I fell in love with hip-hop 20 years ago. It was the first time I heard Rebel Without A Pause.
Having lived in south suburban Chicago during the early-mid 80’s, far from the city, and even farther from the developing genre known as hip-hop. I grew up in a 93% gospel music-playing house. Fortunately, my mother didn’t try to keep me from hip-hop altogether, she just mandated that there be no cussing and no unnecessarily raunchy talk. Even at that, I’m pretty sure she let some stuff slide.
Those first few interactions were special. Pretending to be UTFO and Run-DMC every day all summer. Being awed by Jam Master Jay, Cut Creator, and Mix Master Ice. Then came later dalliances. The Show. Raising Hell. Bigger and Deffer. All great songs and albums. Some classics, even, but just enough to inspire a very strong like. Nothing that changed the world. On my own time, I still listened to as much jazz as anything else. Then we moved to Philly.
I heard Rebel before I actually heard it. Everybody was playing it. Ehhhhhyyeeeebody. I didn’t know what that racket was, but it drove me up the wall for about three months. Until I heard it. Specifically, until I heard Terminator X. That was the first song that absolutely comandeered my radio. Where I hadn’t been able to escape it because of everybody else, now I didn’t want to avoid it. I was the one listening to the same song 50 times a day. That’s when I fell in love with hip-hop.
But it went deeper than that. Sure, I could talk about beats and rhymes, but what it’s developed into is an love of crate digging. Back when we were kids, playing Run-DMC, I could never be one of the rappers, because I didn’t know the lyrics. That didn’t bother me so much, because I was always just a little more intrigued by the DJ.
I didn’t know about my friends, but we had records at home. Not stacks and stacks and stacks of records, but we had a good little clutch. I wasn’t particularly looking to find samples when I played the 45 of Jungle Boogie, but I did. When I found Soul Finger by the Bar-Kays, I just knew I had hit the motherlode. That was just the tip of the iceberg. I hadn’t even made my pause tape of Ain’t Gonna Bump No More With No Big Fat Woman, with added sound effects from rap records. But I would.
Not to get all nostalgic about it, but the beautiful thing about hip-hop then was that it was new, but then so were we. We were all young together, so it only made sense that hip-hop was a young man’s game. Now, hip-hop ain’t so young any more. Albums that most people consider to be in the canon like It Takes A Nation Of Millions To Hold Us Back, Straight Outta Compton, By All Means Necessary, and Unfinished Business all turn 20 years old this year. But hip-hop is still a young man’s game. Some of the top record sellers this year weren’t even born when those classics came out. Which is fine, except some of the younger cats have no perspective on the game. They’ve never lived in a world without hip-hop. Even more significantly, they’ve never lived in a world where gangsta rap wasn’t the defining sub-genre. Even bigger still is the fact that they’ve never lived in a world in which hip-hop wasn’t a cash cow. Meaning that for most of the newer rappers, hip-hop is just a means to get paid. There is no concern for the art. (And for people who would contend that hip-hop was never about artistry in the first place, I’ve got some lyrics to show you, if you wanna get down.) That, among all the concerns about its negative impact on the community, is a neglected point. The more lucrative hip-hop became, the further it drifted from its original intended audience. It became less reality, more fantasy. Less fights, more murder. Less getting dissed, more pimping. But just like you can never unsee what you have seen, there’s no going back. It is what it is.
At one point, I hoped that hip-hop would mature. Just like it talked about the things that were important to us when we were adolescents, I hoped that it would address our adult perspectives as well. By and large, it hasn’t.
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