The terrific six-episode podcast “Mogul: The Life and Death of Chris Lighty,” which made its début on Spotify this spring, came out everywhere else yesterday. It’s essential listening. Narrated by Reggie Ossé, the host of the long-running hip-hop podcast “The Combat Jack Show,” “Mogul” tells the story of hip-hop—and stories about friendship, ambition, depression, creativity, and the American Dream—through the life of the late Chris Lighty, who started out carrying record crates for Kool DJ Red Alert as a teen-ager and ended up managing artists like Q-Tip, Busta Rhymes, Missy Elliott, Nas, and 50 Cent. Lighty made deals that changed fates of artists, labels, and the industry itself. He was admired, even revered; he had a loving family and close friends. In 2012, he died of an apparent suicide, shocking those who knew him and knew of him.

In telling his story, “Mogul” advances podcasting in a few important ways. It’s a big step in the evolution of the emerging genre of narrative biographical podcasts, which include “S-Town,” “Missing Richard Simmons,” the Dov Charney season of “StartUp,” and, on some level, the first two seasons of “Serial.” It’s also the first highly produced narrative podcast about hip-hop. It joins together the talents of Ossé—a former attorney, a veteran of interview-based podcasting, and the co-founder of the Loud Speakers Network (“The Read,” “Brilliant Idiots”)—and those of Gimlet Media, the podcasting company co-founded, in 2014, by the longtime “This American Life” producer Alex Blumberg. Ossé originally wanted Loud Speakers shows, including his own, to be alternatives to the NPR voice; he’s proud of the way his own speaking style combines “slang and precision.” Gimlet, on the other hand, has NPR in its DNA.

Ossé and Blumberg met in 2015, after Blumberg tweeted that he wanted to meet Combat Jack. Blumberg was looking to connect with people who knew how to run a podcast network; Ossé and his Loud Speakers co-founder, Chris Morrow, had been talking about wanting to get into narrative podcasting. Ossé and Blumberg hung out, hit it off, and decided to collaborate, and Lighty’s story seemed like a good place to start. “You have the rise from a kid who started from the Bronx River Housing Projects to become one of the most celebrated, powerful figures in hip-hop,” Blumberg said. “Then you also have the story of the birth of hip-hop and the growth of hip-hop at the same time, paralleling each other.” In some ways, those stories parallel Ossé’s story, too—he grew up in Brooklyn around the same time as Lighty, fell in love with hip-hop, worked as an attorney for major labels and artists, and experienced stresses that became oppressive. He also met Lighty, while working as an attorney.

Ossé makes listeners feel like friends. (He addresses us as “Internets,” among other affectionate nicknames.) “Mogul” is aimed at a general audience, and Ossé explains stuff for people who don’t know it. “Chris was born in 1968. He came up in the nineteen-seventies, a time when New York City was fucked up,” he says, before getting into the Bronx and its gangs, fires, break beats, and park jams. Even if you do know the history, it’s pleasurable to hear the music and stories of people who were there. In Episode 1, Kool DJ Red Alert tells us about how Lighty and his friends, who later called themselves the Violators, wanted to be his muscle so they could get into clubs for free. (That muscle ended up carrying his crates.) When Red Alert’s nephew wanted to start a group—the Jungle Brothers—Lighty became their road manager. In Episode 2, we hear a snippet of the giddily delicious “J-Beez Comin’ Through,” with a shout-out to Lighty. Ossé first heard about Lighty in that song, in 1989; many others, including me, first heard his name from the next group he worked with—A Tribe Called Quest—in their song “What?,” from 1991. (“What’s Chris Lighty if he wasn’t such a baby?”)

The “Mogul” presentation of all this, and of how Lighty was subsequently recruited by Def Jam, is sublime, thanks in part to Ossé, in part to music, and in part to Russell Simmons. To illustrate what Def Jam meant to Chris Lighty, Ossé backs up and explains what Def Jam meant in general. He plays the song that introduced rap to mainstream America: the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight.” (“A hip, hop, a hippity hop . . .”) “I fuckin’ hated that song,” Ossé says, convincingly. “It sounded fake to me, man. I grew up on the real stuff, like where you heard m.c.s, like, spitting in the park, spitting like in the projects, real m.c.s, like Grandmaster Caz and Melle Mel.” He compares his feelings about “Rapper’s Delight” to what a Sex Pistols fan would think of Billy Idol. Then he plays Def Jam: LL Cool J’s “Rock the Bells.” It’s thrilling—deeply gratifying beats, vocals, and music that you feel in your bones. So are the other Def Jam songs he plays us: “No Sleep Till Brooklyn,” “Children’s Story,” “Fight the Power.” Understanding all this, we then we hear about how Lighty first met Def Jam’s co-founder Russell Simmons—at Nell’s, “one of the flyest clubs,” Ossé tells us. The story is hilarious, told in archival audiotape by Lighty himself. “People had snakes around them, coke was everywhere, too many white girls,” Lighty says.

Ossé talks to Simmons, who bristles at this account—you can hear tones of the mentor annoyed by a glib mentee. “A lot of industry people hung there, too,” he says. “It was not just me and snakes.”

“Mogul” is full of great and funny moments like that. It also goes to some very dark places. We hear about how Lighty becomes more and more successful. He negotiates a game-changing deal for Def Jam with Warren G, of “Regulate” fame—this story, too, is sublime. (“He was into funk bands like Parliament-Funkadelic,” Ossé tells us. “But he also fucked with cats like Pete Seeger and Michael McDonald.”) Lighty founds his own company, Violator Management, which becomes a multimedia conglomerate; he has a lavish, star-studded wedding in Miami. The pressures of his life increase; his financial situation becomes complicated. Loved ones are wary of his volatile marriage.

A year into the making of “Mogul,” the team uncovered some information about Lighty’s behavior that took them aback—the kind of thing, as Blumberg said to me, “that can’t be undiscovered.” In the segments that address it, Ossé sounds anguished. “I don’t fuckin’ know, B,” he says to us. But, as Blumberg said to me, “Reggie’s all about this—talking about things that aren’t necessarily discussed that often. And, to me, this fell into that category: let’s talk about it. You’re not serving anybody by covering up the truth.”

Last week, I visited Ossé at the Tribeca studios where he records “The Combat Jack Show.” He’d had a late night the night before, at a secret Bad Brains show in Brooklyn, but he looked rested and happy. He wore a blue polo shirt and had a large dragon tattoo—his Chinese zodiac sign, he said—on much of his right forearm. “I think for most of black America, up until this point, mental health really was a luxury that white people only had access to,” he said. “All throughout my life, I’d hear my white peers talking about seeing a therapist. I was, like, What is that? It wasn’t till later on in life that I started seeing a therapist. I was, like, Oh, wow, this is nota luxury. I think everyone in this country needs therapy.” Working on Lighty’s story made Ossé realize that he himself had suffered from depression in the past.

Ossé, an only child and the son of Haitian immigrants, grew up being educated in gifted-and-talented programs in Brooklyn and going to Catholic schools. “My only exposure to white people had been at Xavier High School,” he said. “This was the earliest days of hip-hop, before Sugarhill Gang and ‘Rapper’s Delight.’ ” Ossé listened to hip-hop mixtapes of live performances of pioneers of the genre. “So I kind of found my thing, and the kids that I grew up with in my neighborhood, we kind of had this certain cool, this kind of certain aesthetic, how we looked and how we dressed, and we were learning this new language—the body language, and just the whole nine.” He loved comic books—“Frank Miller to me is a god,” he said—and one of his teachers was “a punked-out young white girl who really inspired me to have a passion for the arts.” This was the artist Marilyn Minter, who, by night, was hanging out with people like Basquiat, Warhol, and Fab Five Freddy.

As Ossé took in all that was happening around him in New York and in hip-hop—“In this bacteria-filled petri dish, culture started to spawn,” he said—his white classmates were still hung up on a disco-sucks mentality, largely ignorant about the birth of a new art form happening around them. “I felt that they were a step behind and they didn’t get it and they didn’t have any flavor,” Ossé said. “I had a sense of compassion for my white peers—awkward, rude, belligerent, spitting. Just, like, what’s wrong with you guys? And I get to Cornell, and I’m, like, Wait a minute! White people run the planet?” He laughed. “True story.”

Ossé enjoyed Cornell. Though he still had creative impulses, he decided to go to law school. (“I said to Marilyn Minter, ‘You’re going to hate me—I’m going to be an attorney,’ ” he said. He and Minter reconnected a few years ago, after he spotted her in an HBO documentary, dancing with Jay Z.) At Georgetown Law School, Ossé became a Buddhist. He then became a successful attorney in the music industry, including working for Def Jam and in private practice. “I represented Jay Z, I worked with Diddy, I was doing all these deals,” he said. After a time, he hated it. “It was kind of like the Chris Lighty experience—that weight of always looking for the next big deal.” He quit, got a book contract, and published “Bling,” about hip-hop and jewelry. He began blogging about hip-hop backstories, under the name Combat Jack; his posts went viral; he decided to podcast. “If you’d told me in 2004 I’d make a living as a podcaster—” he said, shaking his head. But, as a Buddhist, he has faith in finding one’s own path. He wants “Mogul” listeners to realize that “life is short—and it’s long when you’re miserable.”

Mental health is a theme of “The Combat Jack Show.” “We’ve had therapists come on,” Ossé said. “There was some dysfunction in my crew, and we had an on-air therapy session.” After a mental-health-focussed show, Ossé got a powerful letter from a young listener. “He talked about being seventeen, eighteen, and not being involved in an altercation but getting shot, to the point where he almost lost his life,” Ossé said. “And healing, but not wanting to leave the home. And people outside teasing him, like, ‘Scared to come out? Man up, nigga! Man up!’ Because that’s the only therapy we know.” The young man, after listening to “Combat Jack,” realized that he was suffering from P.T.S.D. “Like, ‘I’m suffering from trauma. I need therapy to get over the fact that I was a teen-ager and almost lost my life,’ ” Ossé said. “But that’s not expected of us.”

Chris Lighty, toward the end of his life, owed money to the I.R.S. and in child support. He’d lost money investing with Bernie Madoff; he was reeling from the implosion of the record industry; he was at the end of a volatile marriage. Many of his loved ones were unaware of the totality of his problems and their strain on him—to the point that many refused to believe that his death was a suicide. Lighty seemed to have it all, and his death made no sense. “Mogul” does a thoughtful and subtle job of examining the possibility that his intimates’ disbelief is part of the larger story of Lighty’s depression—that, like so many of us, Lighty may have hid it from people because he was ashamed or overwhelmed.

“We’ve lost a lot of people in the music industry,” Ossé said. “We lose people all the time. We don’t realize they may have been suffering from some kind of mental-health issue.” Other biographical podcasts, which tend to deal with extreme and compelling life stories, also touch on issues of mental health, whether they address it or not, and the violence and pain that can result. Ossé believes in talking about it and in ending the stigma against therapy, especially among black Americans. “My life’s work is demystifying that,” he told me. “We survived slavery and Jim Crow and housing discrimination and homeland terrorism. And a few of us have looked at therapy as a source of healing.” Music helps, too. In the end, “Mogul,” with its break beats, its memories, its anguish and joy, is a potent story about the complexities of art and the American experience. And in an intimate, authoritative voice, it advances the conversation.

 

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Sarah Larson is a roving cultural correspondent for newyorker.com.