25 Rap Songs For America’s 250th

Welcome to https://defector.com/category/listening-habits" rel="noreferrer noopener" target="_blank">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.