Faux Real

A once in a lifetime opportunity has presented itself to me and I cannot be a part of it. That’s right — Too $hort is performing in my town tonight and I can’t go.

Please join me in regretting my inability to attend this great event by wistfully watching “I Want To Be Free,” a 1992 video in which my favorite rapper registers his own disappointment with the Oakland police force. If you’re not a huge fan, watch the last minute of the video and pay attention to the last few lines.

A preemptive defense: Screw all y’all who would take my imaginary feminist card away for wanting to be there. I know the man’s lyrics and popularization of so-called pimp culture aren’t a popular thing around these parts, but I love hip hop and you can’t take that away from me. This is one of the least misogynist videos of his I could find on YouTube, so thank me for that dear feminist reader. But for the music lovers in the vicinity, allow me to expound on why Too $hort is my favorite rapper of all time.

I used to hate rap. I came of age as rap hit the mainstream and all around me I saw suburban Indiana white kids dive into rap culture and try to find ways to make music that was about living hard lives in modern, urban ghettos, real ghettos that most of us would never see except in movies, define their worldview. My resentment for my peers made me hate the catalyst for their behavior, the music itself. (I later developed a similar distaste for jam bands, having grown up in the same town as a fraternity-heavy campus. Grateful Dead or Dave Matthews, anyone?) It wasn’t until after Ethan was born and I revived a friendship with an old rap-loving friend that I learned to love the music.

My friend — one of my oldest friends, who I grew up with in school and church, and may well win the title of first love (when we were thirteen he told his mother he would marry me) — was experiencing consequences for his honky-assed appropriation of gangster culture. Caught for dealing petty drugs, he was put on house arrest after a short stint in work release and remained there for over a year. I made a point of visiting him whenever I could — he was on the outs with his girlfriend and his family, and he was trying to keep his nose clean which meant staying away from any of his drug-using and -dealing friends. That left me and one other person to keep him company in his loneliness.

I too was in a bad spot — Ethan’s father and I had just split for good — and it was comforting to be in the company of another lovable screw up without needing to interact. On house arrest my friend worked a lot, and without any dependents or anywhere to go, he amassed large amounts of money that he spent on an entertainment system. We’d sit on his front lawn in folding chairs, as far as he could go outside with his ankle bracelet on, and student-watch while music blared from the $2000 speakers in his upstairs apartment. We didn’t say much to one another, but we kept each other company and listened to Too Short, Rappin’ 4-Tay and Geto Boys on repeat.

I find great pleasure still in discovering new, interesting artists, people like Roots Manuva and Sach, both of whom I discovered thanks to fellow bloggers, but my heart lies with these early-modern gangster rap idols. The truth is that I didn’t discover the greatness of rap and hip hop until long after its great days in the mainstream were over — the most seminal of groups had broken up and gone solo, The Chronic had come and gone, Biggie and Tupac had already been assassinated, and Puff Daddy, for shame, ruled the airwaves. I had missed the coming out party, I was a baby when rap was born, and by the time I noticed that there was this vibrant, political musical movement going on around me the mainstream had already descended into gross materialism and inanity.

Too Short, speaking of inanity, is my favorite rapper. You may have caught that. He started in the mid-eighties and founded his own record label to get his music distributed, and if you follow his growth over his 15+ album spread, you’ll notice that while the backing tracks have changed with the latest trend (sort of), his rap style has not. Old school rap, new beats — it’s difficult for me to place the approximate year that a track was released unless I pay close attention to the backing music, and I pride myself on silly trivia such as this.

But the best part of Too Short is that he is what he is — he’s not the best lyricist, the best producer, or the best rhymer — and he’s kind of cheesy. His rhythm is lacking compared to recent break out artists. On occasion he puts together incredibly insightful pieces of social commentary (see especially the last few lines of the video above), but he mostly exists anymore as a caricature from an older movement, back when he placed himself in opposition to a news media that vilified black artists and made fun of Rodney King and dismissed the LA riots as the random and senseless violence of hoodlums, when rap was still dismissed as a flash in the pan phenomenon. But Too Short keeps performing and pumping out albums, even if he’s doing so in a know-nothing town like this one.

Bonus points, above all, for perseverence.

I’m truly regretful that I don’t get to see Too $hort tonight — in part because my old friend and I were supposed to go together. Oftentimes my inexplicable love of music has less to do with the music itself and everything to do with the memories attached to it. In this case, it’s clearly both.