"If the truth gives pain, it is not the fault of the teacher, nor of the reader who hears it for the first time, but of error, which stabs and stings before it will surrender its victim." M.M. Mangasarian
Showing posts with label what it means to me. Show all posts
Showing posts with label what it means to me. Show all posts
I love Hip Hop. I love everything about what makes it so profound in my life and how I am always a part of it.It is a culture born from above average people whom ingeniously created to make a better aesthetic life out of limited resources. It is revolutionary. It never asked for permission to be seen or heard while inspiring the uninspired, and it neither apologized for its liberty being felt. Hip Hop is a culture born to outright the wrongs of all conditions in an environment of injustice by celebrating life. Yes, a better life fantasized about in the American Dream. No, not celebrating materialism, bling, or capitalism because it did not begin with anything or was it given anything from the start. No, Not at all, but to celebrate urban life as an expression for liberty and happiness by the inviting spirit of what the Statue of Liberty was meant to represent:
“Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore. Send these, the homeless, tempest-tossed to me, I lift my lamp beside the golden door!”
After Hip Hop was born it became the litmus test for the United State’s of America and eventually the rest of the world. If anyone really wanted to know what was wrong with this country all they had to do was listen to what Hip Hop has been trying to tell it from the beginning. It was pressure cooked from some of the world’s worst conditions in the South and West Bronx, Harlem, NYC, where the tired, the poor, the huddled masses, the homeless, and the battered struggled. It was an infant holding up a mirror for all to see when Grandmaster Melle Mel first said, “A child was born, with no state of mind.” And now, today, that child he spoke about in The Message has all grown up with an uncultured thug mentality making crappy records as a music label’s harlot, but that is a topic for another discussion.
Words, beats, and life! Words, beats, and life! Those three things are what R.A.P. (Rhythm And Poetry) became to mean to me. It is what defines how I felt about the music that I fell in love with almost instantaneously. I became consumed with this music that made my body move but at the same time stimulated my curiosity for learning. I mean, it was obvious that I was being entertained by this music…that much I knew. What was not obvious was the fact that I was learning things from this new style of music at an incredible rate. It was so regaling to me and I was so young that I had no idea what was being feed to my brain. I just simply could not get enough of it. Rap music was life. The words and the beats became my life.
When I came to the US from Trinidad around the age of 10, I was devoid of the music that I grew up on. There was an absence of the rich steel pan and soca music that Trinidad had provided me. Suddenly I was in a place where those forms of music failed to exist. I mean, no one outside of my apartment was listening to anything that resembled soca or steel pan. I quickly had to adapt to a new way of life as do many children who come to the states from other countries. I had always taken to things that I found interesting. I took to basketball immediately and I took to rap music in the same way. I became entranced the first time I heard that sound accompanied by spoken words flowing out of my friend’s boom box. It sounded like nothing I had ever heard before. I could feel the passion that emanated from the rapper’s voice and the beats that clung to it. That day I was formerly introduced to rap music. Rap music became my solace, my teacher, my buddy, and one of the sources of my black identity.
I grew to know artists like: KRS-ONE, Public Enemy, Poor Righteous Teachers, Brand Nubian, Intelligent Hoodlum, Queen Latifah, Main Source, the Native Tongues Crew, Too Short, and LL Cool, to name a few. I didn’t know them personally, but I sure felt as though I did, based on all the time I spent listening to their words. The words these artists rapped was nothing short in ingenious. I was so entertained by the rhythm, the beats, the lyrical content, and the style that these musicians encompassed. I later found out that some of these artists became among the best teachers of history that I had ever had. I was not formerly taught by them in a conventional classroom with a dilapidated blackboard, out dated text books, and squeaky wooden desks. That was not my classroom for instruction. When I was being taught by the likes of BDP and Public Enemy my classroom occurred wherever I happened to be listening to their music. Sometimes it was on the bus while my walkman’s headphones rested gently on my ears. Sometimes it was outside near the basketball courts where they (rap artists) lectured from my friend’s boom box, or “ghetto blaster” as we used to call it. These lectures could take place at any time or anywhere. All I had to do was listen to the music. The best part was that it was fun to learn from them. I didn’t even realize until I was older, as to how much I actually was learning about history, politics, and vocabulary.
