Hip Hop and My Youth
Hip hop has always been the twinkle of my eye. It was there during my most innocent of days, silver spoon and all — somewhere in the middle of England, on icy morning walks to school as I clutched my phone close to my ear just to be warmed by the soulful harmonies in Kanye West’s Cant Tell Me Nothing. It was there years before that when my aunt would pick me up after school, and I would spend the afternoon listening to my cousin’s radio, phoning in to request songs just so I could hear them one more time. My brother used to play Eminem’s Marshall Mathers LP, one of hip- hops most vulgar and controversial moments, on mornings when my mother would drop him and I off at our respective schools. “Now Ryal, don’t go kill anyone at school”, joked my brother while getting out of the car at his university, after a long ride of my mother complaining about how these lyrics were rubbing off on an eight- year old me.
Six years later, the love was still there. Lil Wayne had just dropped off his now infamous Tha Carter III, the same body of work that sold over 1 million copies just one week after being released. I remember the tangible quality of the production and how it used to give me goosebumps. I remember Weezy’s idiosyncratic vocals that reeked of promethazine and ganja (I could smell his voice). He somehow managed to merge classy delivery, poetic license and despicable, misogynistic sexual imagery to create an avenue of music which since his peak has become the number one most influential genre on Earth. The legendary offering came in the same year that I discovered Limewire, a P2P file- sharing platform that created a vacuum of the most- wanted multimedia across the world, that anyone could access.
Sitting at my computer after school for hours on end, downloading anything that had the name Lil Wayne in it, or anything else that struck my fancy, was how I spent my early high school years. Looking at the impact that hip- hop has made in the past 11 years, I would imagine that this was the same for many kids in my generation. Soaking up the culture was an addiction which has manifested in various sub- cultures of their own across today’s youth. Looking at this decade long- whirlwind of hip hop taking over, brings two tears to my eye for good and bad reasons. One, because I grew up in it and now feel like I have been wonderfully vindicated, after years of having to defend my choice of listening to the devil’s music. The second tear is regretful because I have’t made something out of my love for the culture, except for a bunch of half- written verses and unmastered beats sitting dormant on my laptop.
I spent the next 8 years of my life addicted to J. Cole’s inclination to telling the saddest stories, Kendrick’s gangsta- meets- Frodo vocal inflections, Drake’s ability to twist a Julia Roberts and Tom Hanks movie plot into a rap song, and the rest of 2008 Lil Wayne’s face- tatted, coloured- dreaded clones.
So what is it about hip hop that leads kids of all backgrounds into a music- driven fervour? Is it the undeniable coolness of hip hop artists, the fashion or the fact that most hip hop artist don’t seem to give a fuck? Are they role models, or bad examples? Of course, the music will speak for itself at the end of the day — but on that same day, the personality and creativity of the self- entrepreneur that we know as a rapper will shine through the music, and undoubtedly rub off on millions of pre- pubescent teenagers who want to be just like them. I was one of them, and I know that it was not easy to dissuade me from listening to my favourite music. In fact, it was impossible.
