I really wanted to submit something to the recently finished Democracy Symposium, only I couldn’t come up with anything anywhere nearly as thoughtful and incisive as the work done by my colleagues here. My entire response to democracy at this point is squinted eyes and a barely open mouth as I try desperately to muster something worth saying. The best I had was is, “Democracy is okay or whatever.” An entire post that hardly makes.
To quickly switch gears, there’s this, a song I heard for the first time earlier this week, a song which immediately fell into my brain’s haywire classification system as a perfect bit of summer hip-hop.
That’s Future doing “Turn On The Lights” a perfectly listenable track that fits tightlly amongst a collection of songs that I associate with the summer. Whether or not there’s a particular summer sound is beyond my understanding but I connect these things with the weather that I’ve enjoyed them most in. If that is a bonkers thing to do, then that’s a cross I will have to bear.
What’s specifically delightful about this song – beside its production, which is infectious, and its hook, which I can’t yet extract from my head – is that it is a relatively rare thing for me to hear new hip-hop that I’m into. Tracks come along every now and again but less often than I might prefer. If it wasn’t for a co-worker whose obsession is new hip-hop, I’d never encounter anything new, mostly because I tend to casually sift through the stuff I missed when I was younger. I’ve been listening to records by A Tribe Called Quest and GZA and Raekwon recently; I can’t imagine the effort it would take to catch up with everything that’s happened between those classics and the more modern stuff. None of this modern stuff is meant for me. It’s meant for young(er), cooler, more tolerant people. And if I was being honest, I’d also acknowledge that none of the stuff I’m sifting through was meant for me either, although I’m giving myself a pass there, because at least I can say I was younger then.
Back to the subject at hand: summer hip-hop. The songs that come to my head when I think about this particular classification are all at least ten years old. I’ve put links to some of them below.
Busta Rhymes’s “Dangerous”
B.I.G.’s “Mo Money Mo Problems”
Pharcyde’s “Soul Flower”
Beastie Boys “Intergalactic”
Outkast’s “Chonky Fire” and “High Schoolin”
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VbSGAk6d6bU
Field Mob’s “Sick Of Being Lonely”
Although they may betray my taste in music moreso than I might like – “Why aren’t you listening to the serious hip-hop!” says an imagined critic – but they’ve each got what I’m looking for in summer music: that certain je ne sais quoi that I struggle to define. As with Future’s song above, the production and the hook matter hugely. I’m not worried about what’s going on lyrically because each of these to my mind are fun to listen to. So then that perhaps is the defining characteristic of something I’d describe as summer hip-hop: fun.
What about something a little more current? So call me maybeReport