From Damocles to Socrates, the classics in / of Hip-Hop
Growing up in 1990s Harlem, I couldn’t have escaped hip-hop if I’d wanted to. The streets bumped with it: the boombox action on the corner and in the park, the speakers screaming from apartment windows, the cars reverberating with bass. On the way home from school every weekday, a nerdy Dominican boy listened to the beats and was mesmerized. None of that loud music in our house, my mother would always say — but I itched to bump the beats at home on our radio. Sometimes, if Mom had stepped out to the store and I was feeling brave, I’d tune in to Hot97 and live a few minutes of glory.
It wasn’t only the sonic architecture of the bass that snared me. The allure was in the verses themselves with their mighty torrent of words: sharp and cutting, smooth and coy, boisterous and threatening. And the prolifically inventive rhyme schemes! When, at the innocent age of twelve, I first heard the Notorious B.I.G. rap “Escargot, my car go / one sixty, swiftly” I had no clue what escargot was and had to look the word up — but even before receiving enlightenment from the dictionary I knew the verse was a gem. As much as the books I devoured at the local library, the rap game expanded my cultural horizons.
Text by Dan-el Padilla Peralta
