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Life & Arts

Girls can be a guide to good music, if not love

Beat Box

Zach Lee

Hip-hop, I love you.

Some would say I'm a day late and a dollar short when it comes to professing my love, but I say they should stop letting Hallmark decide when it's OK to let someone know they care. Now is as good a time as any to let the world know why I love hip-hop as much as baseball.

Like all great loves, this one started out with a naked girl -- well, that's not entirely true. My love for hip-hop first began to blossom when I received a shoddy car from a dying neighbor in the summer of 2000. The car had neither a CD player nor a way to play tapes. All I had was the radio, and even that wasn't all that great. As a true punk rocker, I wanted to listen to KTRU and KPFT, but their radio waves were too weak, and all that came through was the booming beat of 97.9 -- The Box.

Then I don't know it took more than a few grunting noises and a beat machine to make a good song. The next step in my torrid love affair was indeed a girl. This one was clothed though, and she was a year younger than me. She was cute, and she thought enough of herself to think that I liked her -- I couldn't help but fall for her. She thought Eminem was attractive. It may have been a bad reason to buy his CD, but it seemed good enough to me. I never went out with the girl, but I thank her for all the good times I have had with other girls to Em's music. 

The naked girls came in much later. Suicidegirls.com was my window into a world where only beautiful girls with pierced lips and multicolored tattoos frolicked and took pictures of each other without letting any cloth adulterate the image. One of them -- I still remember her name: Portia -- liked Atmosphere and Aesop Rock. Soon, I was listening to anything with a Def Jux sticker on it.

Since then, my love has settled in enough to accept hip-hop for what she is -- something even she's not always proud of, but something beautiful. She can change, and she can even be quiet for a while, but I wake up every morning to her beautiful heartbeat. Punk may be dead, but hip-hop will never die / And even cloudy skies are blue with my baby by my side.
 

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