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  • » Name: Amanda Bassa
  • » Location: VA
  • » Member Since: 09/21/07
  • » Bio: student, future change maker, and everything you wouldn't expect me to be.
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The Undisputed Truth

Call Me an Old Fart


September 21, 2007 | Tags: none


There seems to be a new stereotype emerging within the younger population that affiliates themselves with hip hop culture. The “respect your elders” concept has been seemingly obliterated, and now the young heads seem to think they have the right to step to those who came before them and criticize their tastes in things such as music and fashion. All of a sudden instead of being open minded and wanting to learn about the many unique styles that fall under the very broad genre of rap music, these little ankle biters are going around complaining that people born before 1983 or so are stuck in the 90’s and just not “down wit dat shyt dat dem rapperz like weezy and yung joc be spittin! U juss pissed cuz u can’t crank dat mini me as good as I can, wit cha old, burned out nursing home ass self! ain’t it time fa yo nap u old suckaz!?”



Well, give me my 4pm dinner and call me geriatric, but I think that the rap that came out before the y2k bug gave these kids the feeling like they could talk ballsy to people 10 years older than them is straight gold. Sure, some of it is purely a nostalgia concept because hearing certain tracks from my childhood evokes some fond (or not so fond) memories for me. And hey, there were some straight doo-doo stanky tracks to be dropped in the 90’s as well (try listening to JT Money’s “Who Dat” now. Not much better than “Ay Bay Bay”). I’m more than willing to admit that the 90’s had some low points. But some hands down amazing things were released in that time that for some reason the kids these days just refuse to give a chance to.



What has started to fascinate me as of late with the tracks from my childhood, though, is that as I grow and my mind continues to mature, the music seems to as well. No, they’re not making remixes of the songs and rereleasing them; they just sound different. As peculiar as this may sound, there’s a very logical explanation for this. When you’re very young, you haven’t learned the toughest lessons that life still has in store for you. You probably haven’t truly loved anybody besides your parents. You don’t know much about how the world works yet. You still have this happy innocence about you, despite how grown and sexy you swear you are at the time. But a lot of music, not just of the rap variety, focuses on concepts such as love, sex, drugs, hardships that life throws at you, etc., that a lot of kids just don’t know about yet (or shouldn’t really know about yet). A young mind will hear the songs on the radio, get addicted to the tune and memorize the words, but they don’t necessarily understand all the concepts in their entirety yet.



Take for instance a song that I distinctly remember listening to a lot back when I was in 6th grade. Looking back on it now, it amazes me that this song got as much radio play as it did (yeah, I was a radio slave back then before the internet came around and saved me). Teenyboppers who don’t know better: I present to you “You Got me” performed by The Roots and Erykah Badu.



I knew every word to the song. I got happy when it came on the radio. But my naïve 6th grade ass really never took the time to figure out what I was truly listening to. I got distracted, forgot about the song for a few years, and about two years ago I rediscovered it. Suddenly the song that I used to listen to as a happy little youngster was making me sad. It was messing with my emotions. I had been through a lot since 6th grade, and the lessons I learned made me comprehend the song in a completely different manner. The song literally matured with me through my life.


This applies to essentially every song that I remember from way back when. Although some songs I’ll look back on and think “How in the hell did I EVER listen to that the whole way through?!”, most of the time, the songs take on a positive growth in my eyes. As I educate myself more about the world and my history, I understand more of what the more lyrically advanced rappers were getting at in their rhymes because I can understand their intricate metaphors now, whereas things like that used to fly over my young mind. As I take the time to learn more about how hip hop was before I was born and old enough to pay attention and therefore couldn’t figure it out first hand, I realize more and more the relevance and significance that artists and groups like The Pharcyde, De La Soul, and EPMD had on the history of the culture and how much influence their music actually has on the new things that come out today.



So I’ll continue to listen to my non-up to date, antique, old school music. And I’ll proudly do my duty and blast it at full volume when I’m riding around the city, in hopes that some kid that’s waiting for the bus will hear it and it will catch his attention and motivate him to learn about the music that shaped what he’s listening to through his headphones at that moment. So go ahead and call me old and boring, but I refuse to let a part of the history of such a powerful culture die because the new generation won’t take the time to find it.









The views and opinions expressed in this blog are those of the writer and not necessarily those of HipHopDX.com or Cheri Media Group.

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