How. Ever. There is some rap/hip hop stuff that has spoken to the suburban malcontent in me. The disaffected intellectual. I like the Beastie Boys, from Cookie Puss on through to Paul's Boutique. The stuff I've heard off the most recent one is fantastic as well, and my first online diaryland entry is a breakdown of a performance they did on Letterman, which blew my doors off for the sheer punk rock joy of the happening. Of once again, watching people genuinely enjoying what they were doing.
It's not just white boy rap. In fact, most times the white kids bug me even more.
That Eminem kid - never got that, though I read reviews and theoretically get it, it doesn't speak to me the way Adam and the boys do. Perhaps it's my age - I am, of course, of the Beastie generation, of their mindset, that particular Reagan-era pissed off middle class white kid; it's like Eminem had no sense of irony, or wit, heavy on the trash part of his whiteness.
I loved everything I read about Public Enemy and IceT. I heard, growing up on the west coast, enough LLCoolJ to be wooed by the interplay of samples into a rap. However, it was moving to Washington DC that really educated me.
Shocking, right? Moving to DC in 1989: in punk rock, it was Revolution Summer, in the rest of the District it was about GoGo, and as much NYC rap as you could possibly hear. I waltzed into a job (like I tended to do back then) at a record store called "Nobody Beats The Wiz".
I know, crazy. How much more NYC could it be? Not much. The location was in Georgetown (interestingly for later in my life, directly across the street from a french bistro called Au Pied A Cochon, "the foot of the pig" - it was the first time I'd ever heard of cappuccino, which I quickly learned to hate just because I had to fetch it for the owner's harpy of a wife every morning after counting out the tills).
At any rate, working at the Wiz was a massive education - we had a small punk rock section of cds, but it was the guys I worked with, a couple of students at Howard University who schooled me in hip hop, who in hooked me up with De la Soul. I already knew of Fishbone, with their West Coast punk rock roots; and would later work with a close friend of theirs at my next job at a bookstore in Dupont Circle called Common Concerns. Of course, Run-DMC, you couldn't have been breathing and miss that. But right then, there was Boogie Down Productions to be reckoned with, Erik B & Rakim, A Tribe Called Quest, Jungle Brothers,KMD, 3rd Bass, even, god help them, DJ Jazzy Jeff and the Fresh Prince. There were movies to watch: School Daze and Do The Right Thing, there was Public Enemy, Easy E; West Coast stuff from Tupac, NWA and Dr Dre, all of which was the fodder for long debates around the cash register as they broke down all of those early guys. Of course, De La Soul, with their sampling and their verbal interplay, got me most stoked, but I appreciated the political motivations of all of the major players, and even knew about Sir Mix A Lot from my hometown of Seattle.There were local guys DC too - Vince D, and the go-go of Chuck Brown and his All Stars would have never even hit my radar if I hadn't worked there.
Anyway, I bring all this up, because recently, there's another white kid who does rap and hiphop and he's from Seattle, and there is a song that he wrote, one that I heard in the purest form there is to discover a song (for me anyway) - on the radio, in the car. The station was KEXP, which was KCMU when I grew up - and the first place I heard Suicidal Tendancies, the band that literally, changed the way I thought about music. About what it could do, about what it could mean. Sounds odd, right? When I heard Macklemore's song, "The Town" - the melody drew me in first. Sure it had that basic hip hop beat, but it was layered with interesting melodies, interesting riffs. Vocals cut with samples of people talking about growing up in the hip hop scene in Seattle. A scene I wasn't part of, but that was running parallel to the punk rock scene that I was a part of. We all played many of the same clubs - it turns out. Sit & Spin, RKCNDY, Paradox, all of them were places he name checks and that immediately brought back such vivid, intense memories of night after night in those places. Of the community - and that's what the song speaks to, and he mentions the city government. In Seattle, in the late 80's and then through the 90's there was a concerted effort by the city managers to pen kids in. It was a very, very unfriendly city for a teenager to grow up in. Poster bans, curfews, constant harassment of underage dance clubs...places like the Monastery, Skootchies, and the Vogue, the Graven Image, all scenes of police raids on kids who were just trying to see some music. When you live through a city trying to legislate your scene out of existence under the guise of "protection" and then, in spite of that, watch it explode when national attention focuses on the bands that become so good by persisting through all that bullshit (and that's what I believe made our scene so vibrant for a time, was that understanding that it kept going in spite of the pressure, in that classic sense of wanting to piss off the folks so much, you just kept playing shows, kept practicing, kept recording, kept living in group houses with a basement where 4 bands practiced, just because you loved it, loved being a part of a community that was creating a place you wanted to live in). Sure, now that the city fathers have (supposedly) embraced the music scene (because of the revenue it brings, not because they give a shit about the people, that will never change) I understand there is a difference in the city I love. There's a difference in me, too - I'm not twentysomething (or thirtysomething, even) and in a band anymore. I haven't, if I'm honest, been to a show in well more than a year (events I've worked at like Outside Lands excluded, of course), so I don't necessarily expect it to be the same. What I do expect though, is some of the more lyrical things in Macklemore's song - that skyline that is etched in my veins too, to travel those streets that I know so well, to see those vistas that have so many memories attached. He lists all these neighborhoods, places so familiar and plain to me, that it gets me homesick in the best ways. And yet, as he says "So much has changed here, so much has not." Police brutality, oppressive local ordinances, materialistic developers exploiting the downtown and surrounding areas. I get that. All cities have their bullshit. In SF they are legislating against Happy Meals at McDonalds. Not that I'm a fan of childhood obesity, but for crying out loud, is that really the best work of the city representatives? Really?
I digressed. Again.
The memories, for a long time, were why I left (ok, there was the divorce thing, but that's all part of it) I grew weary of feeling I knew everyone. The familiar became tedious. It's only recently that I realize a lack of familiarity, or the constant infusion of a new place and new people also breeds a certain dissatisfaction in general within me. I've always loved Seattle, warts and all. Recently, my mother told me that my older (of the two) brother and his wife were at some bar on the eastside and the piano player mentioned he had attended Bothell High School (where I went, as did my brothers and his wife, and one would assume probably a good percentage in a suburban piano bar on the Eastside, just saying) it turned out he was a guy I knew from school that I was pretty friendly with (particularly in junior high, when he did this amazing multimedia presentation about the Beatles, that still probably is the single most informative thing I've ever seen about them) - he is now, and has been for a while (I do remember having a conversation about this at our 10 year reunion, about he and I being the two playing musicians in the room. Not that either of us would have ever expected it when we were in school) and when my brother mentioned me, apparently he lit up and said, "Oh, yeah, I always dug her, she's great" or something along those lines. Stuff like that, for whatever reason, used to drive me batshit - like why can't I just be rid of this? Now though, I crave a bit of history. Of not having to explain who I am anymore. Of just being me. I think it might be part of being comfortable in my own skin - which apparently has taken 4 decades to do. Comfortable enough to say that I'm totally impressed with a white kid from Seattle who writes some interesting lyrics and works with a dj (Ryan Lewis) and producer (Lewis also does the videos, which are also much higher quality and more cinematic than the usual pool party rap trash) that allows him to transcend, at least in my mind, the barriers I have to a certain type of music. I can see how you could think of it as a form of blues or poetry, if it's written like that - and I always thought bands like Public Enemy and Run-DMC and others hit that, and that I just wasn't familiar enough with what they were talking about to be able to really appreciate it as the art form it was always referred to. Now, I finally have a touchstone. Not that I'm going out and buying new stuff, or gonna hang at hiphop shows, but an appreciation for different styles and understanding is something I value, and I'm happy to be able to have a little sliver of that from his stuff. Here's another, creative spin on an old story, "Irish Celebration". Cheers kiddo.
