Word up, this is how we gon’ do this.
I’m the Rhinoceros. I’s a rap cat. It’s one of the most important things to me in all the world. And I’m fuckin’ insane with it. I learns rappers’ real names and personal histories. I’ve prolly heard of the most respected rapper in any city you can name. I dip, dive and dash across my university campus hollering Camp Lo lyrics at the top of my lungs. I seem to be able to find a Scarface song to soundtrack my every experience. I can never seem to stop myself from lip-synching or audibly mumbling “Bring The Pain” or “Light Sleeper” on buses and subway trains. I spend hours and hours online debating the latest shit at the greatest place on the Internet and trolling mp3 blogs for new Bay Area hyphy singles or old De La Soul B-sides. It’s just what I do. More than that, I reckon it’s who I am. I haven’t got a choice in the matter, and I wouldn’t have it any other way regardless.
Now, it’s become cliché that inside jessabout every rap fan there lurks an aspiring rapper, especially those of the hopelessly naive, manifestly untalented, homely bleachskin sort who couldn’t sell a record if an entry pass into the Playboy Mansion were included with the purchase. This lot is mine, hopefully exempting the ‘untalented’ bit, an’ I’m more than well aware of it. Even my “slangwich”, my personal creole, that is the Queensbridge and Port Arthur-influenced dialect I may or may not choose to speak in here and in real life, raises a few “Aren’t you just a condescending whiteboy?” eyebrows. To which my answer is “Fuck no, I’m for real”, but point tookened all the same.
All that said, I fancy myself a very good rapper, and I’m looking to record a sampler tape of my own spittage. Given I comes from a way the fuck upper class bourgeois background an’ I’s neither known real poverty, sold crack nor even so much as seen a real live gun, it ain’t my business to be talkin’ gangsta shit, even if plenty of my favourite rappers gets they bread an’ butter that way. But neither does I reckon I’d like to get down with the main underground clicks, who too often seem like unimaginative, moralistic, backpacking nostalgia-pimps, and I usually don’t fuck with the wilfully oblique post-rap set either. ‘Sides which, put simply, I ain’t sure my life would make for great rap shit. The world don’t need to hear from a rapper who reads The Economist magazine and whose favourite movies are Persona and Before Sunrise rather than Scarface. So I’s tryna take a different route; I reckon I’ma try an’ spit some inventive imagery an’ some generosity slang, and see where that takes me.
As of the last eight months or thereabouts I’m also one of a number of righteous folks who gets busy out at Hip-Hop Karaoke. I do my thing. I make no claims to be exceptional, but folks seem to really dig the way I get down. The event has developed something of a serious following, and a terribly gracious gentleman called Jordan Timm was kind enough to write about it in a recent issue of one of this country’s most respected national newsmagazines.
Along with a real ill pal of mine and fellow HHK stalwart, I’m also a contributing writer at Dope-A-Lot, an online publication of uncommon sophistication and editorial élan, scrupulously devoted to cataloguing and detailing hip-hop-related goings-on in my city. Its éminence grise, its raison d’être, is the noble and gracious Philip Litevsky, otherwise known as Strictly Tev, a man few among his acquaintances regard as anything other than a most exemplary gentleman indeed. I also contribute to Allan’s World, the increasingly popular online hangout of a casual music-crit friend; we review groovy new shit from all over the globe, largely indie rock an’ whatnot. That shit is dope!
But some would doubtless argue, more than persuasively, that someone of my background ought to remain on the sidelines, rather than trying to jump into the ring. It’s not easy. White folks who come from moneyed backgrounds are viewed with suspicion in the culture, even though certain older or less-popular strains of the music find that they’re virtually its only audience. The rhetoric of Black liberation and self-reliance, and sometimes anti-white racism and separatism, arose in hip-hop as a response to white fecklessness and oppression, and if hip-hop is genuinely meant to be the voice of folks of colour (as I believe it was chiefly intended and shall remain), a bourgeois white person is gonna have a tricky time as an MC. And I’m not as angry and violent as the most credible of white emcees have been, so I can’t really authentically claim to have lived the kind of life most of the greats have lived. I’ve never lived in the hood. I’ve never even lived next to the hood. And hip-hop, for all its pageantry and smoke-ring-blowing, values conviction and authenticity above all else. So if I opt to try and make a name for myself, as opposed to making music for myself alone to listen to, it’ll be a long haul.
But I can’t stop, won’t stop. Hip-hop is my lifeblood. I live it an’ breathe it, I shit it an’ eat it. I never been defeated, punked out, retreated. So it’ll be whatever it is. Knamsayin’?
