Dr. Dre
In the 1990s as a young person you couldn’t step into the arena of culture without hearing an awful lot of hip hop, rap, and gangster rap, which was mostly fine with me. Popular music interests me just in principle. When I listen to a shitty piece of manufactured pop music or force myself to shit through some hideous Hollywood atrocity, I am always gladdened that I’m compelled to take away at the very least insights of a sociological nature. The Japanese film director Takashi Miike once said that no movie is bad enough to make sitting in a movie theatre unpleasant. My relationship with gangster rap took an unusual turn when we moved out to the country southwest of town when I was thirteen and I quickly befriended a sixteen-year-old boy named Doug from down the way who had a driver’s licence and whose mother had a charming little llama farm. There was also the matter of his uncle’s ample video cassette porn collection. I was partial to the Seymore Butts series. Doug was not ultimately to graduate high school and his prospects cannot be considered to have been good, but he and his two best friends who were brothers were good running mates for a precocious kid marooned on the edge of civilization. These were the first boys with whom I was to ever get properly gooned on spirits. Doug only played gangster rap in his car and always said that since he was driving the passenger had to listen to whatever he the driver wanted to play, even his mother being subject to this arrangement, which struck me as crazy even though I made my mom listen to Megadeath and Slayer when I was a kid, sure she’d at least appreciate the virtuosity. Rap and gangster rap of the 90s vintage weren’t exactly my thing. I wanted Mudhoney’s guitar sound and to break shit on stage, but back from the beginning of things some rap had appealed to me in a real elemental sort of way, rife with fun performative advocacy and hilarious grandstanding, and it was especially Run-DMC and Public Enemy that I revered above all, notwithstanding the tug of alliances pulling me from metal and toward punk and dirty guitar rock, hip hop and rap figuring only parenthetically…theoretically. Doug was obsessed with N.W.A and all its various solo offshoots, et cetera. He loved playing the Ice Cube solo albums more than anything, all of which I found turgid and drab, but I liked Eazy-E’s more wildly performative stuff and really, really love Dr. Dre’s post-L.A.-riots community-building project The Chronic, which I suppose you could say even allowed Doug and I to properly bond a little and which does the exact thing party music is supposed to—ergo, it makes you shake your ass—while at the same time more or less introducing the world to Snoop Dogg of Long Beach, California, who writes pretty stupid rhymes but who nonetheless has the most mellifluous West Coast flow ever caught on magnetic analogue tape. If you give too many gifts to an iconoclast then, sucker, that’s your ass. Those anointed celestial walk a narrow margin through the yarrow and the margarine. Just like Snoop Dogg of Long Beach, California, elbow-deep in a suntanned jar of Orange County honey, we are what we are and is what we is and the reason we don’t trade it in for better is ‘cause we’re afraid of what worse shit we’ll get. Fuck all y’all. Peace.
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