A kid’s first boombox is a beautiful thing. Mine was a bit of the divine made by Panasonic which has survived to this day. (Side note: they don’t make shit like they used to. I’m not one to opine for the “good old days,” but I can’t think of any piece of technology made this millennium that has lasted even half as long.) It was, of course, unnecessarily large, considering it had but one CD and one cassette player, along with a few knobs for audio settings. These knobs were no small things, though, as I marveled over them as if they were indicative of the caliber of machine I had just acquired. Treble? Bass?? Good god, I could do ANYTHING with these controls!
I got this boombox at the age of ten after lusting after a friend’s stereo and begging my mom for my own. Yes, I had had a puny cassette player and even a Walkman (that will be a story for another time), but this was another matter altogether. This was the kind of the thing that made other kids ooh and aah over my luck at receiving such a marvel of modern technology. Looking back, I’m sure it was a below average music system, but at the time, the fact that my friends were in awe of it was enough for me.
I still distinctly remember my mom agreeing to take me to Circuit City – Circuit City, y’all! – to pick something out, and pacing back and forth up and down the aisle as I decided what to buy, as if my ten year old brain had any idea of what would qualify as a good sound system. My primary criteria was how many dials and knobs it had, yet somehow I knew that that was a superficial concern, so I balanced that with my impression of the sleekness of the build and the un-pretentiousness of the design. Somehow my preadolescent brain took that to be a good indication of its quality.
Later that weekend, perhaps the same day, my mom took me to Music Plus, a local music and movie establishment so old that it makes Blockbuster look cutting edge, and I bought my first ever CD: a compilation of popular hip hop put out by one of LA’s premier rap stations, Power 106, called “Straight From Da Streets.” The ludicrous nature of this title is not lost on me as an adult, but at the time it was beside the point. My cousin, eight months older and essentially my idol in the way of coolness, had this same CD and that made it the absolute dopest in my eyes. I had already listened to it at her house and envied her intimate knowledge of the songs on it, as she blithely recited the lyrics along with Ice Cube and Black Sheep. We had made up our own dance routine to “Dazzey Dukes” by Duice, which we proudly displayed for her parents, knowing full well we were being damn fools and loving it just the same.
And let me tell you, folks – this album was THE SHIT. “Let Me Ride” by Dr. Dre. “Rebirth of Slick” by Digable Planets. “I Get Around” by Tupac. “It Was A Good Day” by Ice Cube – the bomb ass remix with the Staples Singers sample, which to this day I swear is the best version. It was one of my earliest introductions to hip hop and firmly cemented in me a love for the genre before I ever really knew what I was falling in love with. When my parents signed up for the BMG music club – anyone else remember choosing CDs with those little stamps containing pictures of the album covers? – I was all about the rap artists that I had been introduced to on this album and a few other sources like In Living Color. Digable Planets, Black Sheep, Queen Latifah – these were foundational for me as I established my own musical personality outside of the classic rock, soul, and pop that I was weaned on. Elton John? Timeless. Otis Redding? Legendary. Artists like them will always be a part of my canon. But these hip hop artists? They felt more personal, like something I had discovered on my own and had an emotional connection with, despite the fact that I was a middle class white girl a galaxy removed from the worlds of Compton and the Bronx that they described. I’m sure some of this is just the standard individuation process that every generation goes through, but the older and more aware I got, the more I realized that the values my parents taught me had analogs in this music that meant so much to me.
No joke, man, this shit was formative. I have indelible memories of this stuff. I would spend a week or two every summer with my grandparents in a tiny, desert town in Arizona with my sister and cousins, including my aforementioned hero who I emulated in every way I could, and we marveled at the newest hip hop together. One year, we would randomly look at each other and rap “If I had wings I would fly” multiple times a day in imitation of Warren G, down to his inflections elongating the key words in that phrase. I would listen to Tupac on my Walkman before everyone else woke up, then laugh as another cousin inserted himself into the ubiquitous All Eyez On Me, insisting “they can’t do nothing to Ca-sey” to the beat of “Ambizionz As A Ridah.” The older I get, the more problematic these relatively privileged kids posturing to gangsta rap seems to me, but bare minimum I can say it opened my eyes to a different world view and offered a different vantage point through which to view the world. Others may have taken it at face value, enjoying the music and glossing over the underlying message, but I took that shit to heart. Years later, when I became “the white girl” on the basketball team and the bus and the playground, I used this perspective to interpret my different standing and come to terms with the fact that, while I could certainly become one of the team, I would never be on an equal social footing with the rest of my cohort because of my color, and because of the fact that this arbitrary factor gave me a preposterous advantage in the eyes of the wider society. Did Tupac or Ice Cube directly explain this shit to me? Well, no, but their music was invaluable to me as I navigated this world that was both familiar and foreign, and for that I will be forever grateful. To them as well as to my cousin, whose essence continues to guide me to this day.
