Wigger Please!

We went to see RZA at Studio B this weekend. Growing up in Queens, you had to listen to hip hop unless you were OK with being lame and getting jumped. So, we listened. And we genuinely liked. But we knew our place and knew that even though our lunch money was safe, we'd never get to go to a show less we wanted to enter the 36 chambers of Stabville. It was a different time in New York. Jumpings and stabbings were accepted and common things to avoid in life--right up there with oncoming traffic and high cholesterol. And going to a hip hop show would just be asking for it.

Then, New York became Disney World. MTV discovered hip hop. And born was the mighty wigger. All of a sudden, hip hop was safe...and way whiter.

I have seen Wu Tang or at least one of its members at least three times last year and every audience was completely wigged out--street wear [thank you Urban Outfitters], buzz cuts, Timbs and Jordans. It was like a better-fitted, more expensive version of my childhood.

I can guarantee that most of the wiggers around me knew more about hip hop than I did. Like I said, my interest in the genre grew out of peer pressure rather than hunger. But, wigger please! What do you know about Staten Island? Not counting the time you took your parents on the free ferry tour, exactly how many times have you been to Staten Island? Will you please explain to me the enthusiasm that comes out of you when RZA gives his hometown a shout? Really, Staten Island? You are whooing a cancer-breeding landfill. I used to vacation on Staten Island. Yeah, that's right. We were poor and Staten Island is really far away. So, when we went to visit either set of cousins who lived there, we'd stay the week. The lovely Isle du Staten. I have driven its stupid windy roads looking for the Wu Tang store. I have swam amidst the landfill stank that saturates the air during a humid summer day. I have canvassed there as a short-lived NYPIRG employee. I have been to the weird clubs and dealt with the weird, weird vibe that is Staten Island. It is nothing to whoo about.

While I'm at it, I might as well also tell you that most of you who were there Friday do not live in the Brooklyn RZA talks about. My uncle owned a Chinese restaurant near Peter Luger's in the 80s. He worked behind a bulletproofed counter yet still managed to get mugged a bajillion times and stabbed twice. Even that isn't the Brooklyn he's talking about. You can just forget your brunch Brooklyn.

I am all for a fun show. And it is fabulous to see people completely stoked for a set to start. But when I reflect on what hip hop once represented to me and what it has become, I get kind of sad. Perhaps I am completely influenced by an article I just read in Newsweek about the "romantic authenticity" that white people have made for black music (a good companion piece to a recent article in the New Yorker about the de-blacking of indie rock music). Or maybe it's just the brand of hip hop that I know and subscribe to. Maybe I've just gotten too white. I'm sure somewhere in Queens, I can still find a hip hop show that I'd likely be stabbed at.

Go Limp Bizkit!

xoxo,

Hater