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"The greatest writers," according to Strunk and White, "are effective largely because they deal in particulars." The same is true of rappers. Why brag about your fancy car when you could specify, as the rapper Rich Boy did, a red Cadillac convertible with gator-skin seats? Why threaten vague violence when you could imagine "smackin' babies at they christening" (Notorious B.I.G.)? Why shout out your borough ("Queens get the money") or neighborhood ("You be starving in Kew Gardens") when you could memorialize a specific street corner?
A few weeks ago, the graphic designer Jason Shelowitz was at home on the Upper East Side, listening to the late rapper Big L, who lived in Harlem. "I was kicking the verse along with him," Shelowitz said the other day, "and he calls out his corner: 'On 1-3-9 and Lenox Ave. there's a big park.' I just thought, I want to mark that somehow, his words in that physical place." He had the lyric printed on a piece of twelve-by-eighteen-inch PVC foam board, so that it resembled a parking sign. At the bottom, instead of "Dept....