Hip-Hop’s Fiercest Critic

I watched the footage this past June in the basement of hampton’s house on Martha’s Vineyard. Hampton herself was upstairs. She’d said it would be weird to view her younger self with me; I was surprised that she was willing to show me the footage at all. Hampton is arguably the most significant music journalist of her generation. She started out writing for the hip-hop magazine The Source in the 1990s before becoming a contributor to Vibe and The Village Voice. As hip-hop ascended to global dominance, hampton—whose lowercase byline is inspired by the Black feminist critic bell hooks—challenged it from the inside, treating rap music with the seriousness it deserved while calling out its materialism and misogyny. She co-wrote Jay-Z’s landmark 2010 memoir; she produced the 2019 documentary that is widely credited with landing R. Kelly, the R&B star who contributed many horny refrains to rap songs, in prison after decades of unpunished sexual predation.