Ben Nadeff-Haffrey
speaker
1,009 appearances
5 recordings
1 series
first heard Jun 2026
last heard 6 Aug
Ben Nadeff-Haffrey’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 5 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 3.
Appearances
She told me a story from when she was a kid about having a crush on an Italian-American boy named Billy.
One day, she called his house.
But the truth is, all of New York City was segregated then.
It seemed like there was a defining race riot every year, very do-the-right-thing.
The reality that Mayor Dinkins' vision of a beautiful mosaic obscured is that if one bit of colored glass from the mosaic crossed another, someone might end up shot or run over, and then the riots would begin again.
But Southern Staten Island was a particularly dramatic case.
It may as well have been the Deep South.
When one Wu-Tang member went to Daphne's area, he remembered getting chased out by white kids with motorcycles.
They spray-painted KKK on the rocks to warn the black kids away.
This was the Staten Island RZA grew up on.
But he had a way of escaping that reality.
Hip-hop.
By the time RZA was in his early 20s, hip-hop had gone stratospheric from the courtyards and rec rooms of the New York City projects to the top of the Billboard charts.
The labels were grabbing at any artist they could.
RZA got a deal.
He brought his new label a bunch of songs, and they said, we think girls will like you.
So we wound up releasing an EP called Ooh, We Love You, Rakim, a record that presented him as a sweet ladies' man named Prince Rakim.
It was an attempt to do something extremely commercial, totally inoffensive and upbeat, and also fundamentally false and corny.
And maybe for that reason it bombed.
RZA got dropped from his label and he was back to zero.
Showing 361–380 of 1,009 · page 19 of 51
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