On Being Aesthetic (A Narrative of Sorts)

a.

At work. Sitting. Waiting to be trained. Listening to yet another annoying band-wagon-riding college radio station. Between a whiny cover of Helen (an over-the-top, compositionally complacent, love song by the Foo Fighters) and a boy singing about being an outlaw (at an unbelievably high pitch and decibel), I had a moment of clarity: “Indie doesn’t have to suck,” I murmured outloud, “but it really does.”

I reasoned that Indie’s suckiness was a result of one of three things, or all three things taken together. These are, in brief:

1. the heavy handed attempt at being clever (typically, via the “obscure as fuck lyrics” literary trick)

and/or

2. feigned originality (or the inability to properly “play the role” of whatever aesthetic persona the artist/s in question desire/s to portray)

and/or

3. girl jeans (get wit’ it, butt-rock fashion is dead – well, maybe not the hair).

b.

So, I at once enumerated my non-socio-economic reasons for being a hip hop head. At the top of the list were the following reasons:

 1. its sensitivity to cultural transformations

2. its promotion of honesty (i.e the “cut through the bullshit” attitude)

3. its promotion of race, class, and gender equality

4. its ability to rally people together.

Now, at face value, the above four reasons may seem incredibly sarcastic; however, I can assure you that they are not. Also, before you assume that the Hip Hop I’m referring to is the Hip Hop of rappers like Common, Nas, Mos Def, Talib Kwali, etc. (i.e. what’s called Conscious Hip Hop, or as I like to call it, “Preach Hop”), I should correct you. I’m referring to ALL Hip Hop (with the exception of Crunk, Hyphy, and Raggaeton, which aren’t really Hip Hop but a sort of bastard child of Hip Hop that flaunts its daddy’s name, because without it, well, it would just be taking up space, time, and available resources for good music).

c.

Sitting. My senile boss shuffles down the corridor. I minimize IE’s windows. I open an Illustrator file. I begin to click at it, savagely, as if to indicate that I’m working hard. She buys it and takes it with her down the corridor, creeping past open and closed doors with the attentiveness of the Angel of Death on the first Passover.

-fin-

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