Ghetto-Opoly: How It Really Went Down pt. 4 (was: Ghetto Sublime's First Foray Into Sportswriting)
Imagine a really square, middle-aged white guy -whose only experience of hip hop has been bumping Rappin' 4Tay on his walkman- trying to write an astute recap of the True Skool Anniversary Show featuring Africa Bambaata. If I were him, I'd probably be wandering around the club feeling like a veritable Candide, tapping kids on the shoulder and asking, "so wait, they sampled the beat from what? And he cribbed the drop from who? And who's rapping on top?"


So that's me in the pressbox at Memorial Stadium, blithely unaware of what's going on during a football game, elbowing middle-aged, male journalists with toupees, and badgering them: So wait, he wants to stay away from the endzone because of what? And he's punting in the coffin corner because why? And why did that quarterback rush for the ten-yard line? A seam means what? A pooch kick means what?


Otherwise, this recent foray into contact sports has been all rosy-fingered delights, so far. Being a sportswriter has different perks than hip-hop journalism; we get catered lunches with fried chicken, biscuits, crab salad, coleslaw, fat peanut butter cookies, and two different kinds of iced tea. We get "press credidations" that serve as a passport into the locker room (ooooh) and we get to rush on the field after games to thrust microphones into the faces of sore and beleagured PAC-10 players with streaks of greasepaint under their eyes.


I guess my only qualm, so far, is that -for the most part- football players aren't nearly as interesting as gangsta rappers in describing what they do. Being a rapper is all about inventing a persona and inhabiting it --which is why you get such bizarre, enchanting, unabashedly tacky characters like Keak Da Sneak and Goldee the Murderess. In my observation, football players aren't nearly as good at celebrating their idiosyncracies, and spinning their lives into lore.


Yet, I digress. Let me rewind a bit:

Back on the ghetto-opoly tip, about 5 weeks passed between the moment Paul hatched his plan for the article, and the actual game. In the meantime in-between time, our interactions were hot and cold. I apologized for trying to get on him at the Friendly Low Region show, and he said yeah Ghetto Sublime, you's a gangsta, but remember that discretion is the better part of valor.


And then, nothing.

The word "sublime" refers to something that's so beautiful, it disrupts all your internal systems of organization --and I'm reminded of a letter I sent to Paul Smith during that hiatus --a garbled, ecstatic, 2 page panegyric to an absent lover who didn't reply. Because I'm ghetto, at heart, I decided to make a much more heady, impetuous move.

Maybe it's not the best idea to use your music articles as a way of telegraphing messages to your crushes --but sometimes, if you frame it just right, you'll make a point that's relevant to your larger audience, too. So in the middle of a profile piece about the East Oakland 'ghetto retro' funk singer, Sweet Lil Wayne, I inserted the following 2 paragraphs:

"While Sweet Lil' Wayne isn't beholden to trends in hip-hop and R&B, his music isn't above emulating them. In fact, his forthcoming LP (due out later this month) represents a new style and language that's gaining currency within hip-hop -- one that digs a bit deeper into relationships and their attendant emotions. ...

"The song "Miss Taboo," which opens Ooh, Mr. Farrakhan, you're gonna be so mad at me/I met this bad one, she was gray, but I just had to see/I pushed up on her, then I boned her/When I was through she thought I owned her/Okay, well I guess that happens when you young, hung, and mackin, represents hip-hop's new penchant for personal testimonials that end up sounding more pithy and self-deprecating than the old agit-prop stuff. (Though there's still plenty of "boning.") Given the genre's recent foray into songs about that forbidden fruit called "white girl" (Z-Man's raunchy "White Girls with Ass" comes to mind), it seems condonable now for MCs to talk about interracial relationships both as a cultural shibboleth and, in this case at least, a personal vice. (Indeed, Langston Hughes might have called "Miss Taboo" a testament to the raciness of race.)"

Two days later, Paul sent an excited e mail to say he thought it was the best thing that ran in the Gazette that week. Yeah. It was on again.