Rap Isn't for Me

I grew up northwest of Detroit. It was a suburb of Pontiac, but I'm not even sure I could call it that either. In the 90s, my hometown was for farms and for people who worked in Detroit but were either too afraid to live in the city proper, or didn't make enough money to live in the surrounding suburbs. Those suburbs were for lawyers and doctors; bankers and the like. I grew up listening to whatever my father was playing, which was usually rock and roll or blues or even alternative. He'd put on Clapton's cover of "I Shot the Sheriff" or we would listen to "I Can't Dance." I thought I was cool the way I shimmied around the house like I was a part of the band Genesis. If my sister and I were lucky, sometimes our father would do the "Tape Measurer Dance" where my dad would stand just outside the door frame, loll his head around, and bounce up and down while knocking the extended tape measurer between the two sides of the frame.

As I moved into middle school and high school I started listening to Eve 6 and 3 Doors Down; Coheed and Cambria and whatever the hell else was playing in the alternative section of Best Buy. I never looked at music as something that defined who I was. I enjoyed Coheed and Cambria because I enjoyed the science fiction opera hidden beneath Claudio Sanchez's disconcertingly high voice. I would get mad at people when they would call it emo music. They just didn't understand.

Other kids in high school were listening to rap, or what they thought was rap. It was mostly Lil' John shouting at people while Usher did everything he could to help categorize "Yeah" as a song. In fact, most of the rap artists my high school compatriots listened to were featured on the song "Yeah." Sure, there were those who liked Tupac and Biggie for the obvious reason of them being Tupac and Biggie, but their love for rap shared a positive correlation with their love for grinding on each other at the homecoming dance: rap had utility.

When I moved away from home, my narrative about rap changed. Whereas before I associated rap music with the gangs we learned about in G.R.E.A.T (Gang Resistance Education Awareness and Training), now I began to see the coded language in the radio stations I listened to. It became even more apparent -- when I moved farther outside of the Detroit area into a township that is famous for having the most churches per capita -- that the farther removed a person was from Black culture, the farther more that person confounded rap with gangs. In fact, a radio station that played in Allendale, MI prided themselves on not playing "gangster" rap, a qualifier that did not exist while living near Detroit.

My interest in rap changed with Kanye West. Maybe it was Pitchfork's review of "My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy" that made me want to listen. It sure as hell wasn't the White fanboys who wore pink polos with the popper collar or those impractical "shades." I listened to Kanye because Kanye was good music, and it was accessible rap music for White folk.

For a while after that, I thought I was finally starting to like rap. I would ask my friend Joey what he was listening to. He would give me some recommendations. I would listen to him and tell him what I liked and what I didn't like, and he would tell me why I was wrong about the ones I didn't like. I would always acquiesce.

I began listening to different kinds of rap when I started teaching at a high school on the west side of Grand Rapids. One of my students kept telling me to listen to Gucci Mane. I asked Joey about him and Joey told me to give him a listen. This was before Gucci got a tattoo of an ice cream on his face and before he was imprisoned for pushing a woman out of a moving car. I didn't care for the guy. He wasn't rapping like Kanye. At that time, I didn't understand what trap music was, but I knew that his beats were too low-brow for me.

I continued to follow Kanye. I started liking him for ironic reasons until I actually liked him. I did something similar with Gucci Mane. I saw Childish Gambino in concert twice, once when he didn't have enough music to perform a full set, and another time when he was performing with an asshole named Chance the Rapper. Chance hadn't made it yet, and I was pissed that he wasn't Danny Brown; he bragged about becoming a rapper after he got suspended and started spitting as if he were already famous. It took Joey telling me to listen to his shit again before I finally came around to the guy.

I knew that I had reached a turning point in my relationship with rap music. The only genre I hated was country music now. But what I still realized was that, with music, I was still an observer. There was never a point in my life, nor has there ever been a point in my life where I felt like a certain album was made for me, like an album was written to help me understand the fucked-up world I live in. It took a conversation with my colleague after Kendrick Lamar's "DAMN" album dropped to realize that rap was never there for my approval. Rap never cared whether or not I lumped it into my disapproval list with country music. As my colleague put it, rap music was the only think that helped him understand what it meant to grow up Black in America. Lamar has found three very different ways to write about being Black in America: being Black and poor, being Black and successful, and being Black and struggling with the idea of place and purpose.

I'm now a Scoutmaster for the largest African America troop in my county, Kent. I always talk to a few of the boys regarding what they're listening to. They've been into the new Childish album, and I give them my opinion of it thinking its the word of law. Sometimes I don't learn from lessons I've already had. I told them that his Camp album was trash, that he was whiney, that he didn't understand the rap game and didn't know how to rap about it. While I said it, I realized that I was just spitting out the words from Pitchfork's album review, I was being an elitist shit. What came of their reaction were a few words I'll never forget: "Chad, that album wasn't for you."

It took me the drive home to really consider what they said. I knew the album wasn't for me. No rap album is for me. Not even anything by Macklemore is necessarily for me. But when I thought about Gambino's "Camp" album, I realized the parallels between a Black man getting called an oreo at NYU and two young Black men going to a Christian school as the only people of color. I realized that Gambino's verses about his place in White society were akin to the questions my scouts had about their place in a city considered to be the worst place to live for Black men and women. Ii realized that, when it comes to rap music, I am a spectator, I am just a visitor. I shut up and I listen. If I don't like something, nobody is making me listen to it. Next time, though, unless somebody really wants my opinion, it will be best to keep it to myself.