Back in the days when I had an unobstructed view of my penis and could run a mile without weird green fluids flying out of my mouth ala Linda Blair in "The Exorcist", I participated in the often overlooked sport of Track & Field in High School. Even though I did the 100, 200, triple jump, and 4x100 relay respectively, my main event was the long jump - I quickly learned that better than average speed mixed with
gigantic calf muscles lead to Letterman jackets and sex with impressionable 10th graders. Those were the days, when I wasn't embarrassed to take my shirt off during sex, abdominal muscles so tight that I'd frequently imagine some female character from "The Color Purple" appearing out of thin air just to aggressively wash her clothes on them. Despite the fact that women would see my chiseled frame and start
openly praising god for his master craftsmanship, I have to admit that it had nothing to do with either heredity or a tunnel vision commitment to being the best track athlete that I could possibly be. I owe it all to my parents, and their desire to get me out of the house so they could proceed to mercilessly fuck in every room in the house during the summer months.
But my folks just couldn't come out and say that they wanted their snot nosed kid out of their zipcode while they humped like two negro bunnies to 70's era R&B, so each summer I was sent packing to my great uncle's farm in Sumter, South Carolina. I was told that I'd make a shitload of money, I never did. I was told that I'd make a shitload of friends. I've always been too anti-social to pull an amazing feat
like that off. My father often waxed poetic about the beauty of southern living, how I'd spend every free moment imaginable taking in the scenery - but the oppressive heat and pesky mosquitoes had me regularly questioning my reason for living. But the farm was always good for two things though - getting me in the best shape imaginable
and getting country, corn-fed ass girls to wildly gyrate on top of my toddler-sized penis.(There's something inherently wrong about a cat from Virginia calling anyone "Country") Even though I actively avoided witnessing the killing of anything that
would eventually wind up on my breakfast or dinner plate, because I was the type of sensitive ass kid to give cute names to slaughter ready animals - I spent each summer doing a plethora of backbreaking chores that now has me losing weight just thinking about. Chopping down tress. Manually plowing fields like it was 1925. Getting up each and every morning so I could feed chickens, cows, and horses. Things of that nature. Not for nothing, but if I ever write an autobiography, the chapter detailing that particular period in my life will be entitled: "Mosquitoes, Country titties, and Hard labor". No shit. But everything changed the summer right before my senior year in High School.
For some reason, despite the fact that I had always made my opposition known, my great uncle had his mind set on making a man out of me those summer months - which meant giving me the option of killing whatever I planned to eat or starve. Let me tell you, you view bacon a whole lot differently when you become the prime suspect in the fatal stabbing of an adorable pig that you affectionately named "Grunt D.M.C".
Hamburgers lose their all-American appeal when you find yourself in a slaughterhouse, fried chicken begins to taste differently after you wring a yardbird's neck with reckless abandon. Even though I did what I had to do that summer, proving my manhood to my uncle and not starving to death at the same time - foods that I never thought twice about now had a delightful back-story of murder even before they reached my mandible. Simply put, the perception you have of something can drastically change once you know everything that goes into it.
That fateful summer came to mind recently as I watched the Joe Budden/Saigon beef unfold, and the ongoing Rick Ross/50 Cent exchanges - causing me to slowly realize that the Internet has caused irrevocable damage to the art of the diss record. Back in the day, whether it was the BDP vs Juice Crew battles, LL Cool J vs. Kool Moe Dee, any verbal confrontation that pre-dates the Internet - it was a golden age for the fan because not only did we have the luxury of solely judging each party on their lyricism, we also had to figure out the back-story to the respective diss. Ones imagination ran wild, waiting for your favorite MC to retaliate with every rhetorical gift god chose to bless him/her with - picturing them hunkered down at some undisclosed location somewhere, like a mad scientist, concocting a potent verbalmixture to dispatch their would-be dispatcher. Sometimes, the atmosphere surrounding the beef that you created in your own mind was often more interesting than the actual beef itself.
But now, with artists dropping youtube video's every day discussing their beef, radio show having, professional instigators pretending to uphold a journalistic standard when all they are doing is just carelessly pouring lighter fluid on a manageable flame, and dime-store videographers going out of their way to promote more ignorance than Tyler Perry's press agent - it becomes extremely easy to reminisce about days of Hip Hop past, when we didn't have access to so much
fucking information. Not surprisingly, with so much mid-battle bantering going on it leaves both parties susceptible to blatant contradictions to the point that you quickly lose interest - suddenly feeling as if you wasted precious time watching one of those cheaply made Spanish language soaps on Telemundo. I mean, interviewing a
rival's baby mother and making veiled threats against another guy's moms - not only is that shit mad corny, its not Hip Hop. Some people respect rappers who put out 30 diss tracks and a slew of snarky animation, I personally see it as a person trying to hide the fact that they can't rhyme with Hip Hop propaganda. Lets be honest, the Rick Ross/50 Cent beef was kind of silly to begin with. If a person really wanted to see two dickheads battling they'd buy gay porn or watch "Hannity & Combs" reruns. Even though I respect Joe Budden and Saigon as artists, the last diss track was over a month ago for Christs sake - why in the fuck am I still hearing it being referenced? Even though I'm the guy who shamelessly fucked a woman in a church, recently asked a local writer if her all woman play was a "period piece", and is in the habit of handing out cigars after emerging from the bathroom and saying "I just gave birth!!" - "Too much information" is all I think whenever I witness this new era of Hip Hop fuckery.
As much as I'd like to get on my Hip Hop snob shit, rail against modern day rappers like I do in every other post - I won't, because I believe that they are simply a victim of their times. Who knows, maybe the BDP/Juice Crew battles would have been ruined for me if KRS-One was always on VladTV talking about it. The Kool Moe Dee vs. LL Cool J verbal sparring probably would have lost its luster if I happened to peruse his youtube page. Maybe Roxanne Shante wouldn't be a legend in my eyes if twitter was around back then, exposing me to her answering instigating ass fans who wanted more venom from the Queensbridge MC. Maybe MC's will one day see things my way and keep mum on their rap battles so they won't ruin it for folks like me. Hey, anything is possible, just this morning I ate breakfast that included three of the
animals that I killed during that fateful summer in South Carolina. It
was good eating too.
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