There are people who don’t like or listen to rap now, but in the 1990s as the East Coast/West Coast feud was in full swing, white people in the suburbs were racistly terrified of it, specifically any music that bore the ominous label of “gangsta rap.” The news coverage of Snoop Dogg’s murder trial made it seem like he was going to come out of the TV and pull a gun on the viewer. So, for the time being, I stuck to the gentler stylings of Hammer, Vanilla Ice, and the New Kids on the Block (to a five-year-old Jewish kid in 1990, NKOTB was rap). Those artists were safe to listen to on two levels: I wouldn’t get in trouble for playing their songs, and the worlds they inhabited felt less infused with danger.
In elementary school, I continued to absorb the hip-hop that made it all the way to the center of the mainstream. My parents submitted to some rap. They didn’t raise any objections to hearing “Gangsta’s Paradise” by Coolio on Mix 98.5 alongside more mom-friendly hits like Joan Osborne’s “One of Us.” Or at least not any more than they rolled their eyes at “Tubthumping” by Chumbawamba. But by middle school, I’d begun branching out. I soon came to realize that there were actually two genres of hip-hop: the stuff my parents knew I listened to, and the stuff I kept from them.
The Beastie Boys bridged the gap between those two subcategories, providing catchy, inescapable radio singles as well as weirder and more explicit album tracks. Mike D., MCA, and Ad-Rock ushered me into the hip-hop of a post–MC Hammer world. Sure, it was rap, but it was goofy and Jewy. It sounded like music made by me and my friends, plus time, plus turntables, plus talent, plus beer. By the time we really got into the Beasties’ catalog in the late 1990s, they’d already transitioned from (fighting for their right to) party animals to reflective but still silly rap elder statesmen. They wore fake mustaches and fought cheesy Godzillas in their videos. And I think it helped that, like Hammer (and it hurts to admit this), they weren’t that good at rapping. “If you try to knock me, you’ll get mocked / I’ll stir fry you in my wok” is, with hindsight, not the Pulitzer-worthy couplet I thought it was in eighth grade.
I was thirteen when the Beastie Boys released Hello Nasty, their first album since I started buying albums on my own. Beginning there and backtracking through the Beasties’ catalog, I became ravenous for hip-hop music. At least once a month a small group of my friends from school and I walked to our local record store (even at the time an antiquated term) to seek out new music. We timed our purchases carefully. Some of the employees narrowed their eyes at tweens attempting to buy CDs bearing the stark black-and-white PARENTAL ADVISORY: EXPLICIT LYRICS sticker.3 But not Abe.
Abe encouraged our forays into explicit content, whether it was heavy metal or an R-rated movie.
“Are you psyched for Rammstein?” he leaned forward over the counter to ask, as a friend slid the new disc by a German heavy metal band across the counter at him. He always said “psyched.” Abe was the least famous person I’ve ever heard of who had his own catchphrase.
“Are you psyched for this VHS copy of Kevin Smith’s Mallrats?”
“Are you psyched for this ‘Mean People Suck’ keychain?”
Abe was our hype man, but more than that, he served as our guide to the world of grown-up entertainment—although, like my camp counselor Eli, he couldn’t have been that much older than we were. His approval made us feel like we were making cool, adult choices. Abe continued to encourage us even after our tastes began to diverge. My middle school friends had started exploring the kind of rock music that alienated their parents. Primus. Metallica. Presobriety Red Hot Chili Peppers. But for me, it was hip-hop.
I’d return home from the strip mall and scuttle my purchase up to my bedroom. There, I’d throw the CD in the boom box on my night table and listen to it quietly. I could have plugged in a pair of headphones and cranked the volume as loud as I wanted, but something about that seemed wrong. Listening to a boom box through headphones feels a little bit like putting on a bike helmet to drive a car, a cumbersome and unnecessary amount of precaution.
Although the thumping, percussive beats grabbed my attention, I was consumed with the lyrics. I mentally cataloged the tongue-twisting consonance, incisive metaphors, and cutting slang that hadn’t reached the suburbs yet. I had a particular affinity for East Coast artists who blended hard truths with wry humor and occasional whimsy. Biggie, Nas, A Tribe Called Quest, Redman. The words shot into my brain and unspooled like a busted cassette. I unpacked and understood them little by little. When I first heard the lyric “I never sleep / ’Cause sleep is the cousin of death,” it hit me like the first time you see your own blood. Of all the anxieties that had kept me up at night over the years, it had never occurred to me that sleep itself was the enemy. How close a cousin is it? I wondered. And what do you do all night if you never sleep?
I also kept careful track of the curse words, specifically where they differed from the radio and music video versions. It was exhilarating to hear the artists express themselves outside the strict rules of radio edits. Juvenile’s omnipresent “Back That Thang Up” of course became “Back That Azz Up” when freed from the confines of the FCC. The radio edit of Eminem’s breakout hit, “My Name Is,” (an embarrassingly important song to me at the time) altered whole swaths of its explicit taunts and mocking threats to make it presentable for mass consumption. I came late to the Notorious B.I.G.’s landmark debut, Ready to Die, and for years I’d heard only the radio-friendly version of “Juicy,” whose chorus contained the pithy but inoffensive incantation: “If you don’t know, now you know.” On the album version, Biggie punctuates that statement with an emphatic N-word. The lyric took me by surprise: I didn’t know, and then I knew.
Clearly, that song wasn’t made for me. Biggie’s word choice drove the point home. It wasn’t just the diction that revealed I wasn’t the target audience for a lot of my favorite music. Off the same Notorious B.I.G. album, one of the most haunting tracks, “Things Done Changed,” contrasts the vibrant, almost quaint past of Biggie’s Bed-Stuy neighborhood in Brooklyn against its harrowing present. In light of the increasing levels of violence, he even feels nostalgic for the days of settling disputes with fists instead of guns. “Instead of a MAC-10, he tried scrappin’ / Slugs through his back and / That’s what the fuck happens.” Once I figured out what that meant, I knew it reflected the coldness of circumstances I’d never experienced firsthand. Still, I was riveted by the writing, the charisma, the attention to detail, and of course the wicked loud drums.
While my middle school friends mostly stuck to rock and roll,4 my Jewish summer camp friends were into rap as well. I don’t know whether it was the vicarious access the Beastie Boys gave us to cities like New York and Los Angeles from our bedrooms in the suburbs, or our experience as outsiders in towns populated largely by Boston-area Protestants and Catholics, but something about the music made sense to our teenage brains.
Our summer camp clique faced the traditional Jewish encouragement to excel at academics, to pore over texts and uncover new meanings; while we were getting into rap music, we were also studying for our bar mitzvahs. Both pursuits involved learning and parsing dense, opaque lyrics. Only one of them actually felt like it related to the rest of our lives and would help us breach the boundary between boyhood and manhood.
Rap was and is at its roots a refusal to stay within the margins prescribed for you and a celebration of culture that’s not taken seriously by the mainstream. It’s aggressive and silly and sincere and profane. And, just like most teenagers, even summer camp Jews, a lot of it projected an air of invincibility and irreverence even in the face of venerated institutions. Even if we didn’t always feel that way ourselves, we could aspire to it.
The music tapped into every teenager’s desire to live like a human middle finger. We were “nice Jewish boys,” but even nice kids realize that a lot of the world is often unkind and unfair. And sure, we lacked the swag (as the kids say, unless they don’t anymore) of 2Pac flipping off the camera, but it felt inspirational that someone was o
ut there, calling bullshit in ways we only wished we could.
Of course, 2Pac was about more than just flipping the bird to photographers and bragging about having sex with other rappers’ wives. His music also touched on the ravages of poverty, the horrors of violence, and the importance of loving your mom. Of those topics, only the third one felt particularly germane to my life at the time. Though we felt a sincere sense of powerlessness, it was not because we were disempowered; it was because we were children. There was no sinister machine for us to rage against.5 And despite any cultural divide we may have felt between ourselves and swaths of our classmates, we were visually (and for the most part, economically) indistinguishable from them.
There were differences, though, for me specifically. While the rest of my camp friends attended schools with clusters of other Jewish students, I was one of maybe ten at mine. As a younger kid, it felt kind of fun and special to be different. My mom came into my first-grade class to read the story of Hanukkah. I was proud to share my family history and tradition with the other seven-year-olds. But that feeling evaporated in middle school, where the two least cool things you can do are “be different” and “hang out with your parents.” Judaism still figured prominently in my identity, but it had also become a hassle. I didn’t want to explain Passover anymore. I was sick of running from classroom to classroom after the Jewish high holidays, asking teachers for the assignments that I, one of maybe three students who had been out of school on those days, had missed. I even worked in a local church nursery taking care of the kids too young to sit in services, which felt like the ultimate example of acceptance without belonging.
Now, obviously, working in entertainment and living in New York City, I come across guys like me all the time. Brooklyn is awash with secular Jews in their early thirties wearing A Tribe Called Quest T-shirts and retro Jordans. The bars teem with would-be Beastie Boys. On many nights I feel the exact inverse of my middle school self-consciousness. Ugh. Why is everyone here just like me?
Most nights in my early teenage years, I fell asleep to the underground rap block on the radio station broadcast from Emerson College, ten miles away in downtown Boston. I listened from a cocoon of my own whiteness, insulated in my parents’ house, nestled in a quiet middle-class suburb, a turducken of safety and privilege.
At the time, I took that all for granted: growing up with economic security, in a society where racial bias worked in my favor. Even when I started going to concerts with my friends, being a young man meant I never felt unsafe traveling into and out of the city late at night. These are all things I try to be mindful of now, but I just hadn’t been exposed to much else at the time. Or, when I had, I’d lacked the awareness to recognize that what separated me from anyone else wasn’t an inherent goodness, but the good luck of being born where, who, and when I was.
Rap accelerated my awareness of the wider world. It showed me how much I didn’t know. The ultimate example of the chasm between my life and the world transmitted to my eardrums by the laser in my Discman was that by the time I listened to Biggie’s first album the whole way through, he’d already been shot to death, a victim of the kind of violence he so vividly described on the record. 2Pac had been murdered the year earlier.
While the music we listened to created an aura of bravado, strength, and recklessness in the face of death, the crushing weight of circumstances was impossible for the artists to avoid. Meanwhile, hundreds of miles away, we were the invincible ones, lacking in swagger but immune to and unafraid of the most brutal realities of America.
But our last summer at camp, we learned that we were also mortal.
In the middle of August of that year, a white supremacist fired seventy bullets at a Jewish Community Center in California, injuring five people. This was the late 1990s, before the pure desperate grief of a mass shooting was tempered with the frustrated resignation of “this is just what happens sometimes.” The next day, camp wasn’t canceled, but the directors shepherded all the kids to the field farthest from the front gate. Then, as an additional security precaution, the higher-ups stationed Eli at the camp’s entrance.
Eli was not exactly a model employee on days when the stakes weren’t life and death. He had only one qualification as a security guard: his sheer size. His flaws were that he wasn’t bulletproof and he didn’t give much of a shit about anything. Entrusting Eli with this much responsibility seemed misguided at best. All a potential invader would have to do is wait until Eli left to get high in the woods, and he’d be in. (Statistically speaking, it would be a he.)
My friends and I, fourteen years old and convinced we would never die, sneaked away from the assembly in the field and down to the basketball courts. Eli, positioned sixty yards across the parking lot, should have sent us away, but he figured watching us play pickup hoops beat staring at the road, wondering if every car contained a gun-toting anti-Semite. He turned his chair around to face the court and started teasing us.
“Oh, come on!” he’d yell after a ball flew out of bounds, and “Brick!” after a missed shot.
For obvious reasons, the camp management was on high alert for yelling in the parking lot. Richard, the assistant director, came running down the hill, and when he saw that no one’s life was in danger, he got pretty upset. Richard was middle aged, and we suspected he cheated at sports against the campers. He always wore a hat to cover his bald spot, which as a kid I made fun of, but now as a bald adult myself, just seems practical. As Richard crossed the parking lot, Eli stood to face him, and we scurried into the woods to watch the confrontation. The exchange that followed changed the entire way I viewed authority.
“Eli! You are supposed to be protecting this camp, and you are not even looking the right way,” Richard seethed.
“Hey, Rich,” Eli said, “fuck you.” He stood, unmoved and unimpressed. Those of us hiding in the woods, however, were thrilled. We were finally getting to see the youthful recklessness of a rap song up close.
“I . . . I . . . I am your boss and you will show me some respect,” Richard sputtered. With one long arm, Eli reached out and flipped Richard’s hat off his head and into a puddle.
It ruled.
“How’s that for fucking respect?”
My friends and I looked at each other, mouths open in silent screams: Did you hear that???!!?!!
“You swear one more time, and it’s your job,” Richard replied. Eli stared for a long moment. We crouched in the shrubs, waiting for his response.
“Fuck, Richard.” Eli paused. “Shit.” Another pause. “Aaaassssssss.”
Richard picked his hat out of the puddle and shook off a few drops of hot, gross water.
“This is serious, Eli,” he said, with less authority, as he turned and walked across the parking lot toward the camp’s main field. Eli shrugged. He watched Richard go and then pivoted his folding chair a few degrees so he could continue heckling our basketball game.
We laughed at Eli’s open defiance, but it couldn’t fully penetrate the heaviness of the day. Eli’s disrespect had lessened the pain of the horror across the country through his brazen and profane unwillingness to be controlled, but he couldn’t erase the reality of what had happened. The shootings took place thousands of miles away, much further than the Brooklyn neighborhoods that felt so remote, reachable only through a boom box. This time, though, the trauma occurred in a place that felt like home. We had been touched by a violence we couldn’t control, and the safeguards in place to protect us were makeshift at best and useless at worst. When Richard was out of sight, we headed back out onto the court, but with less enthusiasm than before.
As Biggie said: We didn’t know. And then we knew. Things done changed.
Things That Make Me Feel Grown-Up (in Order of Increasing Adulthood)
Walking into a bar without getting carded.
Voting.
Writing a letter of recommendation for a friend.
Wearing a suit of my own volition.
Paying bills.
/> Going to bed when I get tired instead of staying up for no reason.
Not eating all the french fries if I am not hungry for all the french fries.
Restraining myself from rolling my eyes at my friends’ dietary restrictions.
Not knowing any of the music playing at a younger cousin’s bar mitzvah or birthday party.
Cleaning something in my apartment because I noticed, on my own, that it was dirty.
Swearing in casual conversation with my parents without reprisal.
A Worthy Adversary
My first (and to date, only) nemesis was my tenth-grade Spanish teacher, Ms. Sandra Walensky. Ms. Walensky was a long-tenured teacher, beloved by many and feared by others. She wore long dresses and always seemed to be leaning slightly forward. When she was in a good mood, her posture gave her the appearance of listening intently. When she was in a bad mood, it gave you the feeling that she was about to spring forward and tackle you off your chair.
Ms. Walensky wasn’t even the Spanish teacher who gave me the worst grades. Señora Griglun, my freshman- and junior-year teacher, gave really hard tests, the kind where the grades come back worse than you’d hoped, and you still feel like you got off easy. I got along great with her even when I, a grumpy, entitled nerd, felt like I should have been doing better in her class simply because I always did better in every other class.
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