25 Rap Songs For America’s 250th

Welcome to Listening Habits, a column where I share the music and musical topics I’ve been fixated on recently.

It can be hard to remember amidst the downfall of everything, but 250 years of America is a major milestone. America, more of a grand experiment than a nation, a fantastical idea suggesting a very modern notion that the point of a country is the pursuit of the unachievable, starting with happiness. A nation that aspires toward its utopian principles but at heart is just as much about territory, empire, and extraction. It’s a nation of contradictions, is what I’m getting at: atop those purple mountains’ majesty and above those fruited plains lies both beauty and madness, achievement and grift, togetherness and division.

And no nation loves its own mythology like America does. You can follow official White House Twitter accounts to see that. It’s a mythology that imagines America not as a fight over taxes or even as the “brave” discovery of a definitely-not-lost (please do not say that he got lost) Christopher Columbus, but as a nation literally crafted by white God himself, with little baby Jesus in his loving arms. America especially loves its myths on the Fourth of July: hotdogs, sparklers, baseball, freshly baked apple pie on a kitchen windowsill. Precious, but also convenient, it fits a motif of America as a place not just for white people but that belongs to them. Or to quote my favorite line from The Good Shepherd, on the subject of what it is that WASPs have: “The United States of America, the rest of you are just visiting.”