L'Introspective | "I Thought You Were Just Hip-Hop..."

I get this so often! It's like people are surprised  to learn that I listen to other genres of music besides hip-hop.My musical taste is so, so broad. Too broad sometimes - if that can ever be considered a bad thing. Whenever I think of my relationship with music, I always think back to my mum and how she used to leave all her CDs and tapes lying about the house. She grew up in the eighties so all I would hear her playing was this New Wave stuff and lots of soul and groove music. I remember coming back from primary school and loading up the stereo with CDs. We had one of those models where you could feed the player with five discs at a time so once one CD had played through, the next one would start straight away.

I'd play Tears For Fears, Sting and The Police and Madonna for hours and sing the lyrics word for word pretending that I was in some music video or something. When the only responsibility you have in life is homework, you can afford to spend the rest of your life playing ancient CDs. Michael Jackson was another obvious figure in my after-school living room concerts. The amount of socks I'd burn through trying to moonwalk? Innumerable. Not to mention me overplaying my Moonwalker video to the point of breakage. "Ya doing wrong... Ya doing wrong..." I want to go back to those days.

Whenever I'd visit my foster family during the summer and Christmas holidays, my foster mum would blast Bonnie Tyler, Meatloaf and Celine Dion all the time. All day. Because of her, Total Eclipse Of The Heart is forever on my iPod. I suppose living with two families and experiencing two totally different cultures all at once has made my musical taste so varied. But do you know how dope it is when I hear the randomest song on the radio from way, way back in the day and I can recognise it and sing along? I'm a music nerd, I swear to you. I get excited by that shit.

As for hip-hop, I only seriously got into it at the end of secondary school. It's not music that was foreign to me though - MTV Base, The Box, Choice FM they all played it. But I wouldn't sit and listen and go "oh yeah, that's hip-hop". I just liked the sound of it. When I was about thirteen/fourteen years old, my cousins had GTA: Vice City on Playstation 2 and three radio stations I would always listen to were Fever 105, Wave 103 and Emotion 98.3 since those were the ones that played all the music I loved. Kool And The Gang, Teena Marie, The Human League, Spandau Ballet... gold. The first hip-hop tune I really paid attention to though, was probably The Message by Grandmaster Flash. Cruising through the streets of Vice City was a vibe whenever that track played; even if you were going to whack Diaz or doing the odd drive-by on a PCJ 600, that track banged. That or Summer Madness. It's only in hindsight that I realise just how much of an impact that one game made on my whole life. Weird.

By the time I was fifteen, I was still listening to the old school tunes but Erykah Badu and neo-soul were my loves. Through those sets of artists I would be introduced to Slum Village and The Roots, with their 1999 Things Fall Apart album making the largest impression on me. It was just cool music and it made me feel different. I don't know how to describe that emotion but it's similar to an orgasm, except I'd be fully clothed and a casual tear would drop out my eye on the odd occasion. (I laughed as I wrote that, but I swear to you, that's the closest you'll get to understanding what I experience when I listen to music I love). Few songs make me feel that way, very few. But Act Too (Love Of My Life) is one of them. When I first heard it, I wept. Not because it was a particularly sad moment though. I just fell in love and it hit me so profoundly. If a guy ever makes me feel like that, I swear I will marry him in an instant. No qualms. Whenever I listen to it now I always think, this is me. Aside from Erykah Badu's Apple Tree, that's the song I relate most to in this world. And after that moment, my love for hip-hop snowballed into the madness that it is today.

I feel like I'm not doing myself justice by writing such a short post on my journey with music and hip-hop. So many things in my twenty years of living have influenced me. I know that if he were alive today, my cousin Richard and I would be debating about hip-hop for hours, probably eating jam sandwiches in his mum's kitchen. Then comes my close friend who introduced me to Lupe Fiasco all those years back after a heated discussion on MSN. Failure will forever be my favourite Lupe tune because of him. Not to mention, my dad and his vinyl player. The first record I ever played on it was Des'ree You Gotta Be and I always got in to trouble - I virtually tore up that 12" maxi! The crackle sound you get when you play vinyl records is one of favourite sounds though. There's so many people I haven't mentioned but I am eternally grateful for the music they exposed me to, whether purposefully or not. I owe so much to music simply because it's given so much to me.

It's the love of my life.