ABSTRACT
It was almost 20 years ago now. That space was amazing. I understood it before, but it really became crystal unclear that day at Northeastern University. My friend Rusty parked the car and we raced out of it as the sounds of kicks and snares and bass contrasted in the speakers were heard in the distance. They lured us. Where the hell is it coming from? We kept walking down the empty halls of the university and seemed to travel farther from the sonic utopia each step. Damn! What the fuck! We toss and turned down this floor and that floor until finally we hit it. There was only 200 feet between us and the auditorium where life was born again. I ran to the door, drunk in the sounds of what could be notes and staccato vocals smashed on top of each other. My heart beat to overloading capacity as I opened the door. There it was. There I was. I was home. But I’d never been there before like this. The room was packed. In its middle were two circles of physical artists spinning on the floor as the rhythms inspired them to create holograms for us all to walk through. In the corner by the stage were pen players, scribbling hard to decipher symbols on blank white sheets. It looked like the paradise you might see if you understood what the colored hieroglyphs outside of your train really were not. On the stage was a humanoid (at least he may have been) turning records into tilt-a-whirls, defying centrifugal force in ways that sounded like music. All around the room were collections of humans talking on beat off of the top of their heads. Someone told me that they were “cyphering.” I started doing it too. What was it? It was hip-hop. It was a “next universe,” a world within a world. It is the epitome of authenticity/the maintenance of multiplicity. We all were one yet many. There was no race there. We took spaceships beyond that. In it, I was saved. How dare I call it my mom’s Jesus. This is what Tunnel Rats meant when they sung the chorus “I’m talking about a place called ‘hip-hop’ Whatever happened to that place called ‘hip-hop’ I never seen you in that place called ‘hip-hop’ So the lies that you speak need to stop” I went there. And I never left. 1
