nineteen. eighty. nine. a number, another summer, sound of the funky drummer. music hitting you hard, ’cause i know you got soul. (brothers & sisters.)
last night my DSL was working. miracle of miracles. and the frustrating thing about having such an intermittent connection is that once you get it running, you feel like you need to do something worthy of such broad broadband. you paid for it, you went to all the trouble, so use it. but then you just sit there, staring at the screen, bathing in the cold blue monitor light, pondering.
but last night, i don’t know. i just felt inspired. blame it on the V-103 old school mix i heard a few sunday afternoons ago, and i decided to revisit high school. i graduated in 1989, from a high school that was about as white as an ivory soap bar, 99 and 44/100s percent caucasian. rap and hip hop was mostly foreign to me, thanks primarily to that environment. but there were instances, glimpses. somebody dubbed me a run-dmc cassette in junior high, i could’ve sworn it was ‘king of rock’ though it might have been their first album – the one with ‘it’s like that (and that’s the way it is)’ and another track that started with:
‘when i woke up. this morning. and got out of bed. i had so many strange thoughts. goin’ through my head.’
and i can remember that last spring in junior high, eighth grade, standing at the ‘horseshoe’ and waiting for the bus to take me home. and there we would be, 12-year old white kids imitating run-dmc. we might have been ignorant of all that had come before, only barely remembering snippets of sugarhill gang from elementary school skating parties, but we heard something that was beyond cool. the critics will claim that rap didn’t really cross the cultural line until run-dmc met aerosmith in the studio for ‘walk this way’ – but in 1984, we were already lining up for the music to come.
later would come exposure to public enemy in college. i missed ‘do the right thing’ in the theatre, but caught it on video. there was just something about the hip hop and rap that was produced between 1984 and 1990. the similarities were easily traced and tracked, as many owed their rhythm sections to james brown riffs and george clinton bassthumps. but it was quality, samples that mattered, lyrics that rocked. hip hop today, well, it’s just sad.
so what did i do last night? while napster is still a free world of giving and sharing, i am taking advantage of it. i found all of those tracks that i remember from high school, needing to test them with my older ears. kool moe dee. old public enemy with chuck d rapping about his olds 98 (‘the ultimate home-boy car!’). slick rick. monie love. and you know they still sound good. you can’t say that about all of those songs, most of those songs that filled the airwaves in the 80s. let the nostalgia buffs and the kids that weren’t even around listen to the milli vanillis, the new kids on the block, even the simple minds. sure, ‘alive and kicking’ is a great little song, but come on.
and i am not discounting all of modern hip hop. but you can keep your puffys, your snoops, your cash money millionaires. i need no bling bling. metal rap is over. long live the standard bearers and the revolutionaries like outkast, erykah badu, the roots, jurassic five, lauren hill.
i go to work. like a doctor. an architect. a boxer.
