Dre, was at the time the most popular rap artist on the planet. 50 Cent, riding on the shoulders of Eminem and Dr. He didn’t only want to retire (itself a stunt in a genre that tends to leave you before you can leave it), he wanted to retire as the Greatest of All Time, hip-hop’s holy grail. “The Black Album” represented Jay’s biggest gambit yet. His teammates and even some teachers were stunned. I remember when one quit varsity football to better focus on his A.P. In the hallways after one activity or another, I would see other Black and brown kids on similar tracks and nod. I played basketball and trained for the 200-meter relay. I took dual-credit courses at the local community college and drove downtown for SAT prep. I joined the National Honor Society, Peer Assistance Leadership and Service and the French club. Like my older sister, who was then two years into a finance degree and on a gravity-defying trajectory of her own, I had spent most of high school on a mission to make something respectable of myself. My parents, born in agrarian villages in colonized Nigeria, had settled there in the mid-1990s as middle-class academics. My family lived in the suburbs of Houston.
Half amused, they would scribble their verdict in the margins: “Shameless but hungry.”īy that time, the fall of 2003, I had already plotted the next 10 years of my life - the graduate school, the job, the house, the car. I imagined eagle-eyed college admissions officers poring over my file, spotting any latent passions discovered in the heat of application season.
I knew that it might look fishy - adding on another extracurricular so late in the game - but I figured making the effort could also work in my favor. In my senior year of high school, I joined the student council.
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