#Growing up macklemore topic clean movie
#Growing up macklemore topic clean archive

MOOKIE: And not Larry Bird? Who’s your favorite movie star?

MOOKIE: Who’s your favorite basketball player? In one scene, the young black pizza delivery guy, Mookie, and the pizzeria owner’s two Italian sons, Pino and Vito, stand leaning on the cigarette machine in Sal’s Famous Pizzeria in Bedford-Stuyvesant and talk: I record the movie on a VHS tape and watch it dozens of times. For a year now, I have been listening to what some people call “n-er music,” like “Fight The Power,” the Public Enemy track that blasts out of Radio Raheem’s boombox every few minutes in Do The Right Thing. Same as other kids my age, 90 percent of my sports heroes are black men. I am in junior high, convinced that I will someday be good at basketball or football. Spike Lee’s 1989 movie Do The Right Thing is on network television, with all the “motherfuckers” edited out. Hip hop was not on the radio, not on the Omaha stations we could pick up. My new cassette was the only place I could hear those songs. “It Takes Two” is the first song on side A of this cassette, so it was the first hip hop song I ever owned, rewinding over and over in the cassette player, learning every verse of the party rhymes, learning who Rob Base was, according to Rob Base: Not internationally known, but known to rock a microphone because he gets stupid, meaning outrageous, stay away from him if you’re contagious. I’m an altar boy at the Catholic church a half-block away from our house, and when I’m not in school, I like to shoot baskets on the hoop my dad put in our driveway, most of the time with a boom box plugged in and playing music through the open garage door. The nearest black people live in Omaha, an hour away, and not that many of them. None of the 8,000 other people living in my hometown are black.

Hurby’s Machine: Let The Drummer Get Ill.

Fresh And The Get Fresh Crew: Lovin’ Every Minute Of It

Salt ‘N’ Pepa: Get Up Everybody (Get Up).

The cassette is called Rapmasters 1: The Best of The Jam, ©1989 Priority Records, a compilation, the cover orange with a silhouette of a B-boy statue, overlaid with the track listing: Joe and maybe looking for something else. I flip through the racks of music, about to buy something I will listen to in a knockoff Walkman for months, and then keep for more than 20 years. Red Oak, Iowa, 1990: I am 11 years old, at KMart, with the $5 my dad pays me every week for yardwork.

At the very least, it might make you think about what 10 or 12 songs your story fits around. If you have an interest in how music fits into our lives, you might like it. I know most of the stories on this website are about outdoor adventure-this is about as opposite as you can get from that. He reminded me of this thing I had sent him, a piece I wrote without thinking about where/if it could ever be published: Stories about 12 hip hop songs I listened to, from age 11 to age 32. Last week, my friend Aaron, who is a dad of teenage sons, messaged me, saying, Didn’t you tell me about Joey Bada$$ a couple years ago? My son is getting into him now. I’m not sure why we do things like this, but I’m sure everyone does at some point, and experiences that particular nostalgia for a simpler time when we really heard music.

#Growing up macklemore topic clean archive

And Midnight Marauders might be playing in a few minivans right now.Įveryone has a several-year period of music in their life that actually sounds better to them than anything else ( it’s science), and more than any other type of music, I go back to the Golden Age of Hip Hop: I go through my collection of dozens of albums from 1986 to 1994, watch documentaries about artists from that time, listen to podcast interviews of hip hop legends, read every hip hop history book I can get my hands on, and wish someone would put the archive of Yo! MTV Raps episodes on Netflix or Amazon Prime or something. Despite our feeling that the music from that era will always be cool, way too cool to ever be heard in an elevator, a chain coffee shop, or a shopping mall, everyone gets older, and the edge our music had in its heyday eventually dulls.

I’m 36, and lots of men my age are dads, and probably listened to ’90s hip hop. I didn’t click on it at the time I figured, well, whoever wrote that is probably right. A few months ago, a headline claiming “The New Dad-Rock Is ’90s Rap” filtered through my newsfeed.