Black Thought. Photo: Erica Génécé. In 2016, wearing a white shirt with tiny embroidered roses, Black Thought centered himself in front of a whispering audience at the Harvard Innovation Labs. He had just finished a conversation with host Michael Keohane about the hand-painted clothing he’d made as a young artist, his rise within rap music, and his eventual aspirations as an actor. To the delight of the campus crowd, he asked, “I can kick a rhyme?” Nudging up his glasses, he then unleashed five minutes of complex stanzas, double entendres, and expository verses. Somewhere within the burst of sentences, he veered into the biographical. “I got to see how gangstas played at such an early age. What my father was into sent him to his early grave. Then mom started chasing that base like Willie Mays … Trouble was my ball and chain.” And then, after a pregnant pause—“Black Thought is what that all became.”