A young man's life is cut short in prison, found hanging in his cell. At his home-going service, the church fills with people who knew him, but one stranger slips into the back pew carrying a history no one in the sanctuary knows. As the service goes on, he pieces together how the environment closed in on a boy long before the end.

Descendant of The Message by Grandmaster Flash and The Furious Five, 1982

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A childhood friend who was never really let into the group overhears a conversation he was never supposed to hear: an old friend who made it out, a grudge somebody's been nursing, and a plan starting to take shape. Call before trouble finds you, the old rule says. And for once, he's the one holding the phone, close enough to warn somebody, or close enough to finally be let in.

Descendant of Warning by The Notorious B.I.G., 1994

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A seventeen-year-old girl with a baby, a system that keeps failing her, and a welfare check called in one morning too late. The caseworker who takes it has been to this door before, and she already knows how many of these stories end.

Descendant of Brenda's Got a Baby by Tupac Shakur, 1991

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The prompt reaches young voices in over thirty countries: if you ruled the world, what would you change? One senior comes in certain the only world worth speaking on is the block that raised him, until the voices from everywhere else start to sound just as urgent as his own.

Descendant of If I Ruled the World (Imagine That) by Nas featuring Lauryn Hill, 1996

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Over lunch with her best friend, a woman gets a text from the college friend she cut off six years ago and never explained why. What tore that friendship apart, and what she's been avoiding ever since, is finally about to come out.

Descendant of Just a Friend by Biz Markie, 1989

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It starts with a found wallet and a long ride from El Segundo back to New York. Three broke friends, a beat-up diner, and the kind of no-destination adventure you spend the rest of your life telling.

Descendant of Left My Wallet in El Segundo by A Tribe Called Quest, 1990

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It starts with a DJ and a beat nobody can stop moving to, until the music becomes a frequency that opens a seam in the sky. Dr. Barnes sees something vast up there, something that has borrowed the shape of a man, while below, the whole city dances, swaying and humming and can't stop.

Descendant of Rapture by Blondie, 1981

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A 2:47 a.m. call pulls a detective, forty-eight hours new to Chicago, to a body in the snow, and to a case that seems to point exactly where it should. But someone made sure it would. Everyone sees a wife who keeps the books, and no one sees the woman quietly moving every piece to take the throne for herself.

Descendant of Testify by Common, 2005

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Twenty-seven years later, a grown man walks his son into a third-grade classroom, stops cold in the doorway, and there she is, the teacher he never forgot. The teacher he wanted to notice him. Now, face to face, what surfaces shows they never remembered it the same way.

Descendant of Passing Me By by The Pharcyde, 1993

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Once upon a time, a father settles into the rocking chair to tell his kids a bedtime story, the way his own father once did for him. Those stories shaped him, saved him, lessons wrapped in imagination and passed down like an heirloom, and now it's his turn to decide what to hand his children.

Descendant of Children's Story by Slick Rick, 1989

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A collection of ten original short stories descended from hip-hop's storytelling tradition. These are not adaptations or retellings. Each story inherits specific narrative traits from iconic hip-hop storytelling songs and builds something wholly new from them. From micro-fiction to novellas, all carrying the DNA that made you recognize the music as literature in the first place.