Ants - P.O.S. - Ipecac Neat - 2004

So my girlfriend made a couple of efforts about 3-4 months into our relationship to get me into Hip Hop and made me a couple of mixes before realizing that I was never going to be 100% okay with listening to it. People will often apologize to me in cars or hanging out in parties when hip hop is playing, usually with a "I know you don't like hip hop"...which isn't actually true. I sort of like this song for instance...it's more a matter of I will never be okay being a hip hop fan.

I realize the cultural baggage is mostly my own, but I still have it. My relationship to hip hop needs to be taken in context. My first exposure to it was relatively late, and that depends on whether or not you count The Beastie Boys first album. I was a teenager at the time when MTV (back when it actually showed music) was starting to play hip hop to the exclusion of rock music. This pitted me in a sort of cultural war...Hip Hop was "winning" and I didn't much care for what that meant for the music I like. Beyond that as a person who started first and foremost as a fan of Beatle-esque pop, early 90's hip hop was the very antithesis of that. Virtually without melody, it was beats and rhymes set to clunky rhythms. It was all poise and posture, and no "Art" as my 16 year old brain defined it.

But beyond that, my reticence springs more from the racial issue...ah the dreaded racial issue. To me, where I grew up, you were belittled by both sides for listening to hip hop. You of course got your racist red neck Hoosiers who claimed you were betraying your people by listening to "Black People Music"...but what effected me more (I can always ignore redneck idiots) was the perception by the few African-Americans in my town that any white person listening to hip hop was doing so to appropriate "blackness" as a way of being cool, that as we had done with Jazz, Blues, and Rock before we were co-opting their style cause our own was too lame.

Well, now a new generation has come of age, one that exists after the culture war has been lost and the appropriation is mostly complete. Most hip hop concerts these days are too pricey for anyone but white suburbanites to go too, and it's harder edges have been replaced by cartoon thugs and jesters. The world's relationship to Hip Hop is in a different place, but I will never be able to shake the feeling that if the person next to me on the subway heard what was coming out of my iPod headphones they're thought would be "Jesus, what a fucking poser".