I sold most of my gangsta rap albums last year.
This is how I got “Doggy Style”. I was in Portland, living on 15th and Hawthorne, and I felt like taking a walk. I ended up at Rip City Records, which is, or was, a few blocks East. So I bought “Doggy Style” thinking I knew a few tracks from MTV, and what the hell, I used to listen to N.W.A. and Eazy-E. I figured I’d get this album with the borderline gross cover art, probably crappy vinyl, probably warped out of the box, I thought, because the cardboard was so thin how could the quality of the record be much better. So I took this thing home, like in a brown paper bag, to my apartment, and it was about ten-thirty or eleven in the morning, and it was sunny and cool, with some mist or haze, and I could see across the river, and the downtown, and I had this garish unknown album. So I prepared to listen to said album, as you know you do, to listen to a gangsta rap album. So, distractions aside, I opened the plastic sleeve, stripped it away, pulled the liner out of the cardboard, the vinyl out of the liner, and I was stunned. It was a rope. Flat and thick and black, shiny, tight. This was quality vinyl, and I put the needle to the record, and there’s this bathtub sound, and for the next half-hour I was slack-jawed in amazement. That album was truly the bomb.
So I sold it last year. Even before we had the baby, I couldn’t really justify the guns and the misogyny. With the baby, what could I say: “It’s the beat, son; it’s the beat.”? It dosen’t really wash, does it? My wife and I have talked about it some. I think what I like (and I do like it) about gangsta rap is somewhat abstracted from the content: it is the beat, and the rhymes, and the compactness of the language. I think it is unfortunate that it is about bitches and guns and shit. My wife thinks there can be no separation of form and content, that anything so seductive and catchy would necessarily be corrupt. I don’t think that is quite true, but I have tried and failed at writing poetry that has no content, and I believe it is impossible, so I think she has a point.
7 responses so far ↓
1 Scotty The Body // Jan 21, 2002 at 9:12 pm
As you were doing this, I was walking down Cooper Avenue in Aspen, Colorado. The sun was heating up my dark green cap and I took it off and looped it through my beltloop. I went into Sam Goody and purchased three CD’s—Snoop Dogg, Outkast and a techno compilation. I blasted them on my little boom box in my room as my redneck racist Florida roommate watched his Public Enemy video in the other room. It was a really good day: no work, young body—boundless in all respects that were important to me at the time. I needed to go to work later that afternoon, and when I went to shave, my roommates had taken down the mirror again. I found it under the roommate from Georgia’s bed with a light dusting of coke on it and a couple of microscopic lines of blow. I washed it all down the sink and hung the mirror back on the bathroom wall. I noticed that the back of my neck and nose were sunburned.
2 Trav the Mav Pav // Jan 23, 2002 at 10:00 am
Oh my gawd…Elliott has a kid?Cannot…process…So today I’m covering my butt in wax. What do you say?
3 Trav the Mav Pav // Jan 23, 2002 at 10:04 am
Honestly, I like gangsta for the guns, drugs, violence, misogyny (sp), and its unadulterated neo-tribalist impulse. It’s some heavy-ass stuff, and it ain’t from the rhymes.
4 scotty the body // Jan 23, 2002 at 9:59 pm
Different Elliott, kid. Very different Elliott.
5 deedub // Mar 14, 2002 at 9:01 pm
it’s all about the bitches and guns and shit. big deal. good music is good music. and good parenting will instill in your kid the same notions you hold while still vicariously living a fantasy you admit to yourself.
6 d.dub // Mar 14, 2002 at 9:14 pm
dammit meant to say a fantasy you WON’T admit to yourself. punk.
7 Anonymous // Mar 29, 2004 at 1:27 pm
oh this is gr8 like me na wot im sayin homie
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