Douglas Martin is all-too-aware of the irony that if Run DMC emerged today in those pants, they’d be labeled hipsters.
Let’s take it back to 1989. I was living with my biological mother, a first-generation rap fan, who would blare Run DMC and LL Cool J cassette tapes upon my arrival home from school. I’d bob my head trying to figure out the differences between addition and subtraction, and life was good. 1991 is when shit started to get tricky.
That was the year I first saw the video for Nirvana’s “Smells Like Teen Spirit,” and the explosion of compressed and distorted guitar was like an atom bomb going off on my head, layering a mushroom cloud over everything I’d listened to prior. That and “Lithium” had me hooked. For the next several years, one eye watched Kurt Cobain’s shadow, the other scoped Christopher Wallace’s. In the early 90’s, the idea of a scrawny black kid spending days skateboarding to “All Apologies” and nights bumping “The Warning,” elicited a fairly peculiar image. Figuring the kid would grow up to be an experimental-folk singer moonlighting as a hip-hop producer who flips samples from Catpower and The Unicorns, is probably similarly awkward.
It took me years to realize that there are a lot of kids who grew up just like me. Look at Pharrell, who not only punches beat pads for hip-hop superstars, but has a rock group called N.E.R.D. Look at Kanye, an art school-dropout who became arguably the decade’s greatest beat maker (and rap‘s biggest superstar), prior to taking a left-turn and decided to record an album influenced by Thom Yorke, Roisin Murphy, and Tears for Fears.
Judging From the Inauguration Photos, Kanye is Also Taking Fashion Tips From Roisin Murphy
Even the dude who recorded rap’s highest-selling album in 2008 is gearing up for the release of his rock record. Regardless of the questionable replay value of “Prom Queen,” the lines between cultures are blurring quickly. When you have Jim Jones rhyming over MGMT’s “Electric Feel,” then it’s safe to say that a sixteen-year-old doesn’t have to listen exclusively to hip-hop for fear of being called an “Oreo” or a “Blipster.” Alternately, there are tens of thousands of aspiring white rappers (inevitably varying in quality,) who can spit freestyles at the lunch table without someone shouting a backwards slur like “Wigger” at them.
The other day, as I was leaving the grocery store, air-drumming the intro to “Crooked Head” by Fucked Up, I saw a fleet of skateboarders, and two of them were black. One of them had the exact same pair of skinny jeans as me. Then, I saw a young brother hop out of his car wearing a fitted cap and a chain wallet. I wondered if either– or perhaps both– of them have heard of Fucked Up. These kind of questions will arise more and more as hip-hop drives deeper into its third decade of existence, and well into its fourth. Most kids nowadays don’t really give a fuck about genre constraints; they just know what they like, which bodes well for rappers who want to try new things in 2009 and the years beyond. And, coming from someone who’s gotten quite a few curious stares when Tegan & Sara came up after M.O.P. when my MP3 player was on shuffle, thank God for that.
Download:
MP3: Nirvana-“All Apologies”
MP3: The Notorious B.I.G.-“The Warning”
