Crossing the line into hip hop nerd-dom.

I had no idea what I was getting into. When I was a doofy kid, I realized that I liked the way hip hop sounded. It made me dance, and that was really all I cared about. I didn't care who was rapping, or how they were rapping, or who the producer was....
However, nowadays there are times now when I really do cross a line that I never thought I would ever cross: it makes me sick to say this, but I think that sometimes I might be a hip hop nerd.

When I use the term hip hop nerd, I'm not talking about that white kid on your college campus that had the round-framed glasses and a creative beard and wore a pageboy cap and talked about the 'black struggle' all day while listening to the Higher Learning soundtrack. That guy was a douche. The fact of the matter is that I do care when certain producers take on certain projects, I read mp3 blogs like it's going out of style so I can have the freshest tracks, I don't want lyrically-driven hip hop to die out, and it kinda takes the fun out of things sometimes.

For example, when I heard that MF Doom and Ghostface were in the studio right now, I almost had a heart attack. Now, I honestly have no clue as to whether or not it'll be a good collab, and run the risk of being terribly disappointed in the end (remember DangerDoom?), and yet I can't help but wake up sometimes in the middle of the night and smile to myself at the thought of those two guys making tracks together.

Don't get me wrong, in the scheme of things, the most important part of hip hop is, and will always be, the ability to force me to shake my ass, but I can't help but get so, so jazzed every time Stone's Throw puts out a new record, or when someone has a ridiculous guest-spot on an album or some sort of obscene rhyming scheme.

When we started this blog, I don't think either of us realized that we'd end up with such a strong hip hop focus. I'd like to think that I don't get pretentious about shit, but I worry that there are times when I am just as bad as the dude with the creative beard. Hopefully my extreme love for shitty music makes me better than that.

At times I'm almost glad that party DJ culture is at the forefront right now. At first I thought that a movement built on irony and scenesters couldn't be good, but it's really grown on me (minus the scenesters, of course).... I think it forces rap-tards like me to lighten the fuck up.

~sarah p.

p.s. Not to throw any fuel on my fire, but here's an amazing MF Doom A-Z article.