So, y'all know I like hip-hop a fair bit. But I don't know that I've ever explained to you guys why. So in honor of DJ Stylus's show tonight, I figured I'd make a full confession.
See, back in the day, I was a competetive high school policy debater. Policy debate, for those of you not familiar, involves talking incomprehensibly fast about various facets of a topic assigned to you at the end of the previous school year, usually with the end goal of demonstrating that either your policy proposal would prevent a lot of nuclear wars or that the other person's policy proposal would lead to a lot of nuclear wars. Either that or destroy the philosophical frameworks by which we know ourselves. Or whatever. This video is a pretty good summary. What you really need to know though was that when I was in high school I, and a bunch of guys in my graduating class, did an activity that involved talking extremely quickly and posturing aggressively. Is it any wonder we found our way to hip-hop? Of course, the stuff we found our way to was of sublimely mixed quality.
"Forgot About Dre" was on the high end of the scale:
Em could flow, not almost as fast as we could talk, but in the ballpark. And "Nowadays, everbody wanna talk like they got something to say / But nothing comes out when they move their lips / Just a bunch of gibberish" was the perfect insult for a bunch of hyperverbal teenagers to toss at each other. I don't know if anyone remembers this, but some hackers put together a fake CNN page purporting to report that Eminem had died in a car crash my junior year. I thought my debate partner at the time was going to have a heart attack. Fortunately, Eminem survived, and my partner did too. Our obsession with that song though left me with a life-long weakness for guys who can rhyme really, really fast. I listen to far more Twista than anyone should, as a result.
Then, there was the psych-up stuff, most notably, Nelly's "Number One":
This song isn't really defensible, but I like it anyway. It's super-outdated, with the references to Sprint and Motorola's networks, "some internet chat line," etc. It's totally narratively and argumentatively incoherent. It's weirdly defensive for a song about how awesome Nelly theoretically is. The facial bandaid was the stupidest accessory ever. And yet the chorus "What does it take to be number one? / Two is not a winner / And three nobody remembers" is a bracing rebuke the the "we're all winners" educational psychology a lot of us got fed in school. In debate, when you lost, it was brutal. This was a way to remind yourself of that, and to prepare yourself for it.
And then, for some reason, some of our coaches hooked us up with The Gourds cover of "Gin & Juice," which really, I think you have to concede, is incredibly funny:
I don't know that this song had any major impact on my hip-hop habits, which is probably a good thing, since it's incredibly goofy. I don't really like party rap that much, just because I think it tends to be less lyrically creative and easily slides into misogyny. But this is classic.
Fortunately, I got exposed to better stuff. I remember hearing OutKast's "Ms. Jackson" on the radio for the first time as an almost spiritual experience, one that kicked off a life-long love of Dirty South rap.
And I will forever owe my drama teacher, who made us watch Slam, and introduced me to Saul Stacey Williams (and also stars Sonja Sohn). This blew my head off:
I mean literally. I cannot begin to explain what a huge impact "Amethyst Rock" had I mean. I knew a fair amount about the mechanics of politics, thanks to the debate team, but "the feds is also plotting me /
they're trying to imprison my astrology / put my stars behind bars, my stars and stripes / using blood-splattered banners as nationalist kites" was one of the most passionately political sentences I'd ever heard in my entire life. Ditto for Jessica Care Moore's "Black Statue of Liberty":
Somewhere along the way, I lost my copy of Listen Up!, this fantastic collection of slam poetry, but I still have Williams' She, which is one of the best documents about love and sex I know.
Such a mix of stuff, I know. But listening to and reading all this stuff again this week really swept me back into what it was like to be 15, 16, 17. I don't apologize for liking the worst of this stuff, but it's all tangled up with powerful memories for me now. For better or for worse, this was one of the places where I started, and a powerful force in the directions I began to grow.