Signature Theater on 42nd Street in Manhattan, where he was rehearsing
for the new Off Broadway musical ‘‘Black No More.’’ He drove a black sedan
that reminded me of the Batmobile — suitable for an artist who goes by the
nom de guerre Black Thought, the name of a bearded Negro superhero if
ever there was one. Five minutes earlier, Trotter had sent me a text: ‘‘Stay
around. I have some music I want to play for you.’’ The city was dark and
quiet, and I climbed into a car whose make I didn’t know.
Trotter didn’t speak as we pulled into traffi c. I imagined we were headed
to the famed Electric Lady Studios on Eighth Street to hear this new music.
Instead, we stopped for gas. Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised: Trotter
drives an hour from his home in suburban New Jersey to the theater and
then back every day; why wouldn’t he pump his own gas? As I waited for
him to fi nish, someone shouted, ‘‘Nice AMG!’’ referring to the car. When
he hopped back in, we stayed parked and bumped the music like two teen-
agers in a hooptie in the late ’90s, rap taking us somewhere else. Trotter
turned his speakers to ear-bleed level and played songs from four albums
of unreleased music, songs with a sonic landscape best described as jazz
meets Motown meets funk. The music’s most persistent subject was what
it means to be Black. The thesis could be captured succinctly: Blackness is
not a monolith. Every other lyric was dedicated to demonstrating the truth
of that idea. Astonished at the amount of music I was hearing — music he’d
kept hidden from hungry fans — I asked Trotter if he’d just played his entire
oeuvre or if he was like Prince, who was famed for hiding away decades’
worth of unreleased music, only presenting a narrow sliver to the public.
‘‘Like Prince,’’ he told me. ‘‘The Roots, we got albums and albums upon
albums worth of work in the vault.’’
In other words, he has creative gears he hasn’t deigned to show us yet.
Now, Trotter, an M.C. who rapped in one of those unreleased songs that he
was ‘‘Black as a Renaissance Harlemite,’’ is helping to reimagine the 1931
satirical novel ‘‘Black No More,’’ by George S. Schuyler, a Harlem Renaissance
novelist, journalist and critic, as a musical. Both the novel and the musical tell
the story of the dubious doctor Junius Crookman, who invents the Black No
More treatment, guaranteeing that he can transform the darkest Negro to the
whitest alabaster. When the protagonist Max Disher, a Harlem resident who
feels perpetually burdened by all the ways society uses his Black skin to deny
him the future his talents and ambition might secure, learns of this cure, he
rushes to undergo Dr. Crookman’s treatment. Soon after that, nearly all of
Black America follows Disher through the Black No More machine, upending
the American racial order. Schuyler’s book grew out of his incendiary ideas
about American race relations. ‘‘The Aframerican is merely a lampblacked
Anglo-Saxon,’’ he wrote in his 1926 essay ‘‘The Negro-Art Hokum.’’ Schuyler
viewed Black racial identity as a scam perpetuated by racists and race men
like W. E. B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington and James Weldon Johnson, all of
whom he lampoons in ‘‘Black No More.’’ He believed that, if they could, Black
people would abandon their blackness for whiteness the fi rst chance they got.
In the musical, Trotter and his collaborators — the director Scott Elliott,
the screenwriter John Ridley and the choreographer Bill T. Jones — are
trying to turn Schuyler’s thesis on its head. Trotter has written the musical’s
lyrics, penning words for rap songs, ballads, some blues, gospel, reggae
and even pop tracks. In a strange twist, he also plays Dr. Crookman.
Trotter’s commitment to a distinct Black artistic and intellectual tradition
make him the antithesis of Schuyler, who once argued that there is no such
thing as Negro art and, consequently, no such thing as Black thought; but
in taking on the project, Trotter was interested in crafting a rejoinder to
Schuyler’s arguments.
Thinking about ‘‘Black No More,’’ I wondered how he and his collabo-
rators were going to make contemporary a book premised on the literal
erasure of Trotter’s commitment to Blackness as a way of living. ‘‘I do a lot
of ‘defi ning Blackness,’ ’’ Trotter told me. The impulse puts him in existen-
tial conversation with Schuyler. ‘‘Whatever that defi nition is, it drives the
entire scope of my work,’’ he said. That work ‘‘might be the quest for that
defi nition.’’ Unlike Schuyler, Trotter argues that blackness ‘‘goes above and
beyond racial identity. It’s an experience. It’s lived.’’
Trotter told me that he hadn’t read ‘‘Black No More’’ until Ridley intro-
duced him to the book during a 2015 meeting at NBC studios, where the
Roots work as the house band for ‘‘The Tonight Show Starring Jimmy Fal-
lon.’’ He thought the meeting would result in him acting in one of Ridley’s
fi lms. ‘‘I immediately began preparation for my ‘13 Years a Slave’ audition,’’
he joked to me. Instead, Ridley wanted to discuss Schuyler’s novel, which
he believed covered topics that were urgent in their relevance to American
culture. Scott Elliott, artistic director of the New Group, thought the novel
would work as a piece of musical theater. The two men arranged to meet
with Trotter, the Roots drummer and producer Questlove and the Roots
manager Shawn Gee. ‘‘We agreed to be a part of the project on the same
day I saw ‘Hamilton’ for the fi rst time, Off Broadway, at the Public Theater,’’
Trotter says. ‘‘Hamilton’’ was its own riff on American history, using hip-hop
as the vehicle to narrate a familiar story about the founding of the United
States of America and Alexander Hamilton’s life. But Schuyler’s ‘‘Black No
More,’’ and his broader ideas about race, diff er radically from the more
optimistic framing of race in ‘‘Hamilton.’’
Trotter wants to off er a divergent vision of how Black people think
about their existence in this country. This makes sense for an M.C. who
cites Richard Wright, Octavia Butler, Ralph Ellison and Frantz Fanon as
infl uences. Trotter is a thinker whose work is in conversation with the
Black literary tradition, especially the work of the Harlem Renaissance,
with its prescient inquiry into the question of what constitutes Blackness.
This musical is a chance for Trotter to have his say — to talk back to a
thinker he disagrees with.
‘‘Schuyler’s ‘Black No More’ is an essay,’’ he told me. ‘‘Ours is an essay
on that essay. A critique of a critique.’’Tariq Trotter is a 50-year-old artist in a genre where youth is an asset and
middle-aged rappers are rare. His voice is gravelly, though wildly fl exible
when rhyming. He is noticed in every room he walks into. A brother who
pays attention to the way the fedora on his head cuts against his face and
has been wearing sunglasses inside since his high school years. At 5-foot-8,
he has been mistaken for the 5-foot-11 Rick Ross and the 6-foot-5 James
Harden. Some would say it’s the beard. When asked if he straightens out
those who mistake him, he says: ‘‘I’d rather not correct them. I let people
have that moment, because for them it’s just as special.’’26 2.27.22 Photograph by Mickalene Thomas and Racquel Chevremont for The New York Times
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