Day 29: "Ministry of Sound Presents - Rappers Delight" - Various Artists (2015)

Yes, I took a day off yesterday.  Fortunately, the level of drama and anxiety in my life has subsided to its base level again so I can write this blog without wondering what the point of anything at all is in life.

This is without a doubt the newest CD in my collection;  I'd kind of given up on purchasing CDs for myself a long time ago, between the advent of Spotify and the unspoken idea that my partner and I generally have a merged CD collection which is mainly hers (and kept downstairs, because it's mostly respectable).  However, this is unequivocally mine, a Christmas present last year from my good friend Rachel, one of the most musically talented doctors you will ever meet.  It's 4 hours of rap from the 80's to today, and it's an opportunity for me to talk about rap in general.

Yes, if you want 4 hours of rap, I made the playlist and its right here

It's possible I'm the joint-least-likely-rap-fan of all time.  I am sure there are lots of people in the world who are AS unlikely to be fans of rap as me, a 41 year old, white, middle class, suburban English statistician, but unless someone can prove to me that David Duke is secretly bumping some old school N.W.A. in his off hours, I'm gonna happily take my place at the bottom of the "people who should stereotypically be fans of this kind of music" pile.

But here I am, an avowed fan of the genre.  Last year Catherine and I went to California with her mother (don't ask), which led to the fun scenario of me cruising out towards Venice Beach in our hire car, with Snoop, Kendrick Lamar, and Dr Dre on my playlist, trying to explain to my mother-in-law why all these culturally relevant L.A. musical icons all had to swear quite so much in their songs.

There's an old trope that's all over the internet, and I heard myself a bunch of times when my go-to "getting to know you question" was "so, what kind of music do you like?".  

"Well, I like..."

So as not to turn this blog post into result 733,001 in Google on this subject, I'll just say that when you say that to me, what you are really saying is "I don't really think about music that much, I never go outside my comfort zone, and I've never heard any of the amazing country and rap artists out there, and I don't wish to engage with your question".  I'd rather have someone just flat out tell me they don't like music at all, so I can at least add them to my list of suspected alien infiltrators on Earth.

(as a post script, I always wanted to find myself in a position to respond to someone giving that reply with "Oh, so it's cool if I cue up Cannibal Corpses "Hammer Smashed Face", followed by a 33 minute free-form jazz song by Charles Mingus about how great drums are then?").

I didn't want to be one of those people.  When I see something which is obviously popular but I don't understand or appreciate it fully myself, my instinct is that rather than rejecting it outright, I try and find someone to guide me into it, help me find in it the joy that they do.  It doesn't always work, sometimes our tastes just don't align, but it means that when someone says to me "Hey, do you like Football?" or "Do you like Opera?" or "Do you like long walks in the countryside?", I can tell them "No, but I tried it, and I can appreciate that other people see something in it, and the technical skill involved, but it's not for me".  

Moving in with Dave in 96' was the start of my path towards appreciating rap.  I already owned a copy of the Beastie Boys "Ill Communication", which I guess is a pretty good "my first training wheels non-threatening rap record", but Dave loved west coast hip hop, and it was under his tutelage that I came to appreciate The Pharcyde, Jurassic 5, and Del tha Funky Homosapien.   With the door open to new possibilities, my trips to the record store at the time no longer focused on the grunge and metal sections of the CD racks - this time, I'd cast my eye over the extremely limited (remember, I grew up in a small, white, provincial town)  rap selection.  The fact that our record store stocked any rap at all was a miracle.  I bought Wu-Tang's "36 Chambers", Dr Dre's "The Chronic", and NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" from there.

By the time Eminem burst on to the scene in 1999 as the "acceptable" face of crossover rap hits, felt like I was OG, and I've never really looked back.  

Part of it comes from my love of narrative.  There's no better way for something to engage me than to tell me a story in an interesting way, and rap, more than any other musical genre (maybe with the an argument for Blues and, ironically, Country) builds itself around a trying to tell you something, take you somewhere, or express an emotion through narrative.  With nothing more than a couple of sample loops and a mouthful of rhymes, Ice Cube's "It Was A Good Day" takes you to a time, a place, a situation that was so alien to me as an English twenty year old kid that it might as well have been about Mars.

Even today I try and keep current with what's hot in the rap scene.  There's a few people I follow on Twitter who are great at keeping me abrest of what's new and interesting, which means that I get exposed to, and get subsequently amazed by, artists like Kendrick Lamar (who's album "DAMN" from this year is amazing), Chance the Rapper, and Common.

Now being a rap fan doesn't come without its own problems in 2017.  There's a lot of rap lyrics which you'd call problematic if you were listening to them and were, say, a woman.  My partner Catherine doesn't really appreciate my love of rap, not because she's not comfortable with the musical style (as a Spanish teacher, she loves Mexican rap like Control Machete), but just for being a musical genre with a track record of fairly casually misogynist commentary throughout its lyrical history.   If we're listening to music on shuffle in the car and, let's say, Dr Dre comes on, it's my turn to shuffle, this time with uncomfortable guilt as she gives me the well-deserved side-eye.

What could possibly be offensive to women about this?  Oh, right.

In addition, rap presents a unique problem to someone like me who loves to sing along in the car;  specifically, I have to very carefully censor myself as we go along because, well, lets just say there's words I'm not gonna say even in the privacy of my own car by myself.

But ultimately it is what it is.  As a fan of rap, you have to own all the parts of it, good, bad and dubious.  I have to believe that the power of the medium, and it's cultural significance, has to in some way outweigh the stereotypes and problems which plague it to this day.  But if you don't think rap can be amazing, can be of cultural significance, and can transcend those limitations to produce something so outrageously exceptional it's hard to put into words how amazing it can be, I have one word for you.

If you're reading this, and you think you don't like rap, if you think its a musical style that doesn't speak to you, take 2 hours and 22 minutes out of your schedule and listen to Hamilton.  

You can send your thanks to me on Twitter when you are done.