J. Cole is of a generation of rappers who knock on the old street misogyny trope just to show how hollow it is. And if hip-hop is slowly expanding its gender politics, the hustle is also expanding to include things like getting scholarships and not siring children until you’re good and ready.

That’s when I started thinking, “Wow, I can’t believe this incredible music is not available for people to hear. You can’t go into a shop and buy this music.”

First let me say that I have thought often and hard about the whole question of authenticity, especially when it involves race, and my thoughts have generally roamed to the question of blues and other Old World forms of African-American music, from country songsterism to post–ragtime guitar, Delta to Piedmont blues, and gospel shouting to Jubilee quartets (and of course toward jazz, which is what brought me, originally, into the whole American music scene).

Even among the eccentrics who hunt for rare 78 records, Chris King stands out.

Even at (a spry) sixty-one and in admitted decline, this nearly anonymous rock & roll superstar does no doubt have fans, comely and lithe girls enamored by the literate fellow with the appearance of a non-virginal garden gnome who occasionally uses profanity (and flying knives) to punctuate his songs and conversation.