As a white Christian kid growing up in the suburbs, I was raised without much appreciation for mainstream hip hop. Sure, I would karaoke “Rapper’s Delight” as a joke and would stan some other old-school hip hop, but by and large, any time someone like Jay-Z came on MTV, I would flip the channel, turned off by the prevalence of profanity and barely-dressed backup dancers.
In the years that followed the release of The Black Album, though, it was impossible to avoid the plethora of mashups that flooded the internet. I was drawn in by the novelty of mixing these tracks with The Beatles, Weezer, or Radiohead—I even tried my hand at a Fugazi mashup.
But something happened that I didn’t expect: after putting these mashups on heavy rotation, I actually fell in love with the album in its original form, like some sort of musical Trojan Horse. Even my white-washed, purity culture background couldn’t ignore the fact that this was one of the most important and impressive hip hop albums of all time.