The first time I traveled to Red Hook, it was for a Jay Electronica show, in the summer of 2010. He was performing in Red Hook Park, a free concert hosted by SummerStage, the first one of the season. That spring, Electronica had burst through internet rap circles as a mystical arbiter of highbrow, fundamentalist hip-hop, full of impossibly precise rhymes and almanac-like references. He hailed from New Orleans, and was rumored to have once been homeless, backpacking through various locales around the globe, studying the Quran and releasing stray singles online. He’d earned high praise from Nas, Q-Tip, and Diddy, as well as Jay-Z, who would soon sign him to Roc Nation. And so, when word spread that he would be appearing, live, in the flesh, in Brooklyn, two of my best friends and I, then 19, embarked on the pilgrimage from my grandmother’s house in Flatbush to a mysterious foreign land, to catch a glimpse of rap’s apparent newborn king.

It was a long, strange journey. Smartphones were out, but not everyone had one. We might’ve printed map directions, or at least wrote them down. Either way, the trip took careful pre-planning and scheduling (my homie had traveled from Harlem; our homegirl, from the Bronx) and a close eye on each transfer and corner-turn, not to miss a step or stop. We started out on the Q train, from Prospect Park, towards the city, transferring at dense Atlantic Avenue—but there, a direction change took us back southbound into Brooklyn, on the D or the N or the R, toward a stop none of us had ever been to before. On the way to the station, a white guy with dreads walked by us. A novel sight anywhere, but particularly in Flatbush. It was funny, just the kind of racial gag that could carry an entire train ride back then. And it did: we soon found ourselves deeply debating the merits of the white guy with dreads, on our way to see Jay Electronica. Was it homage? Was it earned? Was he a cornball? The phrase “cultural appropriation” hadn’t come into vogue yet. We were just tussling it out, entertaining ourselves. Not once, but twice, across our ride, older white passengers walked up to us, and confessed to us that they’d been eavesdropping on our conversation, and that it was riveting to them, they’d loved hearing it. One said that we should have some kind of talk radio show. We found this funny too.