The question is why? Why didn’t I know hip-hop?

I have spent my more formative years caring about music. Caring may not be the correct term. Maybe obsessing? Yeah, that’s a bit more accurate. I know I have written about the importance of music before, but I may not have explained how profoundly important it really has been to my becoming. Well…”get ready, cause this shit’s about to get heavy.”

Basically, I cannot remember a moment that I was not standing on the shoulders of some musician, finding explication from their lyrics and identity through their images and interviews. R.E.M. was the first and most sustained love affair, but a whole wave of “alternative” bands helped to brand me as their own. Pixies, Jane’s Addiction, The Cure, Violent Femmes, Radiohead, Tori Amos…these were my bread and butter.

The cultural importance of these bands, however, seemed to be limited to outsiders and critics. My peers and I who grew up in our small, midwestern rural town were consumed with things that were different, things that were about more than jocks, beer, and getting laid. We bonded by identifying with “the other”. Little did we know, however, that this other we loved was not the only option out there.

It is hard to believe that we were so unaware. Period. Clueless of all things outside of our miniscule cultural universe, like the burgeoning art form of hip-hop. Although this blossomed during my life time, it is only now I have real appreciation of what it is and what it means.

There were hints all through my youth of this powerful music, but I knew without conciousness that it was beyond me. When I was only seven or eight I remember visiting my two cousins, Manuel and Joseph, who grew up in a large city. I stood in their garage while they spread out cardboard and demonstrated their new hobby, “breakdancing”. I wasn’t supposed to tell my mom because she considered this a dangerous activity, one certain to cause my instant demise. They played me the song “Brass Monkey” by the Beastie Boys, and spun around on the floor. This was the same year I snuck off to a flea market with another older cousin and bought George Michael’s “Faith” on cassette tape, only to have it taken away by my mother because songs about sex offended her. (Yeah, it is a digression, but it is funny as hell to me.)

Then in sixth grade I took a liking to Vanilla Ice, and was made fun of by my peers, however the rhythms and samples enthralled me, despite their being completely derivative. I probably liked the simultaneous releases from MC Hammer a bit better, but for some reason I felt like I couldn’t own his album.

Through the years there were other tracks I learned from radio play, No Diggity and Killing Me Softly (Fugees version), that I loved but again felt as though I wasn’t allowed to buy the albums.

Late high school welcomed a resurgence of the Beastie Boys, as their avante garde status improved and I went and bought or borrowed their entire discography. And Rage Against the Machine, that other rap/rock band of mass popularity.

Was there a trend in the music I felt able to purchase? Vanilla Ice, Beastie Boys, Rage Against the Machine…. Unfortunately it is obvious to me now that I had internalized the racial-conditioning of growing up in the rural midwest. Knowing without knowing that I should keep to my own kind.

Now that I have burst this bubble, it is still obvious that so much of hip-hop means so much to people more for what it represented culturally rather than the music itself. I am now a dedicated student on the history of the development of this expressive form, and yet there are still ways I am excluded whereas some of my friends who may not care for the music are still somehow more connected by virtue of where they grew up or the color of their skin.

Now there are things that are more socially constructed to be a part of my background, like the beauty of the five-string banjo or the glory that was Michael Stipe’s slow coming out as gay. But these things don’t carry the cultural weight of the monolith that is hip-hop today. And it seems that unless you grew up in a zone where that was your outlet, the bulk of society could care less. That doesn’t take away from the quality of the music, but it cuts down on the cross-over appeal.

In contrast, there isn’t any sector of society that doesn’t feel the touch of hip-hop culture. And yet, I still often feel like an outsider. A voyeur. A novice in the world of the music of the streets. Is it simply that I wasn’t aware enough of the evolution, or am I an outsider by virtue of my genetic code? Or, as I often do, am I simply blowing this all out of proportion? Probably the latter, but it is still an interesting thing to marinate on.