Our lives did change, not at the stroke of midnight on the turn of the millennium as many expected but in the smoke and fire of 9/11, a New York catastrophe eerily reminiscent of the cover art of ELE (which depicted lower Manhattan bathed in smoke and fire), and in the long tail of war, escalating surveillance, and exclusivist politics that followed. He warned of an eminent shift in the world order on early albums like his 1996 debut The Coming and its followup When Disaster Strikes… and dedicated his third album, 1998’s Extinction Level Event: The Final World Front, to the suggestion that a way of life we’d grown accustomed to was coming to a swift end.
In the ’90s, the New York rapper parlayed positive attention from his group Leaders of the New School and work with De La Soul and A Tribe Called Quest into a lucrative career as hip-hop’s foremost lyrical oracle. A deadly virus impacts world health, communication, travel, and economics.
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