On Love's barbershop TV was a young man named Vincint Cannady, a 26-year-old self-described “black, gay, weird” singer from Philadelphia. He was doing a sort of torch-song version of Radiohead's “Creep” and slaying it with a flaming sword. It was undeniable. There were about eight people in the room. Someone said, “He just took that song from Radiohead.” I knew what he meant. You felt like this was now the definitive version, or that it had been, for a moment. To have realized the song would bear this kind of operatic deconstruction had been a stroke of artistry. Now Love's head turned a tick. “Did you hear that?” he said, referring to the remark about Radiohead, not to Cannady's performance, though both were swept up in the question. “We gotta do something with that,” he said. “We can put that out special.” We could, or rather he could, and did, and two days later the clip went viral on Facebook, generating some ungodly number of views. The barber, who had been frozen with his hands withdrawn, drawn up like paws, the way barbers do when they're waiting for you to stop talking, began to move and buzz again.

They placed me directly in front of Love, facing him and maybe 12 feet away, but seated lower—in quite a low chair—whereas his barbershop chair had been pumped up, elevated. It was papal, this whole exchange of postures between us. Love made very direct eye contact. I started asking my questions. Love was supposed to be at a TV studio soon to tape Ellen. He maybe even should have been there already. But he appeared completely calm. Like a person whose body was heavily sedated with a drug designed to have no effect on his mind or even exert a speed-like influence there. But I suppose we all sit very still in barbershop chairs.

I said that people at home had told me to ask for untold Biggie stories, but that I didn't want to send him on a nostalgia trip. Instead I asked him to go back and get the old Puffy and bring him forward, to imagine that he was still the hungry, young self-made exec who broke Biggie in the first place. If he were to look out on the current scene with that hungrier man's eyes, was there anyone who gave him the same excitement?

Jacket, $1,450, and pants, $895, by Valentino

He thought about it for a solid half minute. “No,” he said.

It was a good answer. He had searched his brain for it. He was not going to give me a name just to give me a name.

“Kendrick Lamar,” he said finally. “But Kendrick's already made.”

He's someone you would put on a level with Biggie, talent-wise?

“Yes,” he said, again after a pause. “He gives you that feeling.” He rattled off a short list of other favorite living artists: “Drake, SZA, Jay-Z, Nas, Migos, Lil Baby, Future...” He trailed off.

Love's seriousness of demeanor was probably the thing about him that took me the most aback. He was almost somber. Not slow to smile—he didn't look depressed (and I know he still parties; his doctor had recently told him he “goes too hard”)—but there was a singularity of focus. He's almost 50 now. It's the age of: Give it all or retire. He seems totally uninterested in and possibly even unaware of the option of retirement.

“I don’t believe in passiveness. At some point there has to be some kind of fight. I feel like we’ve done a lot of marching. It’s time to start charging.”

I asked what kept him hungry.

“My culture,” he said. “I want to be an authentic, unapologetic warrior for black culture and the culture of the street and how it moves. My thing is most importantly to change the narrative of the black race. I can't relate to anything that isn't about that.”

He said he wants to develop an app that will allow users to look at a given city or neighborhood and see where the black-owned and black-friendly businesses are. He didn't want to say too much about the app. It wasn't finished. He didn't have a name for it yet.