coming from this immigrant, high-achieving family, did you have a vision of what you were going to be when you grew up? reggie ugwu And what I would hear back from them is, you donвЂ™t get to do what the other kids do. WhatвЂ™s going on here? Like, how come I have to do all these things? Like, Matt doesnвЂ™t have to say вЂњsirвЂќ and вЂњmadam.вЂќ Colin gets to stay out late. So I would see that, and I would complain about it when I was younger to my parents. And it was very clear that they werenвЂ™t being held to the same standard, Dodai. Most of my friends were white, and most of the kids in our neighborhood were white. We had these rules that we had to kind of live by where we were always respectful of our elders, and we didnвЂ™t really mess around with the opposite sex, and we didnвЂ™t stay out too late. AвЂ™s were the expectation, and BвЂ™s were the floor. The thing that they drilled into us as kids was education and hard work. And my siblings and I grew up under the shadow of this fantastical journey that my parents had gone on from those villages to the suburbs in America and, eventually, the middle class. Both of my parents are immigrants from Nigeria. Yeah, so I grew up in the suburbs of Houston in a suburb called Clear Lake. What were you doing? Where were you living? reggie ugwu Yeah, so letвЂ™s talk about this, like set a scene for young Reggie. There was something that was missing from my understanding of how the world worked and my place in it. And I felt like some of the messaging that I was getting from that album and some of the things that I internalized at that age were a little incomplete. And it made me revisit that time in my life when I was younger. I started thinking about that recently in light of last year and what was going on during the pandemic and the protests in response to the death of George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor and Ahmaud Arbery. IвЂ™m from the murder capital, where we murder for capital. I connected to it so deeply, and the message of that record. Lucifer, son of the morning! IвЂ™m gonna chase you out of earth. Yeah, so IвЂ™ve been thinking about it, because when that album came out in 2003, I was a senior in high school. But I hear youвЂ™ve been rethinking a classic from 2003, Jay-ZвЂ™s вЂњBlack Album.вЂќ What is that about? reggie ugwu So, Reggie, youвЂ™re a Times culture reporter. Wednesday, August 18th, 2021 dodai stewart

But after the summer of 2020, he started rethinking its message. Transcript Jay-ZвЂ™s вЂThe Black AlbumвЂ™ Reconsidered Our culture writer loved this quintessential hip-hop album as a teen.

Jay z the black album track list