Let's Talk About Rap, Baby

I don't normally do this kind of cross-promoting thing in the blog, but I have decided to allow it in this instance since the subject is one near and dear to my heart: old school rap music. If you have any interest in the subject at all, are knowledgeable or hope to become knowledgeable about it, I implore you to check out and engage in the tournament going on at the philaflava.com forum dedicated to the golden age of rap music, T.R.O.Y.

I listened to rap as a kid, but didn't really get into the old school until I was in my early twenties. Even though I grew up in Queens, I didn't have a lot of exposure to the music. Like many of my white peers, my love affair with rap began in 1988, when It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, The Adventures of Slick Rick, and Yo! MTV Raps came out. Still, I remember a few rap joints playing on mainstream radio as a young kid, most notably "Jam On It" by Newcleus.

Anyway, I could go on at length about the subject, and I may do so in the future. But for now, please head on over to the philaflava.com forums and see what's what with this tournament. It's not a big hassle to register (for me, anyway), so don't be afraid to wade right in and start asserting your rap prowess.

The Good, the Bad, and the Mediocre

1980's Arcade Games

THE GOOD: Robotron 2084


"You are the last hope of mankind. Due to a genetic engineering error, you possess superhuman powers. Your mission is to stop the Robotrons and save the last human family!"
I want to transport all of you to another land in a simpler time, when people used payphones and conflict in the Middle East was handled by the CIA. The year was 1982 and video games were all the rage. Not that dinky Atari 2600 or the awful Odyssey home video game system, but stand-up arcade machines, available in every pizza place, stationery store, and highway rest stop around the country. Kids would line up at these machines, plunk their quarters down on the screen to signify their place in line, and watch the vibrating pixels on the screen dance erratically while attempting to figure out just what they were supposed to represent.
One of the pluses of having to build a cabinet for a video game, rather than something on your Playstation, is that you can create a unique interface that compliments the game well. One isn't constrained within the same d-pad, button, button interface that complies with the home system. And so it was with Robotron 2084, perhaps the most fun and most difficult arcade game of all time. Robotron didn't have any cumbersome buttons or triggers, just two joysticks: one for moving the character, the other for aiming his weapon. The weapon was on constant auto-fire. Your bug-eyed character rolled around the screen, shooting a variety of increasingly difficult Robotrons while simultaneously scooping up the members of the last human family, which were sprites that resembled a dad with a briefcase, a mom in a housecoat, and two kids. Really, you could just tell that they weren't Robotrons and therefore needed saving. And that's the game. No sequential story line, no bonus levels or long ending animations, just you vs. the fucking Robotrons, screen after screen after screen. Save the last human family, and start all over again on a new, much harder screen. Eventually, the screen would be so crowded with Robotrons, it was virtually impossible to win. When you're paying a quarter a pop to play the game, that's the best strategy to follow.

THE BAD: Mario Bros.


The world's most recognized and lucrative video game franchise had a pretty lame beginning. First appearing in the blockbuster game Donkey Kong, our little stereotypical friend Mario seemed destined for greatness. Like Will Smith, we can look at the body of Mario's work and say it has been good, overall. Also like Will Smith, we can admit that Mario has been tied to some pretty weak projects. And so it was with his sophomore effort, Mario Bros., which introduced his similarly-greasy brother Luigi. The object of the game is to run around a screen and disable a ceaseless stream of turtles, crabs, and bugs by hitting the ground underneath them. That's all she wrote. It was as dull on board forty as it was on board one. Later, this fraternal duo would pop some magic mushrooms and go Super, but before that, these guys were strictly squares.

THE MEDIOCRE: OutRun


I have trouble calling this game mediocre, because at the time it was the shit. There was a stand-up version and the one pictured, a sit-down realistic version with hydraulic suspension to simulate the car's movement (mostly its crashing). The latter version is the first game I remember that cost fifty cents to play. For a nine year-old, though, it was well worth the experience to drive. Along oceanside highways, across mesa-strewn deserts, you could drive. Take the right fork, take the left fork, drive. Drive, drive, drive. That's all that happened in this game. You were in a Ferrari Testarossa doing 180 miles per hour, and Volkswagen bugs would still blow past you from time to time. After a while, the excitement of driving this pixellated landscape wore off, and you were left with the feeling of having dumped five bucks in quarters to watch a very bad cartoon. At least you got to control the radio, you never got to do that in mom's car.

Paying for the privelege to pollute

I don't know how much press it's getting elsewhere in the country, but here in New York City, our Mayor Michael Bloomberg has been trying to push an agenda through the state assembly to levy a toll against traffic that wants to enter the congested midtown and downtown areas of Manhattan. This will, says Bloomberg, make it a more liveable, pleasant city, with less pollution and more available dollars to fund public transit. Normally, I'm all for any measure to promote public transit, but something about this program doesn't seem quite right. It reminds me, in some ways, of the trade of "emission reduction credits," known to many people as "pollution rights." Under this system, which was written into the U.S. Clean Air Act of 1990, each corporation (or country) is given a certain number of "pollution credits," which represent a certain amount of specific pollution a company (or country) can dispense in a given year. If said company (or country) doesn't use all of its credits, they are allowed to sell the unused quantity to another corporation (or company) that needs to belch out a few thousand more cubic feet of sulfur dioxide.
A great plan, except that it doesn't really reduce polluting emissions any more than it ensures that emissions will remain at a set level. And I suppose that beats letting companies pollute the environment completely unfettered, but what doesn't seem fair to me is that these entities can essentially pay to pollute. How can we stop these multi-billionaire oil and chemical companies from doing whatever they want in regards to harmful emissions? And how does money solve the problem of greenhouse gases and global warming, anyway? Besides lining the pockets of federal workers to pay for air conditioners, I mean.
Because global warming and pollution is not really a money issue, it's a health issue. Though here in the U.S., we are used to throwing money away on pills and surgeries and medical techniques in pursuit of perfect health, we can't rightly give the stratosphere a facelift. We could have the richest government in world, sitting atop a pile of money supplied by pollution rights, balanced precariously atop the highest peak of the Rocky Mountains, surrounded by water. This is the kind of issue you can't temper until it goes away, you need to put your foot down and say, "I would rather have clean water to drink than Saran Wrap." We'll chastise a lone shooter at Virginia Tech for being a nihilistic mass-murderer, but we don't bat an eyelid when Dow makes decisions that adversely affect the health of tens of thousands of people all the time. If corporations are entities that are more like people than companies, than ExxonMobil should be locked away from society without parole.
And that's how I see this toll to drive into Manhattan island; a bold, financial measure that doesn't address the real problem at all. Sure, it will keep the average idiot from tooling around on fifth avenue in the middle of the day, but how can it stem the tide of rich Escalade owners and diesel-belching delivery trucks that can afford nearly any cost to do their business? It reminds me of Bloomberg's tactic on cigarette smoking: banned indoors, taxed to high heaven, but having relatively little effect on the actual number of smokers in the city. And where is that tax money now? Funding some commercials and the nicotine patch program, presumably, though I have never seen the books on that. If we must have this toll program where the revenue is put towards public transportation, then make sure that buses and subways are equipped with air filters, because these might become the only spaces of breathable air left in the city...ah, now I understand the plan's genius.

The day I realized I was a boom-bap dinosaur

I believe that hip-hop music is my generation's music. Rock is for my parents, jazz is for my grandparents, but hip-hop is mine. Listening to it as a kid, I found great satisfaction in my father's complaints about that "military marching music," because I knew he was validating my feelings for it. You don't like it, dad? Good, it's not for you. It's for me.
Listening to rap wasn't unusual for my peer group growing up. I grew up in a predominantly white, middle-class neighborhood, so it wasn't exactly a b-boy heaven, but most of the people I knew in my age group listened to at least some rap. When It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back by Public Enemy came out, there was a huge crossover of heavy metal-heads into rap fandom, especially in my neighborhood in Queens--the very one that birthed the metal band Anthrax, who would go on to record a song with P.E. I read stories of kids who had to hide their rap tapes from parents, and who caught all kinds of flak at school for wearing an EPMD t-shirt--I had none of that. Rap was pretty well-accepted in my neighborhood, and my friends and I prided ourselves on keeping up with the latest rap releases, sometimes to our chagrin (oh Arrested Development, I had such high hopes for you).
Rap music is a pretty cutting-edge form of music, when you think about it. It's made from already recorded tunes, using increasingly complicated recording equipment, and the lyrics are usually stripped of their melody, offering a bare bones kind of aesthetic that disregards conventional ideas about songs. Songs, they say, should be sung. It's not hard to understand why parents might be less than enthused by the monotone yelling over thumping beats coming from their children's stereos. Even Jimi Hendrix never rocked like that.
Fast-forward to the present day: I haven't kept up on all the latest rap releases (sorry, South Coast, I guess I'm still sleeping), but I consider myself a big fan and it's still my primary musical love. I have a friend that's three years younger than I who is also a rap fan since his teen years, though he came up in a different era of rap than I did. Where I was raised on Public Enemy and De La Soul, he was raised on Nas and Biggie Smalls. He believes Ma$e's Harlem World is a classic, not corny like I do. He actually likes PMD's solo album. We see eye-to-eye on a lot of things (it's not like I don't like Nas or B.I.G.), but at the core our tastes are very different.
Like a good hip-hop nerd, I try to put him on to some of my favorite music from my youth. So we came to the day I put The Goats' Tricks of the Shade on the stereo. When that album came out, I played the shit out of it: front to back, over and over and over. I wore out my tape and had to re-buy it on CD. Then I actually wore out the CD. It was a favorite among my high school friends and I, we knew every lyric and every horn stab, and I was sure my younger friend would be blown away. I put the album on the stereo and sat back smugly to gauge his reaction.
My friend listened, passively.
Then he frowned.
Then he started talking over the music!
I was offended and, even moreso, stunned. This was my shit! How could he disregard it like that? So I skipped around to some of the best songs on the album, begging him to listen. He shrugged and said it was okay.
Okay?
Just okay?!
I told him how much I listened to this album as a teenager, smoking pot and playing Super Nintendo and just digging the hell out of it. I told him how I first saw the video for "Typical American" on that call-in cable video channel, The Box, and I was so impressed that I ran out to cop the album. Everyone I knew loved this album, I explained. It's a classic.
"I dunno," my friend muttered, "it sounds like frat rap to me."
And that was that. One of my most cherished albums from high school, reduced to "frat rap." As I listened to it play on my stereo while my friend distracted himself with other things, I came to a painful realization: he was right. The Goats is part of the foundation that The Bloodhound Gang was built on. There's not much distinguishing their choruses from anthemic bar chants by House of Pain. And at that moment, I realized that I may be a rap fan, but I am not cutting-edge. I am a boom-bap dinosaur. I prefer Jeep beats in an era when everyone is driving Escalades. Soulful jazz loops move me more than staccato synthesizer rhythms ever could. And you know what, I've come to terms with it. I'm okay with being a boom-bap dinosaur. I still think The Goats are fucking great.