who was not into hip hop in high school

[jlh]

This Is Dedicated to That One Black Kid, comic by Keith Knight
Monday: who lives in that tiny ass town off the highway, in the middle of nowhere

Okay, so one thing about my little town in the sticks is that I was growing up there in the 70s and 80s, with cable TV just coming in, so the way that hip hop culture and many other things dominate the popular space nowadays just didn't happen then. So I decided when I got to college that I needed to figure out this thing called being black.

But once I got there, I was far too scared to sit at that black table in the caf or even join the Black Students Association. I went to the initial BSA meeting and it was as though they were all speaking esperanto for all I could understand what was going on, and anyway, I didn't have the right hair. Instead, I joined the radio station, and started getting into hip hop.

This was in the very late 80s, just before gangsta rap broke through, and hip hop was pretty open, bohemian and quite female-friendly. In fact, female rappers quickly became my preference and I played quite a lot of them on my show. By the time gangsta rap did come in—I remember the department getting Straight Outta Compton and listening to it as a team and marking up which songs we could play and which we couldn't, in this day before songs got radio edits—I was already immersed enough in the music that it didn't feel too distancing. (That said, we all thought that any scantily clad girl on the cover of an Ice-T record MUST have some better way to make money.) It was exciting to watch this sea change in music close-up.

So, was I able to figure out this whole black thing by joining the radio station? Sort of. There were a lot of other things happening at college that also helped, and just generally working things out for myself and realizing that outside of the posing that can happen in big group meetings, many of the others were as at sea as I was. It gave me a piece of culture that I could understand in a time when many white folks still liked to say that rap wasn't music. But there were some other ways in, and I'll talk about them in a bit.

Comments

[sistermagpie.livejournal.com]

You worked at a radio station--that's cool! My roommate worked at the radio station in college, and this made me think of her just because I think she, too, was using music to sort of get into a different culture than the one she'd come from. It sounds like a joke or like it's a posing thing, but I don't think it really is. It's the start of a conversation.

[jlh.livejournal.com]

I think it sometimes gets a bad rap because of how much cultural poaching has gone on by the dominant culture. So it's like, "aha, you are interested in our music so you can steal it and make more money off it."

But when done honestly, it really can open a door to a whole other world, and music is so very universal. There is very little music that I've ever listened to that I really didn't like as a type or genre.