But then he grabbed the mic like a cudgel, raised it to the sky, lightning struck, and the cudgel was now a hammer, and the slave was transfigured into a god whose voice shivered the Earth. And that is the story hip-hop told me then. And for anyone who has felt, as I so often did, ignorant, enfeebled, enslaved to circumstance, this was myth and this was saga, awesome as any Aeneid, Iliad, or Odyssey.