be confident in their self-expression because it’s a more honest way of communicating with the audience.

It’s a mélange of styles and a mélange of time, a heartbreaking moment played out in three different ways (including all the large changes of fate for everyone on the periphery of the story that stem from slight changes in the initial moment). Prepare your mind.

While putting the final touches on Soul City in Jamaica I watched the Royal Tenanbaums over and over. There’s no relationship between the two pieces of art except that the Royal Tenebaums helped me visualize a world stylized down to the most minute details, and one self-consciously stylized down to the clothes and the street signs. Bottle Rocket, Anderson’s first film, is also amazing if for nothing but Owen Wilson’s bewildering performance.

Terence didn’t really get a fair shake. He was a great soul singer with a delicious grit in his voice, a great looking guy, a good dancer, the whole package. But he was too arrogant by half and the audience kinda lost interest. Our loss. The music’s still great.

A. Aerosol art or Graffiti A. Guerilla Entrepreneurialsm
B. DJing B. Producing
C. Breaking or B-boying C. Bling
D. MCing. D. the marketing is the message

The hypertext master. Wallace writes big books, big articles, big sentences. His mind goes so far and his intellect is so thorough it’s thrilling to watch and learn. It’s the footnotes, it’s writing about tennis, math, McCain, lobster, language, and always being interesting. And, a tantalizing tidbit. My, my look what the internet dragged in. At Rateyourprofessor.com a student of Wallace’s at Pomona wrote: “Excellent at explaining concepts. Very neurotic and tends to chew tobacco and spit in a cup while lecturing. If you are a female, do NOT fall under his spell… he's a heartbreaker.” 

He helped me become the writer I am with his brand of magic realism, his humor, his self-conscious storytelling. After Midnight’s Children, the Moor’s Last Sigh, and the Ground Beneath Her Feet, he’s possibly the best living novelist and definitely one who will get a Nobel sooner or later. And he’s got an incredible-looking wife.

Garcia Marquez first gave me the freedom to be a magic realist, to have wonderous things happen that are received calmly by the narrator and others in the story. Gabo also showed me, as Toni Morrison did, that magic realism is an awesome tool when used to show the magical brilliance of people of color.

I look at Joan as a sort of literary mother because in reading her essays in Slouching Toward Bethlehem and the White Album I learned to really write. I read her sentences and paragraphs over and over and finally saw the matrix and began to figure out what great writing was all about.

His humor, his confidence, his sentence structures, his audacity, his rock-star writer thing: Amis is what a modern celeb writer should be.

I love Ralph Ellison. The ultimate gentleman polymath, superelegant, superblack, brilliant writer. I could not imagine trying to write without having Invisible Man beneath me. The Little Man Behind the Stove at Cheechaw Station is someone I think about all the time, demanding me to be prepared for anything at any time. He is the zenith of black writers, our Joyce, our Picasso.

Lolita and Pale Fire by Nabokov, Invisible Man by Ellison, 1984 by George Orwell, the Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger, Midnight’s Children by Rushdie, and Beloved by Toni Morrison.

Prince, 1999
De La Soul 3 Feet High and Rising
Jimi Hendrix, Are You Experienced?
Prince, Around the World
Joni Mitchell, Blue
Bob Marley, Legend
Prince, Purple Rain
Raekwon, Only Built 4 Cuban Linx
Cody Chesnutt, the Headphone Masterpiece
Aretha Franklin, Lady Soul
Radiohead, Kid A
Radiohead, OK Computer
Kanye West, College Dropout
Joni Mitchell, Court and Spark
The Roots, Do You Want More?
The Roots, Phrenology
Redman, Doc’s Da Name
Macy Gray, The Trouble With Being Myself
BDP, By All Means Necessary
A Tribe Called Quest, the Low End Theory
Thelonious Monk, Underground
Outkast, Stankonia
Janet Jackson, Rhythm Nation
Stevie Wonder, Music of My Mind
Beck, Midnite Vultures
Biggie, Life After Death
De La Soul, De La Soul Is Dead
De La Soul, Buhloon Mindstate
Prince, Parade
Meshelle N’Deogeocello, Plantation Lullabies
Jungle Brothers, Done By the Forces of Nature
Marvin Gaye, Let’s Get It On
Curtis Mayfield, Superfly
Michael Jackson, Off the Wall
BDP, Criminal Minded
U2, Joshua Tree
Miles Davis, ESP
Miles Davis, Kind of Blue
Prince, Sign O the Times
Stevie, Innervisions
Stevie, Talking Book
U2, Rattle and Hum
Eminem, Marshall Mathers LP
PJ Harvey, Is This Desire
Louis Armstrong Plays WC Handy
Sly Stone, There’s A Riot Goin On
Prince, Dirty Mind
John Coltrane, Giant Steps
Al Green, I’m Still In Love With You
Eric B & Rakim, Paid In Full
Dr. Dre, the Chronic
Jay-Z, the Blueprint
Stevie Wonder, Where I’m Coming From
The White Stripes, Elephant
Marvin Gaye, I Want You
Jimi, Axis: Bold As Love
Jimi, Electric Ladyland
Stevie, Songs In the Key of Life
Marvin Gaye, Trouble Man
Isaac Hayes, Hot Buttered Soul
Nas, Illmatic
Jay-Z, Reasonable Doubt
Erykah Badu, Mama’s Gun
Prince, Lovesexy