Reconciling Rap Music to My Daughter

During our lives most hip-hop fans are forced to reconcile with the fact that hip hop might not like us. Whether you’re not from the hood that berthed it, you’re white, or worse, a woman, at some point you’ve rapped along to a lyric that directly denigrated a group whom you’re temporarily ashamed to identify with. You didn’t think much of it — you kept it moving — partially because you were explicitly so advised within the same verse, but mostly because you loved the MC. Their flow was dope, the beat was insane, and somehow synergistically they made you feel like your best self — but in the recesses of your mind may have surfaced the question of how little your love was reciprocated.

Then again, isn’t that the definition of true love? One that seeks nothing in return beyond the feeling we get from our object of desire’s mere existence as their authentic selves. I love hip hop, I think more than I love anything else in the world. If I were stuck on a desert island and had to choose between sports, movies, and rap music, I’d choose music. My beats and rhymes, snares and bars, and if we were in a time warp back to when they had to fit in a shoebox, I’d pack all the usual suspects: BIG and Jay, Snoop and Dre, Nas and Wu, and some Brand Nu — KRS and Kane, not Gucci Mane, Eric B. and his right hand main.

For all intents and purposes, I carry around this collection daily, and rely upon it, if not as an anti-depressant, prophylactically so. Morning commutes can be monotonous, as can washing dishes and cooking dinners, which is additionally exhausting, but add some boom bap to the scene and my mood is transformed, sometimes even 180 degrees, from exhausted resentment to dancing like Steel in Juice, minus the Old English in my eggs. If one’s loving intention while cooking truly does go into their food I’m confident my meals are healthier and more delicious when prepared this way. Albeit ironically, spitting along to lyrics about shooting up your crib, while silently rejoicing over how well tofu comes out on the cast iron skillet.

I whole-heartedly believe that (old) hip hop keeps me young. Now married with a daughter and a house in the ‘burbs, my spirit is regularly challenged by orders from Target and Amazon, groceries, what kinds of tiles or curtains to get, how much money was saved on dish soap, not to mention the logistics and emotional baggage around caring for aging parents. At best, such topics are mind-dulling — at worst I suspect they gradually eat away at one’s soul, until they become so normalized that one loses touch with said soul, forgetting how invigorating dialogue can be. For me the best reminder is throwing on my headphones to listen to the greatest monologists. Even if for only a ten-minute walk to or from the train, I am transported back to my youth, of blunts and baggy clothes, graffiti cans and Starter caps, and it brings me joy. I feel one with the MC, a perfect stranger, though it’s as if the beat binds us and he becomes my inner voice, the highest mark of good art.

When my wife got pregnant in 2020 I knew I’d have to modify the kitchen soundtrack. I knew I couldn’t “quit hip hop,” but as an acupuncturist and a Buddhist, at least in philosophy, I didn’t want my unborn seed regularly hearing songs to prepare her for a world of getting brains stabbed with nose bones. As much as I loved Biggie and hope that one day she might too, I preferred she not overhear through the placenta, “Gimme the baby ring and the number one Mom pendant!” And it’s probably not ideal for her to come into the world convinced that “bitches ain’t shit but ho’s and tricks.” Now with three years of exposure to her personality and demeanor, I’m confident she’d have much to say (shout) in response.

Besides cooking, I spent much of our first trimester searching for (relatively) clean rap that I liked. The Native Tongue crews were an obvious start — groups like Tribe and De La — and I recalled from childhood that Run DMC cursed maybe once per album. Biggie and Wu were immediately banned, and I think the baseline alone on Shook Ones II is enough to traumatize a baby. What I quickly learned is that NWA notwithstanding, rappers barely cursed before the nineties. The dinner-prep playlist has become a lot of EPMD, KRS, LL, Kane, Rakim, Puba, etc. To my wife’s less educated ears it still sounds like brash, aggressive rap tones, but if you pay attention, they’re all PG-13. I’m enjoying it — it’s forced me to boost my late-eighties-era IQ, which is an important one for any true head — and as far as my toddler knows, rap is clean.

She’ll be the wiser before we know it. Eventually I will stop censoring myself for the sake of her inevitably lost innocence, first in exchange for a hopefully authentic connection, secondly for the practical acceptance that whatever she doesn’t hear at home she will on the outside. In spite of my own mother’s once wishful ignorance, that I’d one day “outgrow that rap,” it’s been forty years now; I don’t see my affinity dwindling in the next ten. While with age I have observed less affinity for certain violent movies I once loved (college bro, Tarantino vibes), I’ve retained the same attraction to violent lyrics. Whether it will resonate to my daughter as old man, white noise in the background, the way Neil Diamond did for me as a child (love his shit now!), or she’s astutely attentive, at some point she’ll see and hear me rhyming passionately along (while roasting tofu): Biggie Smalls is the wickedest, niggas say I’m pussy, I dare ya to stick ya dick in this!

Will her mouth drop in awe? Will she run away crying as my wife enters the kitchen yelling, or will all parties be genuinely indifferent, the way I once was to Cracklin’ Rosie? Worse, will she be too confused to know how to respond, and instead internalize it the way teens do, channel it into some pathological behavior or personality quirk that won’t be shed for decades, all because of a missed opportunity for mature communication?

I recognize the irony in maturely communicating about raps about dicks and pussies, STD’s, and violence, but only from the perspective of the most mainstream of muggles’. I consider myself a (pre-woke) Liberal, a feminist and pacifist, who has never condoned womanizing or violence. I intend to impart my evolved ethical standards to my daughter, as all parents do, and understand that at some point she’ll likely question how the messages delivered by my favorite artists of all time can make me feel as intoxicated with joy as her hugs and kisses, while being not at all aligned with my own philosophy or personality. What will I say?

I suppose that old-school boom bap, berthed in the streets just ten miles south of my home, at the height of the crack epidemic, speaks to a particular part of me, one that I compartmentalize daily, and assume that everyone who has ever loved me instinctively does too. My generally laidback persona and good heart is not mutually exclusive to an anger and/or ego that has probably been the impetus in life to both great initiative as well as destructive tantrum. Whether a global indignation with the ways of society, a frustration with parents who to some degree repressed my own self-expression, or an insufferable rage towards the bullies who terrorized me in the year before Wu-Tang dropped, I am anger, and Protect Ya Neck arrived like a glass of water in the desert. I never really hurt anyone, nor did a prison sentence, in fact I went on to get a master’s degree in Oriental medicine and worked fifteen years as a stand-up comic. Now I’m a homeowner, a taxpayer, a “healer” on my better days, with charity efforts to boot. Still if I’m being honest, I don’t know if it was all good, as we say.

As a young man I hated the likes of Dionne Warwick and Tipper Gore, plus any buttoned up “old” of prior generations who represented to me the opposite of freedom, denouncing my idols, pathetically suggesting correlation between entertainment and behavior. Older people, in my perception, appeared as dead aliens, some other enemy species, who existed only to mindlessly enforce arbitrary regulations and quell any fire of passion in my heart or the hearts of my comrades. They said weed made you dumb, but I smoked all day, every day, and was always on the honor roll. They didn’t make sense, and as a result it didn’t make sense. How could something as pure and organic as music make someone bad?

In high school I treated an ex-girlfriend carelessly, insensitively when she needed my support. I got arrested six times — all petty crimes like graffiti and shoplifting. Nevertheless, I wonder how much my criminal fire and even attitude towards girls wasn’t fueled by the mantras on repeat in my headphones daily, my then only heroes spewing so eloquently, passionately along to this hypnotizing rhythm, in perfect harmony with my adolescent neurology. While then in denial, I’m confident my 17-year-old-self took great pride whenever his actions aligned with the alpha lyrics of his role models, just writin’ my name in graffiti on the wall.

Now as an old man I wonder if there wasn’t something to Tipper and Dionne’s allegations (ironically, my wife and I bought our house in the suburb where Dionne lives!), albeit emotionally charged and over-simplified. Obviously most hip-hop fans do not have criminal records, and probably do enjoy healthy romantic dynamics in adulthood. Pathological behavior must always be a result of multiple factors, but I can’t help but wonder if Enter The 36 Chambers wasn’t one of them (for me).

I refuse to follow in the footsteps of the repressive ex-hippy or pseudo-hippy boomers, who’d have their kids believe they never did drugs or slept with a stranger. Once she is of age, I cannot misrepresent my authentic self to my daughter, which brings up the question of when is that time. What is that age? I’d be a hypocrite to censor my daughter or what she listens to, not to mention how futile and naive an effort it would be if I wanted to. Even if she acts out and gets arrested, even if I believe in my heart of hearts that her entertainment sources are a contributing factor to her self-destruction, I believe it is our responsibility to allow our children to visit those parts of themselves and make occasional mistakes that we saw coming. Although they might appear to others as lesser people in the moment, in the long run they will experience themselves as much greater, with the awareness of their own variety of compartments, how they balance or contradict one another and make her special. While I wish I could take back some immature actions in past romantic endeavors, I would not take back my criminal record. I wouldn’t take back any of my fistfights — in fact there should have been a few more — and if not for my boom bap religion, I never would have had the diversity of relationships, nor the dynamic careers that I’ve enjoyed. My life has been exorbitantly messy, but it’s been nothing if not fascinating, and I know it would not have been without hip hop. Now, how to convey that to my daughter when the moment arrives…