How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America: Essays(16)
And we liked it that way.
En route to lyrical acceptance of our dirty, we met Scarface, JT Money, Ice Cube, Bun B, MC Ren, and D.O.C. And after a while, we realized that they were our cousins, our uncles, our best friends, us. We rode through Compton, Oakland, Port Arthur, and Houston the same way we rode through Jackson, Meridian, Little Rock, New Orleans, and Birmingham. We rode in long cars with windows down, bass quaking, and air fresheners sparkling like Christmas tree ornaments.
We felt pride in knowing that the greatest producer alive was an uncle from Compton and the most anticipated emcee in the history of hip-hop was a lanky brother from Long Beach. We knew, no matter what anyone in New York said, that the baddest emcee on earth, song for song, album for album, was an aging cousin from South Central Los Angeles whose government name was O’Shea.
But B. Dazzle, through his lyrics, clothes, sensibility, and utterances of “ciphers” still reveled in being New York hip-hop. And being New York hip-hop trumped being a Southern Black Boy who wondered if New York hip-hop loved him in the early 1990s. Chicago rapper Common Sense rapped in 1994 about faithfully loving HER, a version (or virgin) of pure hip-hop who moved away from New York essence and lost her soul. We could and couldn’t relate, because while the last thing on earth we admitted to wanting to be was a woman or a gay man, our love interest, nonetheless was a HE, a him. And though HE was changing, HE was still sadly New York hip-hop. Around our way, his holy local apostle was a gap-toothed brother with skills and chappy lips named B. Dazzle. The booming acoustics of the B-Boy bathroom and the B-Boy imagination were his Mecca, and since this was before the advent of player-hation, I couldn’t hate. All I could do was not let on that I was starting to love a kind of hip-hop that loved me back, and try hard as hell to be down.
That was then.
Rewind (or fast-forward) back to my standing in an Oberlin College bathroom in early 1998. While Rich Santiago and D. Jakes were in the A-level of the library trying to find titles for their new hip-hop magazine, Rich looked at me and said, “Yo Kie, what about Tha Cypher.” And I was on some, “Yeah man. That’s it.” Now, exactly why I thought Tha Cypher was it is where the story gets a bit shameful. At the time, when I heard “cipher,” I didn’t think of a tight circle of brothers taking turns boasting, critiquing, and confessing themselves into the world over a beat box. The word “cipher” reminded me solely of B. Dazzle and my faulty obsession. It sounded industrial, sleek, masculine, New York—like if the magazine could speak, through gapped fronts, he would say “I am hip-hop, son. Yah mean? What!”
And I guessed that’s what Rich and them wanted in a magazine. But honestly, I understood a few hours later that I might have been too country, too dirty, too much of a Black Boy—might have smelled too many boiling chitlins, said “fenda” too many times, got my ass waxed by too many switches off the chinaberry tree, had comfortably ridden in too many pineconed cabs of pickup trucks—to thoroughly understand what a cipher was in 1992 or 1998. When I said “cipher” over and over again in that bathroom, with all its jaggedly dangling connotations, it sounded fake, forced, clean. Was our Black Boy Central Mississippi space just another cipher? The more I said the word, the more I felt like Puffy’s verse in Benjamin’s, Michael Jackson’s chin, Vanilla Ice’s fade, Hype’s Belly and Soul Train post Don Cornelius. I felt like a something, not a somebody, with forced style and suspect substance, a something that would go to all lengths to never acknowledge its dirtiness, a something that created pleasure in aesthetically being the opposite of a Mississippi Black Boy.
Don’t get me wrong! In college, like lots of Southern Black Boys, I could bring the ever fake and flexible “Word,” “Nam sayin’?” or “Yo, son” where need be. But stripped of the verbal signifiers of hip-hop, I was left kinda naked. I became what I was running from in that Mississippi B-Boy bathroom in 1992, the opposite of NYC B-Boy. I was an unrefined, red-eyed, dirty, Mississippi Black Boy looking for both acceptance and something to resist anywhere I could find it. In 1992, it was B. Dazzle and in 1998, at Oberlin, it was Tha Cypher. Both times, the “it” I really wanted to accept, resist, and love was New York hip-hop. But to love and resist New York hip-hop, I had to believe hip-hop and New York were ends in themselves that had little to do with black Southern me.
And this is where it gets tricky, because by 1998 the South completely accepted its dirtiness. When Goodie Mob asked the question on his classic Soul Food, “What you niggas know about the Dirty South?” New York hip-hop’s honest answer should have been, “Yo, not a gotdamn thing, son. And we ain’t really trying to know that country shit, either.”
1998 was the year that the Calio Projects of New Orleans met hip-hop. Everything Master P and No Limit put out went gold and platinum. All over the country, people claimed to be “Bout It.” UGK, underground Southern glory at its rawest, was about to show Jay Z and the country how to Big Pimp. Outkast was a few years removed from driving a Southernplayeristic Cadillac from Atlanta to space and back with ATLiens, and they were about to redefine sonic chemistry with Aquemini. Far from crunk, but also far from the clean bounce of Kriss Kross, Goodie Mob released a follow-up to the critically acclaimed Soul Food that pronounced they were Still Standing.
Inside the library, D. Jakes and Rich were busy trying to create a magazine that mimicked New York hip-hop ciphers, but in the town of Oberlin, Ohio, and nearby cities like Cleveland, Detroit, and St Louis, folks were listening to and loving how Southern Black Boys were redefining hip-hop. Folks in these other cities watched these Southern artists learn what artists west of the Deep South had learned ten years earlier and Midwest artists like Bone learned four years earlier: they understood that imitating and interrogating New York hip-hop was fruitless without applying that imitation and interrogation to one’s local culture, one’s place. This understanding was at the core of the success of NWA, Bone, and eventually Outkast. As great a moment as this was for the South, was there anyone who thought that Southern hip-hop would move beyond the heights it reached in 1998? How could it?