I need a teacher.

I need someone to teach me about rap. When I listen to it, I want to understand the context of what I’m hearing.

Rap was not around much in my house growing up. My parents’ CD collection consisted almost exclusively of classic rock, CCM, and classical music. My town, Langley, BC, was pretty dang white (still is). Black kids came around one at a time in my class at school, and the one I became friends with, Joel, was more of a reggae guy. 

African-American culture was something we saw on TV and heard on the radio every once in a while. The only rap on my stereo was cut-and-pasted into Christian music and/or rock - DC Talk, P.O.D., Linkin Park - by non-black band members (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Or is there? I don’t know. That’s kind of what I’m talking about.

I finished reading James Baldwin’s The Fire Next Time this weekend. It lit a fire under my butt. I need to expand my field of vision, culturally speaking. But finding someone to help you do that is harder than you think. You can’t just walk up to someone and ask them to teach you about their culture. It comes off as condescending or patronizing. 

But I’m not looking to condescend. I want some feet to sit at. I want the assumption to be that I know nothing. Because basically, that’s true. I don’t understand the difference between 2 Pac and Notorious B.I.G. I don’t understand the difference between Macklemore and Eminem.  

Right now, I’m listening to Questlove interview Kurtis Blow on Questlove’s podcast, Questlove Supreme. Before I pressed play, I didn’t know who Kurtis Blow was. Honestly, I still don’t know who he is. I know he’s important to the beginning of rap because Questlove is telling me so, but I don’t really get it. Not completely. 

I could rely on famous people like Questlove to teach me, but I’m looking for someone I can ask questions, someone I can speak with face-to-face, someone who can transfer some of their passion for rap and hip-hop onto me. 

I took a class on Shakespeare in university. Before the course, I knew about as much about Shakespeare as I knew about rap. I knew Shakespeare was supposed to be important. I had read a couple of plays and poems in high school. But the excitement his writing stirred up in people, the kind of passion you see at Shakespeare festivals and theatre schools, was foreign to me. I just didn’t get it.

About halfway through the class, suddenly it clicked. The tragedies were the entry point for me - the moral ambiguity, the dramatic realism. Kurt Vonnegut once said (and I’m paraphrasing here) that you can’t grade Hamlet on a scale of the character’s success and despair. Shakespeare never tells you how to feel about what happens in the play. It’s how he tells you the truth - that, if we’re honest with ourselves, we don’t know the value of the things that happen in our lives. All we really know - going back to Baldwin here for a second - is that we die.

I didn’t become a Shakespeare-fanatic or anything. No costumes were bought, no archaic language added to my repertoire of words (what’s the word for your repertoire of words, again?). But now, I enjoy it. Shakespeare finally means something to me - personally. This is what I want to happen with rap. I need someone to teach me.

Just like I had with Shakespeare, my knowledge of hip-hop is extremely basic. I’m a fan of Gil Scott-Heron and Digable Planets. I know some of the names of the bigger players - Run DMC, Wu-Tang Clan, Missy Elliott, Jay-Z, Kendrick Lamar, etc. - and I’ve heard some of their music. I listened to MF Doom’s collaboration with Danger Mouse, Danger Doom, a lot in the early ‘10s. I like it. That’s not the problem. I want to get it.

Maybe I can’t get it. Maybe rap and hip-hop aren’t for me. It’s not my culture. Maybe I should leave it alone, get my white ### out of the picture. 

To an extent, I believe this. There is something about a culture that belongs only to the people who build it, who have it in their blood. But if Mr. Baldwin is right, I need to see everyone as my people, not just the people who look like me. To me, that means embracing new things and trying to understand art and music from the perspective of the people who make it. 

There’s a quote at the end of The Fire Next Time that stuck with me. It goes like this:

“America, of all the Western nations, has been best placed to prove the uselessness of color. But it has not dared to accept this opportunity, or even to conceive of it as an opportunity.”

Since Baldwin wrote this 50+ years ago, Canada and America have changed, but if you look at the headlines from last year, it looks like we still have a long way to go. Neither country has taken on the task he described or realized the “uselessness of color” completely. 

But some people have dared. I want to be one of those people. And this is one, admittedly tiny way for me to do that. Can somebody help me?