SOTIM Saturday I know its Sunday. Had to battle a cold yesterday. I took to the bed all yesterday, medicating myself, trying to rest. I feel a little better, and I hope you forgive my tardiness. Thanks. Now I need to ask you for a favor please. Imagine Hip Hop City… …the first paved road, a man driving a steam roller. He came to this place with every possession he owned stuffed in a backpack. He’d answered an ad he saw posted on the internet. An advertisement that popped up during a google query for new Hip Hop music. Come one come all the webpage said. Hip Hop City, help us build your new home, your new safe haven. Do you love Hip Hop? The web page asked. Yes, I love Hip Hop he’d answered. The page said they needed professionals and craftsmen from every imaginable discipline. They needed janitors, lawyers, neurologists, sanitation workers, teachers, engineers, marketing specialists, cooks, underwater welders, cops and the list went on, hundreds of disciplines, thousands of jobs. All with one standard one requirement. All applicants must practice the art of Hip Hop culture in some form. They wanted the judge who wrote rhymes in her home in her spare time, the theater director who’d been a b-boy in college. The physicist who worked his way through grad school as a deejay. The art teacher who masked her face at night and wrote graffiti across the facades of abandoned buildings and old rambling box cars. The web page welcomed felons unable to find employment because of their criminal histories. The man thought about the armed robbery charge he’d caught right after he graduated high school. Cops caught the man breaking into a recording studio. He thought about the hundreds of job applications he’d filled out and the hundreds of rejections all with the same reply. We do not hire ex-convicts, especially those with cases of theft and violent crimes on their rap sheets. Rap sheets, the term left the man with a sense of irony every time he uttered those words. The man filled out the application, the day he found it on his girlfriend’s laptop. He completed the application in an hour. It took six months for his paperwork to go through and to his pleasant surprise, he was accepted. They even sent him a bus ticket. One ticket. No girlfriend. No family. All potential migrants must apply individually, and they will be accepted or rejected according to their own individual qualifications or lack thereof. The application required a demonstration of the person’s talent in relation to the culture. Emcees, deejays and producers were required to send audio files containing samples of their music, graffiti writers sent pictures of their tags, breakers and jukers sent video files showing their moves. The man caught the bus to Memphis, and was shuttled with a hundred other new arrivals, packed tight, like a can of tamales to the camps that popped up two hundred miles north of Memphis, to the undeveloped plot of land that would soon become the epicenter of the entire Hip Hop world. Hip Hop city. Press on you crazy diamond, Danian
Posted on: Sun, 25 Jan 2015 13:34:31 +0000
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