Fair warning, I'm am reaching deep into the well of drafts of this one, so I can't promise that the level of thought and cohesion we all know is IMU's calling card will be present this months after the fact. Funny the way that happens, I'll jot down a few ideas to make sure that I don't forget an idea I found interesting, but the longer I go before writing it out, the more the connective tissue between the ideas disintegrates. In life as in blog.
A deeply embarrassing thing about me is that I was a "rap is crap" kid. I wasn't all the way there and had rap records that I liked as a teenager, an inevitability growing up in Scarborough, but I would say I was 60ish% of the way there. I feel like this part of my personality was especially turned up in early high school when I was starting to get into my local punk scene in Toronto and was digging my heels in to make "punk" my persona. It was also due to the commercial rap of the time being dominated by Eminem and G-Unit, which I still haven't come around to liking.
Still, most of my friends in my neighbourhood listened to that stuff and it was often a source of banter with us. I would tell them that 50 Cent sucked and had no talent and they would tell me that NOFX sounded like shit and nobody liked them.
During one of our debates, I was trying to make a point that punk bands were better musicians because they played their instruments live (in hindsight, full-body cringe) and they played the music on the albums (yet another FBC). Two of the guys I was with, Chris and Vito, said something along the lines of
"Are you dumb??"
"What do you mean?"
"The DJ plays the music."
"Yeah, from a record"
"No, they use the turntable."
They thought that a turntable was a musical instrument! And not in a poetic, "the DJ uses it like an instrument" way. They thought that turntables and the mixer were and instrument that played the actual notes of the song.
It was one of those crazy moments where a short statement succinctly communicates how dumb the other person is. A beautiful moment of catching the other person and them just having to sit with it. The extremely powerful feeling of "I know more than you."
In hindsight, is Get Rich or Die Trying or The Documentary better than Punk in Drublic or The Decline? Probably? A thought for a future draft?
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