How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(15)

Classic.

Black girls couldn’t be a real part of our space because they were busy with their own rituals. Plus, getting caught in the opposite sex’s bathroom got you suspended for a week. We cracked open the door of the bathroom just enough so the black girls could hear. And what they heard, probably more than our actual rhymes, were our responses to our rhymes. As the beat box–accompanied boasts, confessionals, and critiques moved from between urinals and stalls out the door of the bathroom into the hallway, the black girls, white folks, Asians, and wack niggas could only consume and interrogate the sound, not the creative culture or experience from whence that sound sprang. Our cipher was off limits to them, B. Dazzle told me. And quiet as it was kept, we wanted it that way. We wanted the black girls, especially, to need to hear what we were up to from a distance, but we refused to conceive them as our primary audience. Conversely, they kept us out of their private rituals, too.

From our position, the black girls in the hall were positioned in the same way we were positioned as Southern eavesdroppers of New York hip-hop. Some would get close as they could to the crack of the door, but they could never come all the way in. We understood that the seven Southern Black Boys in that space were private, mysterious, and desired by folk who didn’t really know how or why we did what we did. That belief made us feel more powerful, possessed, closer to real hip-hop and strangely closer to New York.

Within that B-Boy room, all of us knew that hip-hop credibility had little to do with the quality of your boast, the intensity of your critique, or the passion of your confessional. Really, it was all rooted in your hip-hop aesthetic. And that aesthetic seemed to be rooted in geography. Hip-hop and New York became unspoken adjectives in small Southern spaces like this, and one’s worth in the B-Boy room was based almost solely on how hip-hop or New York the other six listeners thought you and your style were.

I had a decent bit of hip-hop credibility due to spending summers in upstate New York visiting my father (to most black Mississippians, New York state meant New York City), but my rhyme style was too deliberate, dirty, local, filled with too many “or” words that were pronounced with a long “o” to be considered authentic New York. “Now I need no mic,” I would rap, “just a slow-ass tempo/step to me wrong and motherfucker, you in fo’/a beat down that’ll go down in your history books/come try and fuck with Kie, get yo ego took.” That was the favorite of my four lyrical styles. And the other three styles, though dope in their own way, sounded remarkably close to that one. In the B-Boy bathroom, my rhymes swayed the crowd, but the movement started and stopped in between those two Central Mississippi urinals. B. Dazzle, on the other hand, moved the crowd to different states, figuratively and literally, and his character was as desired and enigmatic as his rhymes.

I believed the myth was that B. Dazzle and his older brother, Kamikaze, spent summers not in Poughkeepsie, Rochester, Albany, or Syracuse, but at some cousin’s place in the South Bronx. The myth allowed me to slavishly follow when B. Dazzle chided us to use the term “hip-hop” instead of “rap,” and “cipher” instead of “rap circle.” “Hip-hop is more lyrical, more New York, nigga,” he told me. He said it was universal, real, filled with brothers in ciphers dropping knowledge, breaking, deejaying, graffiti writing, showing, and proving, while rap music, on the ashy black-hand side, was artistically inferior, country-sounding, and local.

Henry James didn’t have to tell us that geography was fate. Shit, we knew that. The seven of us had similar dreams of being divine emcees, too, though we knew geography wouldn’t allow it. Plus, our mamas and grandparents had other plans, and they made sure we became multiple dreamers who actualized boring dreams like becoming managers, counterfeiters, computer engineers, racketeers, sergeants, pimps, and college professors.

As much as parts of us tried not to be, we were country Black Boys with little to no experience with real New York hip-hop except Yo! MTV Raps and Rap City, or when the Fresh Fest came to the Coliseum or KRS-ONE came to Jackson State University. And by Mississippi standards, the seven of us weren’t even that country because we were from the city of Jackson. In Jackson, and other parts of the Black Belt, we were no longer the dutiful disciples of the Holy Trinity of MCs—Kane, KRS, and Rakim. We respected the gods, but we were done exclusively eavesdropping on the rhymes coming out of New York City. West Coast music, as varied as it was, met us where we were and, truth be told, it was music we could see and hear. We also accepted that the West Coast and the Black Belt were family, and had been since the second great migration of the 1940s ushered thousands of southern black families to Los Angeles for jobs in the automotive and defense industries.

It’s true that the South, dismissed as culturally slow, meaningless, and less hip (hop) than New York, had yet to, as Albert Murray wrote, lyrically stylize our Southern worlds into significance. But if outsiders really listened to the musty movement behind the Geto Boyz, UGK, Eight Ball, and MJG, they would have heard the din of deeply Southern Black Boys and girls eager to keep it real local. We wanted to use hip-hop’s brash boast, confessional, and critique to unapologetically order the chaos of our country lives through country lenses, with little regard for whether it sounded like real hip-hop.

We were on our way to realizing that we were blues people, familiar in some way or another with dirt. There were no skyscrapers and orange-brown projects stopping us from looking up and out. We didn’t know what it was like to move in hordes, with enclosed subway trains slithering beneath our feet.