I fell in love with hip hop when… well, I actually don’t know when. I know this question has been around since forever and I probably should’ve figured it out twenty odd years ago when Brown Sugar came out, but I dunno. Hip hop has just always been there… I’m 50 years old, it is 50 years old. I was born in New York and have roots in the West Indies, it was born in New York with roots in the West Indies.
I’m fairly certain that one of my mothers younger siblings probably played rap at a backyard BBQ or basement party that I wasn’t supposed to be around for. (My father was a minister, which is its own complete sentence and explains everything you will ever learn about me. In this instance, it relates because I didn’t get to listen to secular music often when I was younger.)
Maybe I got more exposure to it on a Sunday night while my mother would wash/hotcomb/do my hair for the upcoming school week and we watched Solid Gold or Star Search. My first time seeing Soul Train fully, was when I was a junior in college! I didn’t have cable, so I never watched MTV unless I visited someone who had cable. Thank the musical gods for Ralph McDaniels and Video Music Box!
If I’m hard pressed, I’d say I might’ve fallen in love with hip hop (culture) when… my youngest aunt and I at the basketball court of her high school watching guys play basketball. I distinctly remember White Lines by Melle Mel playing and in my sheltered 10 or 11 year old mind, I know I probably thought the lyrics were referring to the white lines on the court. I had absolutely no clue, but the association stuck. I pass that school yard at least once a week and almost always flashback to that day.
As my parents became less restrictive with the music I listened to, I gravitated to music with lyrics that I could understand and recite myself. Salt n’ Pepa, Roxanne Shante (because of course! I might not have been clear about what feminism was, but I knew I liked seeing girls up front + literal QUEENS from QUEENS!), LL, A Tribe Called Quest, Slick Rick, Dougie Fresh, Kid n’ Play, De La Soul, Run DMC, Leaders of the New School, Kwame, Whodini, DJ Jazzy Jeff & the Fresh Prince, Big Daddy Kane, Heavy D & the Boyz (it always saddens me that Heav doesn’t get more love on those subjective “Best Of” lists, just like Ludacris), The Fat Boys, UTFO, Special Ed (I was recently listening to the Sirius XM Rock the Bells station and pleasantly shocked myself by reciting I Got It Made flawlessly), +anybody from Queens forever and always because those are the literal rules.
So I know when I might’ve fallen in love with it, and just like many of my relationships since, I know when I’ve fallen out of love with it at times:
Two Live Crew/ NWA / Death Row? The misogyny and violence that I was now old enough to better understand? Was not a fan, immediate pass. I liked the Fat Boys & Kid n’ Play! for crying out loud! Of course that wasn’t going to be my speed.
Gangsta B*tch by Apache came out during my senior year of undergrad and I remember us protesting the song and its airplay. You always remember your first protest!
I will always attempt what I call dancing when One More Chance (remix), by Biggie and California Love, by Tupac is played because 1994, 1995 were special years. (Yes, I know what I said about misogyny… but let’s call the relationship status: complicated at this point.)
Pac and Big’s murders. I remember where I was when I got the news of each. And it’s still heartbreaking. I was out of love with hip hop for a long while after. (This is where I entered my Backstreet Boys era. #BSB4Life; although the late nineties and early aughts, especially in Atlanta was an “in love” hip hop period for me.)
I’m not sure if I’m in love with hip hop right now, I just don’t think there’s anything made for me anymore. And maybe there won’t ever be again, but I am thankful for most of the memories.
Dre: One minute you talkin’ about you-you want things to change and the next minute you talking about you want things to stay the same.
Sidney: I do want things to change, I just don’t like *how* things have changed. And and and… and I didn’t know this is how it would turn out.
Dre: And that’s why we need to look *back*. Okay, ‘coz if we look back, then it will make us see things, the mistakes we’ve made, things that we never knew were there before. And if we just… can *stop*, then maybe we can find that thing that we both know is missing and build on that.
Sydney: Are we st… are we still talking about hip-hop?
Dre: That’s all we’ve ever talked about.
Brown Sugar, (2002)
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