Part of being an adult is knowing when to ask for help.
I'm approaching 30, and I've got to set a good example for my boy. So, here goes:
I hate hip-hop.
I can't stand rap.
I need help.
Well, that's not entirely true: back in the nineties, when that movie came out about Michelle Pfeiffer teaching inner city kids how to write poetry and ride roller coasters, I enjoyed that one Coolio track. I even memorized the words to "Amish Paradise."
Finally, I thought, a rap about my people.
I'm not entirely clueless - I am vaguely aware of some hip-hoppists: Tupac and Biggie, of course; there's Nelly and Eminem and whatever else the kids were listening to at the roller skating rink between Savage Garden songs and the Limbo. Then there are the Lil's: Kim, Bow Wow and Wayne; and that guy who dropped out of college and gave guff to George Bush and not-Beyonce; also, whatever this is.
But none of it makes any real sense to me. And I want it to. I'm an educated man: I know there's a whole world of music I'm missing out on, a rich culture that's passing me by while I sit here listening to the Dead Milkmen for the eighty-ninth time and wondering why, oh why, with my vast knowledge of country and the uncanny ability to identify the used-dental-floss-thin line separating pogo and street punk, hasn't Spin magazine emailed me about my Swingin' Utters review; nor has Rolling Stone gotten back to me about that Chris Gaines retrospective.
Is it because I'm racist? I don't know - not overtly, anyway. It takes effort to care what people look like, and I'm a busy, busy man. But I did grow up a prejudiced hillbilly in a proper Christian mobile home, and living in those close quarters, there was every opportunity for some of the insidious earwigs munching on the brains of my forebears to burrow into my own head unnoticed. These bugs are so deep by now, they just might be a part of the way I think.
Here's what I mean: whenever I go home, I'm always taken a little off-guard by how dumb people sound. Then I get back into the rhythm of the speech. What seems at first like a lot of stupid thrashing eventually morphs into a kind of music and the words start to make a deeper kind of sense. When mom says she "almost stepped in a meadow muffin traipsing through the back forty - way out in the jingweeds" I know she almost stepped in cowshit in the clearing behind the house, but way, way the hell out there. Now, mom hasn't been in the deeper-place since Old Dan kicked off and his garage went to pot, but that's another story.
But why even bother with the argot if you're just talking about poop? Well, in short, what's it to you? If you need to know, you will, and if you've spent a few decades living next to the slow trickle of an antediluvian creek in the hills of an upstate hamlet - a town never forgotten because it never existed - then you'll understand why cow crap matters; you'll probably catch the infinitesimal torque on "jing" in "jingweeds" that hint at why anyone was way the hell out there in the first place, and, given the glacial pace of this tiny world we call home, you've got time to hear the story - or read the first few chapters on mom's brow, anyway.
So I love and understand, more intimately than most people ever will, the hickish brogue of my mother tongue. My intellectual brain can make the connection between the way I learned language and another vernacular - I know there's probably a music and a deep sense to speech I don't understand; and if I don't get it, that might be part of the point. "I'm sure," say the better angels of my nature, "that there's a lot going on in the swagger and pacing of any rap artist worth his salt." But the stump of my brain that grew up on a cornstalk in a field next to Route 305 says "it don't sound like good English."
A good friend of mine once undertook to teach me how to appreciate rap. He started with The Roots and got as far as Wu Tang. But we didn't cover much before whatever angry old prick is controlling the levers of our fates decided my friend was better off in a coma.
This is the same guy who taught me to watch hockey. I can't imagine living without it now, but at some point, I was just staring at a bunch of mullets on skates chase a black dot. But after watching Scott watch the Sabres chase the finals in '05-'06, learning when to get up and scream at the refs, when it was better to scream at Danny Briere going fetal on the ice, and when it was best just to shake my head in general disgust, I figured out how to watch hockey. I learned to love it. These days I shake my head when folks don't know what the trap is, or when they whine about not being able to follow the puck.
All of which leads me to believe, if I had the right person show me what's what, I'd be able to trip through the annals of hip-hop and rap like Afinigenov on a breakaway. As it is, I can sooner tell the difference between silage and a cow turd - all of which smells like shit - than I can separate Soulja Boy from Weezy.
Where do I start? Where do I go from there? What's good, and what's just noise? If you've got any advice, dump it in the comments below.
Seriously, I need help.
