In the 6th grade when she was 12 years old, my daughter discovered rap music and fell head-long in love, her first love really. My skinny, long-limbed, sparkly spoiled Southern California white princess dropped into it HARD. She went from Macklemore to Eminem to Dr. Dre to Snoop Dog (the chronic) and the like. She went from rainbow sparkles to black on black, head-bands and bows to thick black eye-liner and Doc Martens. We let her listen to whatever she wanted, as she was going to anyway, sanctioned by us or not. She started out with the clean versions of everything which for some songs is really just humming; by 7th grade, she made her way into the explicit. And so every morning, when we get into the car for our 25 minute drive to school, she's the DJ, and anything goes.
I have a mind that likes a bone; I love riddles and koans and anything that keeps my monkey mind busy so that I can get on with living from my heart. And my mind learns lyrics really well, always has. So when I listen to rap for at least an hour a day, the same songs over and over again, my brain learns every single word after a while. And so we sing these lovely ballads together in the car "I don't give a fuck, I don't give a fuck, I don't, I don't, I don't give a fuck, bitch I don't give a fuck about you or anything that you do..." The nastier the lyrics, the more fun we have singing them at the top of our lungs, like we're really extra cool. (Sometimes we discuss the songs and use them for discourse on human nature but that's a different post.) On the mornings where I tell my daughter I just can't face her music that day, she says "Come on mom, it's our jam, it's how we do", which works every time because how am I going to deny my girl our jam? And you know what? I am beginning to understand something about rap music - albeit from an affluent white woman in her 50's perspective. It speaks to the gangster in me, that totally bad ass 'I'm a fuck you up' girl who doesn't take any shit from anyone. Who fights back. Who calls it as she sees it, without fear. When I was a girl, Bruce Springsteen was about as close as I got to this. Bruce told me to get the hell out of Jersey and I listened. I bolted the summer after high school and never looked back. When I listen to E Street radio now, I realize how influential Bruce Springsteen was back then; how his lyrics allowed me to find a place in me that knew that yes, I too needed to get the hell out. I too was born to run, to break free and hide out on the back streets. Those songs and those lyrics became my anthem, my riding music, and they gave me the courage to be that girl who ran away from everything she knew.
Rap is doing the same with my girl. It is allowing her to explore this really tough bitch who lives inside of her and is basically like "eff you, I'm a do shit my own way." Sometimes I know she is picking a song on purpose to sing the lyrics to me, as a message she can't otherwise say ("bitch shut yo trap"). The more I witness this, the more I see the value of her inner gangsta; it's allowing her to explore that raw power - without being incited to violence or misogyny. And interestingly enough, she has also gone back to listening to the sound track of High School Musical, which is almost sickly sweet in its straight-laced idealism. So rap is not necessarily informing who she is in the outside world; it is just exposing her to a side of herself she can own, integrate and use when necessary - a tough girl who is capable of handling herself, sticking up for herself and having her own back. Like Snoop Dog, she is the shiiit, beeitch....
Anyway, as it turns out, there is a down side. I definitely overuse 'motha fucka' and quite often find that after hours of hearing (and sometimes singing along) with a song in my head, what I'm actually singing is something along the lines of "take a bullet with some dick and get this dope off this jet." I do find myself dreaming of the day when my daughter has her own car and her own jam. And I can go back to my jam of yoga chants and the like.
I ain't never gonna give up my inner gangsta tho, no. That ho is way too bad ass to let go...
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