"Man, doze ain't stab wounds, daze stretch marks."When I was a young boy-mostly around the ages of eight, nine and ten-I was terrified of black people. You see, folks, I grew up in the Midwest in a variety of white bread, culturally mute towns: Fremont, Nebraska, Treynor, Iowa, Columbia, Illinois. These towns were all predominately white, predominately protestant, predominately conservative. There wasn't a whole lot of variety when it came to race or ethnicity, which probably accounts for so many girls from my school currently in the grips of jungle fever. It's that whole "forbidden fruit" thing. Though it is hard for anyone to truly rebel against conformity, since odds are there are a million people just like you, I don't really think it can be called conformity if there are not any alternatives. Growing up, I didn't have any alternatives. I was like Winston Smith in Nineteen Eighty-Four (the movie version or the book version, whichever you are most familiar with), mechanically moving in unison with the tide of people that I was surrounded by, careful not to step outside the lines, meticulous about not drawing attention to myself, greatly desirous of maintaining absolute and total anonymity. In other words, I just wanted to be like everyone else, which was easy, because everyone was the same. Yet, like that doomed herald of progress, Winston Smith, I too felt like something was missing from my life...options namely. I mean, I sometimes wondered if it always had to be the same people, the same places, the same routine day in and day out. Something needed to change. I needed a certain, indefinable stimulus to make me realize that there was more to the world than the town I lived in and the people that inhabited it. The catalyst that finally shook me from the dull meanderings of my Midwest existence came in the form of rap music. Now, it wasn't like I heard Biggie or Tupac and thought, "Yeah, fuck the Man!" It was a slow process. I heard a rap song for the first time, and gradually, over time, listened to the music more and more before I realized I needed to cut a demo. The original turning point came in roughly 1990-91. My older brother, Dale, owned a cassette tape titled On the Rap Tip, a mix tape of contemporary hits by artists like Tone-Loc, Kid 'n Play, N.W.A., Awesome Dre' and the Hardcore Committee, and De La Soul. Together we would sit in our basement in Fremont and listen to the tape on our parents old stereo. The problem was the tape was actually edited for content, so N.W.A.'s "Straight Outta Compton" was mostly just white noise. But I do remember liking Cash Money and Marvelous's "Find An Ugly Woman" and Vanilla Ice's "Ice, Ice, Baby." As far as I can tell, that was my first introduction to rap music. I know it wasn't exactly Public Enemy, Naughty By Nature, or Fresh Prince and DJ Jazzy Jeff, but it was a start. My brother and I wore that cassette out. By the time I was in first grade I was living on a farm in Treynor, Iowa. My friend next door had an older brother who owned a few rap CDs. So by the age of seven, I was listening, awestruck, to Snoop Doggy Dogg's Doggystyle. "Ain't No Fun" was like porno for my ears. And I also got acquainted with 2 Live Crew, specifically their song "Dirty Nursery Rhymes." Man, I tell ya, when Fresh Kid Ice raps "Little Jack Horner sat in a corner, fucking this cutie pie, stuck in his thumb, made the bitch cum said 'hell of a nigga am I'," it was like my Beatles moment. I wasn't completely sure what I was hearing. In fact, I think I was in disbelief for the most part. I didn't realize that all those words could actually be said on CDs. My parents listened to Bruce Springsteen and Black Oak Arkansas, so when I heard Snoop say, "Guess who's back in the motherfuckin house with a fat dick for your mother fuckin mouth," I thought, "Huh...this is different. Different is good." In 1994, my family moved to Columbia, Illinois, and it was here that my rap career was finally ready to take off. By this time, I was watching MTV on a regular basis, and my brother was starting to purchase rap albums more and more often. The two that stood out to me the most were Bone Thugs-N-Harmony's E 1999 Eternal and Warren G's Regulate...G Funk Era. Dale also owned the album Very Necessary by Salt-N-Pepa, but I only listened to this PSA at the end of the album about AIDs awareness...I thought it was hilarious. Anyway, by the age of ten rap music had pretty much become my favorite genre, and I had even manged to see movies like Boyz N the Hood and New Jack City that further initiated me into the world of hip hop. Now, that being said, I was still terrified of black people. I didn't actually know any black people, had never really even spoken to a black person, and not by choice, they simply were not a part of my little world back then. So everything I knew about black people and black culture I happened to learn from rap music and movies, and according to those two sources I thought that all black people sold and/or smoked crack, owned AK-47s, killed people, hated white people, smacked their bitches, and were more or less poor, but if they were rich, they probably got their money illegally. Keep in mind also that at this time I was not familiar with Spike Lee's work, and therefore unaccustomed with the societal prejudices that held the black man down. So, my view of black people at the age of ten was kinda warped, I admit. When I go to the zoo I like to watch the lions and the tigers, but I don't want to stand right beside them. That's how I felt about black people at the time. I loved rap music, but I just knew that any one of these rappers would smoke my ass if given the chance. Fourth grade rolled on, my brother bought some Notorious B.I.G. and some Tupac, and soon it was almost time for school to get out. I was going to a Catholic school called Immaculate Conception, and my class was broken up into pairs, and each group was supposed to come up with a fake business, and then advertise that business to the rest of the class. I teamed up with my best friend MM, and we decided that our fake business would be a record store. So we got some particle board, glued some old CDs to it, came up with a name for the store and when the time came we presented our idea to the class. Now, as part of our advertisement, MM and I wrote a little jingle for the business. We each wore black jackets, dark sunglasses over our eyes and slicked back our hair. The two of us pranced around the room singing, "Buy our CDs, buy our CDs. We need money like bears need honey. Buy our CDs." Technically, it was my first performance as a rapper and my first shot at songwriting, and I must say it was pretty successful, because throughout the day people would be muttering my song under their breath. I had written a hit. It wasn't too long after that that I decided I needed to make a demo tape to show all these big time hip hop producers my skill(s/z). The previous November my parents bought me a karaoke machine for my birthday, which I took as a sign of their unconditional support. So one summer day in 1995, I stood in my room and rapped into a shitty plastic microphone while my karaoke machine recorded my every word. I guess back then you could compare my process to Jay Z, in that I didn't write any of my lyrics down, it all just flowed out from memory. And much like Eminem, much of what I was saying I was just making up on the spot, which was easy since "fuck" and "bitch" made up ninety percent of what I was saying. After I was done, I took the tape out, listened to it, and, satisfied, tucked it away in a dresser drawer. A few days later I came home from baseball practice, only to be met by my old man glowering at me from the kitchen. "Eric," he said sternly, "follow me." He led me into my bedroom and told me to sit on my bed. He reached his hand in his pocket and pulled out a cassette tape. "Probably just a coincidence," I assured myself. "Your mom found this when she was cleaning," my old man said. Now, my mother's definition of cleaning is pretty liberal. I had that tape hidden pretty well, so I'm pretty sure the whole thing was a sting operation. Anyway, my old man hands me the tape and tells me to stick it in my karaoke machine. I took the tape in my trembling hands, utterly mortified, not because I was afraid of getting in trouble, but because I was nervous about another person hearing me rap. I thought he was going to be too judgemental. I put the tape in my machine, sat on my bed next to my dad, and pressed play. A brief sound of static, a mic being shifted around, and then my voice. It was soft, monotone, clumsy and completely without rhythm. Unfortunately, my lyrics are all lost to me now, but I distinctly remember my ten-year-old self singing, "Goddam, I hate to take my bitch to the mall." Out of context that lyric loses some of its punch, but I'm sure the song it came from made a pretty heavy political statement. For close to five minutes I sat on that bed with the old man listening to the blur of obscenities coming out of the speakers. Finally, mercifully, my old man took the cassette out of the machine and held it up. "Eric, this is trash! This is garbage!" He yelled at me. "You made your mother cry!" A phrase often repeated during my childhood. Then, in a more subdued tone, he said, "Women don't like to be called bitches, Eric." Then he set the tape on the ground and smashed it with his foot. Well, the reviews were in...the world just wasn't ready for me, I guess. I never made another rap tape after that. My message was too controversial, and the music business was too corrupt. I am twenty-six now, and currently balls deep in adapting Strunk and White's The Elements of Style into an erotic thriller screenplay, but I look back on my rap career with fondness, and sometimes, on those sleepless nice where the moon is hidden and the light of the stars is lost amongst the street lamps, I find myself, ever so briefly, thinking of how many words I can rhyme with fuck.
The Moore You Know: Tell me if I'm racist. The other day my girlfriend and I were at the grocery store picking up some things for the Superbowl. We each were bundled up and we each had on our New York Jets stocking caps. Mine is the official sideline cap of the NFL and my girlfriend's is a grey and green retro cap that says Jets across the front in cursive. As I am taking my set of groceries through the checkout line I notice another cashier, a young black man, talking to my girlfriend and smiling. The talk is brief, and soon the two of us are walking through the parking lot to her car. "What did that guy say to you?" I asked. "He said my stocking cap was hot." "Really?" I asked. She nodded and said, "He said, 'That hat is old school. It's hot.'" I was suddenly filled with an immeasurable sense of pride, because a black person liked my girlfriend's hat. Is that racist? Yeah, probably. I mean, I wouldn't have cared so much if it was a white guy saying it, and compliments from Mexicans don't really count, but this was a black guy, a bastion of style and fashion saying it. I dunno. It just seems like a black guy saying you have style just kinda validates it. Now, if you will excuse me, I need to go get my white hood out of the dryer.
© Eric Moore - 2011
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