by Issa Rae
I had given up on trying to get CDs through my mother, but my birthday was coming up that January and I decided to throw a party with some of my girlfriends. “No boys allowed,” my mother conditioned. How absolutely lame! Jennifer, my friend from A Better Chance, an organization for kids from diverse socioeconomic and racial backgrounds attending prep school, had just thrown her own birthday house party. Her mother not only allowed boys, but set up the living room for her daughter and her friends to freak dance. That’s love.
I was so easily impressed by the freedom and the general semblance of a high school party that it never occurred to me that her party might be “wack.” I mean, who was I—awkward, socially hungry—to deem a party uncool or lame? But that was the general sentiment when we returned to school that Monday: Jennifer’s party was wack. If her party, with boys and dancing and nighttime fun, was declared a failure socially, then did my party really have a chance? I should have rescinded any thoughts I had about having a party at that moment, but my mother was insistent. She thought it would be fun for me and wanted to meet all my friends. “I’ll even hire a clown for you and your little friends,” she offered, cracking herself up, while I searched her eyes in horror.
My “friends” arrived, prepared to be bored. All except Cherie, who remained optimistic. We sat in the living room as I tried to encourage conversation, which worked for a while until Amber, Jennifer’s best friend who was a year older, started talking about Friday—her favorite movie of all time.
I seized my opportunity to brag, “My cousins made Friday.”
Their eyes widened. “Ice Cube is your cousin?!”
“No . . . He made it with my cousins.”
“Oh. Do you have it? We could watch that instead of just sitting here.”
This was the most excited I had seen them all night. I had to deliver, though I had never even seen Friday because my mother still wouldn’t let me watch R-rated movies. The living room housed a closet full of hundreds of videotapes—home movies and commercial movies alike. My friends gathered around me as I tried to find Friday. Amber grabbed a tape. “Y’all got Player’s Club, too? Ooo!” I told them my cousins had made that movie, too.
“Your cousins made all my favorite movies.” (In hindsight, that this middle schooler’s favorite movies were centered around weed and strip clubs makes me sad.)
As they pressured me to take them to the TV room so I could immediately redeem my party, I sighed, knowing what I had to do.
I went to the kitchen, where my mom was slicing my party pizza into thinner slices.
“Mom, they really want to watch Friday. Can we?”
“Unh-unh. You know you can’t.”
“But Mom, Cousin Pat and Michael made it. Our family! And everyone wants to watch it. PLEASE?!”
“No. Find something else to watch.”
“Can we watch Player’s Club?”
“Player’s Club? Absolutely not. That’s even worse.”
“But Mom, nobody’s having any fun. Please, Mom, I don’t want my party to suck.”
My mom turned to face me. Did I sense a gleam of sympathy?
“Find something else to watch. There are hundreds of tapes in there.”
I wanted to sink my head into my soft, square-shaped shell of a body and disappear. This was it. I was going to solidify my position as the loser of the group. I turned away from my mother, stiffly, ready to resign myself to that position. I broke the news and the girls looked at me, stunned. Jennifer rolled her eyes. Cherie’s permanent smile wavered. Amber looked at me incredulously.
“So that means you haven’t even seen Friday?”
We moved to the bedroom my little sister and I shared, where I sat on my bunk bed as I opened my gifts. Jennifer handed me hers in a small gift bag. I was excited just to receive a present from her. I threw the tissue paper to the side and looked inside. It was the Ma$e album! I was ecstatic, my eyes instantly darting around the room for a place to hide it from my mother.
“Thank you so much! I can’t believe you got this for me!”
Jennifer shrugged. “Someone gave me an extra one for my birthday, so . . .”
I didn’t care that I was re-gifted. This was my first “explicit” album. I was so ready. Then, Amber (who hadn’t gotten me a gift) took out her own CD, Lil’ Kim’s Hard Core album, shifting the conversation. Everybody talked about how nasty and raw the album was as she popped the CD into my boom box. I didn’t have any expectations, though just looking at the album cover with Lil’ Kim in a full-on squat, legs open—literally “taking pictures,” as my Southern aunts used to say—should have been a warning.
It was on this album that I heard the sound of a vagina being “eaten.” Something I didn’t know, up until that point, could be done. I turned it off quickly, horrified that my mother would walk in, and the girls were, at last, understanding. Then the conversation shifted to talking about our personal sexual experiences and/or lack thereof. I decided I was too young to hear that album in its entirety. I was kind of offended and embarrassed that Lil’ Kim was so explicit. Maybe my mother was right to shield me from that kind of music. But that didn’t mean I was going to throw out my Ma$e CD. Owning the CD finally allowed me to contribute to the conversations I’d been missing out on around the proverbial water cooler, i.e. the vending machine. It broadened my social life, opened a door that I didn’t want to close.
I was so desperate not to close it that, weeks later, I constructed a web of lies about my “music collection” that later came to bite me in the ass. Courtney, Allison’s older sister and the leader of our lunchtime group (a group comprised of the only black kids in the school, minus a few “Ambitious Blacks”; see “ABG Guide: Connecting with Other Blacks”), proposed throwing a lunchtime party in our designated spot, under the shady tree of the school’s roundabout. She had already begun a trend of pooling our money once a month and ordering Domino’s pizza. If you didn’t bring your money, you didn’t get pizza. So she suggested having a mini party with pizza and music. We were talking about the music we were feeling: Dru Hill’s Enter the Dru; Puff Daddy’s No Way Out; Missy’s Supa Dupa Fly; and the Timbaland & Magoo, Aaliyah, and Ginuwine squad that accompanied her—and something possessed me to claim that I owned all those albums. She turned to me.
“For real? All of them?”
“Well . . . some of them are my older brothers’, but basically.”
Courtney and Allison exchanged glances. Then Courtney asked, “Can you bring them? If you bring them on Friday, I can have a mix made over the weekend and bring it to the lunch party.”
My heart dropped. “Yeah. For sure.”
Courtney grew excited. “This party is ’bout to be so tight.”
They resumed talking about whatever as my head swirled, thinking about how I’d obtain access to one of these CDs, much less all of them. My allowance had increased to five dollars a week, but I had poor spending habits and no inclination to save for potential self-imposed emergencies. Why was the ownership of the music that people cherished so important to me? Why did I feel the need to fabricate an elaborate collection? Did I want people to like me that badly? Had I the tech prowess necessary then, I surely would have been the first to create Napster, which burst on the scene just a year later.
I went to school the following day, the day before my Friday deadline, hoping Courtney had forgotten about my claims. No such luck. When lunchtime came around she greeted me excitedly.
“You’re bringing the CDs tomorrow, right?”
“Yeah. I meant to bring them today. But tomorrow, for sure.”
“Cool. Jennifer and Cherie. Y’all are bringing yours, too, right?”
“Yup,” exclaimed Cherie and Jennifer, simultaneously, between chews.
“Great. We’re set. Don’t forget the money for the pizza, too.”
WHO THE HELL RAISED HER TO BE SO DAMN RESPO
NSIBLE?! (That responsibility would eventually lead her successfully into and through med school, but who’s keeping track?) I wanted time to stand still. I wanted a major distraction to make everyone forget my promise. But I had no luck. I sat at home, trying to figure out what I could do to soften the blow of not making good on a promise. Then it hit me.
I stayed my ass home from school. I convinced my mother that I was sick. It was the perfect plan. Missing school on Friday would give me the entire weekend for them to forget about my nondelivery. Sure, the party was the coming Monday, but at least I wouldn’t have to fess up to my lie. The mix CD would already be made, the pizza would already be ordered, and my reputation would be blemished, but not tarnished.
As predicted, that Monday I was passive-aggressively ostracized, as I tried to play up how bad my sudden weekend sickness was. More than ever, I needed to find a way to redeem myself, musically.
One day, I was perusing a Vibe magazine issue (back when Mimi Valdés, whom I would later work with, was the editor-in-chief), and I came across the Columbia House/BMG ads that were generously inserted throughout music magazines. The advertisement stated that you could get twelve CDs for the price of one cent. This was absolutely within my price range, so it must have been too good to be true. I gave it a shot anyway, perusing their catalogue, picking out CDs that I wanted or had heard my friends discussing. I didn’t get any “Parental Advisory” CDs, for fear of my mother discovering and opening the package before me. I was only thirteen, so I didn’t have a credit card or a checkbook, but luckily, they had a “Bill Me Later” option. I was tempted to include a penny in the envelope but didn’t want to chance it falling out.
Luckily, the day the package arrived, I was home. I opened it and saw the holy grail of nineties music in front of me: 112’s Room 112, Brandy’s Never Say Never, Dru Hill’s Enter the Dru, Lauryn Hill’s The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, Brandy and Monica’s The Boy Is Mine, and Mýa’s self-titled debut album. Six CDs were more than I had ever owned at once. Apparently they gave you six CDs to start and expected payment before they sent the other six. The bill was definitely more than a penny, so I had no intentions of paying it. I can proudly say that I had my first and only black mark on my credit when I was thirteen years old. Thanks for teaching me the value of a penny, BMG!
When I turned sixteen, one year shy of the “Parental Advisory” age restriction, my mother was kind enough to allow me to finally see R-rated movies. Since I was driving by that time, she probably figured that I was going to see them anyway. She was right. I don’t know why I didn’t break the rules sooner. Maybe I was content with being shielded from certain adult themes. After all, I do remember being a high school junior and wanting to wait until marriage to lose my virginity. I laugh at that notion now. Innocence after elementary school is so contrived.
When I got to high school, sex took on another dimension, one beyond what I could glimpse in explicit lyrics and videos. High school was also where I was exposed to the ’hood in all its glory. I was a fascinated outsider, simultaneously wanting to belong, but to not be included. Everybody wants to be hood, but nobody really wants to be hood.
In the post-Luke era, high school is also where music started to get exceptionally raunchy. I remember such gems as “I Just Wanna F*** You” and Ludacris’s debut single, “What’s Your Fantasy,” where, during a lunch dance, a bunch of fourteen-year-old students happily yelled out the bridge while popping their pelvises and asses:
I wanna get you in the BACK SEAT,
Windows up,
That’s the way,
YOU LIKE TO @&*$!
High school is also where I gave my music ambitions another shot. My sophomore year, I got Mr. E for Chemistry. He was Persian, had med school ambitions, and lots of money (but wanted to “give back” via Teach for America), and was one of the coolest teachers ever. We were the envy of the school when he decided to take all his Chemistry classes to Magic Mountain that year—for NO REASON! It was in Mr. E’s second-period class that I grew close to many of my current friends, but most importantly, where I formed HOC-D (pronounced “Hawk-DUH!”). The group was comprised of three of the prettiest girls from my high school (two of whom became models, one of whom was a top-three finalist on America’s Next Top Model) . . . and me. Daisy, who took it absolutely seriously, is one of my current friends. She was born and raised in Compton, was super smart (ranked #11 in our class at graduation), was a talented dancer, never stressed about guys (because she didn’t have to and they sweated her), and like me, she loved the music of the hoodrats. The day we formed HOC-D, which was an acronym of our last names, she wrote verses to two songs that night. While HOC-D never amounted to much, Daisy’s dedication to the art form of ratchetry would always stick with me, even when we went away to different colleges.
Despite going to school in Compton—the breeding ground of gangsta rap, and the source of inspiration for many rappers—it wasn’t until I attended Stanford that my ratchet aspirations were truly nurtured. In the middle of Palo Alto, I met three girls who enabled me. One night over a series of drunken freestyle sessions my senior year of college, we formed JAM’D (an acronym of our first names—I wasn’t very creative with titles). I got the idea to record our session on my computer and then created a picture collage on Windows Media Maker of our first freestyle single, “@&*$You, Bitch.” It was my very first YouTube video and my very first music “hit” (the YouTube video would go on to amass over 150,000 views). Our peers loved the song and loved the video. We’d go on to create three more singles: “Nani Pop,” a dance dedicated to female pelvic thrusts; “Catakilla,” an angry gangsta anthem about murdering the caterpillars that infested our campus; and “Working the V,” a song about vaginal attention (promptly made private after my eldest brother commented on the video).
After I graduated and moved to New York, my musical ambitions took a hiatus, due to lack of enablers. All my friends were too busy taking their careers seriously while I was still trying to figure myself out. But my desire never went away. In fact, the discovery that my younger brother’s music group, Fly Guys, had gained a bit of internet fame due to a popular dance group using their song in a video actually helped to restore my hope for a musical future. When I moved back to Los Angeles after a two-year stint in New York, making a music video for the Fly Guys was one of my first projects. Between their lyrics, their stage presence, and their dedication, I learned a lot from them.
In Los Angeles, I was also reunited with my best friends from high school. In the summer of 2009, before I returned to Senegal, Jerome, Devin, and Daisy (my fellow HOC-D alum) were joking around in our Facebook messages and decided to throw a party at my mother’s house and invite all our mutual friends. It was my L.A. homecoming party, and it was also the formation of the Doublemint Twins (now known as The Doublemints). That same summer, a group trip to Magic Mountain and an accompanying heat wave prompted us to start singing, “That’s why we got on our booty shawts, booty shawts!” So pleased with ourselves, we vowed we would make that our first single. Around the same time, the first episode of Awkward Black Girl was still stewing in my head. By the time I figured out what the opening scene was going to be, I knew I wanted to include a raunchy song. While I initially envisioned a Nicki Minaj song, when we sat down and actually recorded our lyrics on my computer, I was inspired to make it the opening song of my first episode. A week before I premiered the first episode, we recorded the single in the Fly Guys garage-based studio and boom, magic was made.
Even with my love for ratchet music, I’ve always had a fear of what my children will be listening to in the future, when they are in middle school. I have a preemptive desire to shield them from sex for as long as possible and to protect their innocence as my parents did for me. I joke with a college friend of mine, Adia, who had the same parental restrictions as I did, that we will raise our kids around one another. We agree that friends make all the difference in the exposure you
have and the life choices you make. I don’t regret meeting any of my friends, and I don’t regret my generation’s affinity for ratchet music. And, while my high school and college reunions will contain the raunchiest soundtracks, I won’t ever bring that shit home to my future kids.
The Struggle
I don’t remember the exact day I demilitarized from my blackness. It’s all a blur and since I’m fairly certain that militants never forget, and I forget stuff all the time, I guess I wasn’t meant to be one.
I love being black; that’s not a problem. The problem is that I don’t want to always talk about it because honestly, talking about being “black” is extremely tiring. I don’t know how Al Sharpton and Jesse Jackson do it. I know why Cornel West and Tavis Smiley do it. They love the attention and the groupies. But the rest of these people who talk, think, and breathe race every single day—how? Just how? Aren’t they exhausted?
The pressure to contribute to these conversations now that we have a black president is even more infuriating.
“What do you think about what’s going on in the world? And how our black president is handling it?” asks a race baiter.
“It’s all good, I guess,” I want to answer, apathetically, with a Kanye shrug. “I’m over it.” But am I really? Could I be even if I wanted to?
Even now, I feel obligated to write about race. It’s as though it’s expected of me to acknowledge what we all already know. The truth is, I slip in and out of my black consciousness, as if I’m in a racial coma. Sometimes, I’m so deep in my anger, my irritation, my need to stir change, that I can’t see anything outside of the lens of race.
At other times I feel guilty about my apathy. But then I think, isn’t this what those who came before me fought for? The right not to have to deal with race? If faced with a choice between fighting until the death for freedom and civil rights and living life without any acknowledgment of race, they’d choose the latter.
