If you were to ask me about my favorite music growing up, I’d probably start off with some grunge era nineties music. I really liked Smashing Pumpkins, Pearl Jam, and Nirvana. There are some songs that stick out from the mid-nineties, in particular, like “Possum Kingdom” by The Toadies, “Good” by Better Than Ezra, “Sodajerk” by Buffalo Tom, “Low” by Cracker. I would also have to mention the Red Hot Chili Peppers and Dave Matthews Band because I listened to them constantly plus Blues Traveller, The Black Crowes and The Allman Brothers and a bunch of other classic rock stuff.
But let’s see a scene from my young life. We open on a dimly lit room off of the living room of a family home on a tree lined street, illuminated only by a television. It’s the late eighties or early nineties and a round faced, vaguely British looking adolescent is either opening a pack of baseball cards or going through comic books. He’s alone, probably eating E.L. Fudges or microwave popcorn. When I see that scene in my mind’s eye, the soundtrack isn’t the music I mentioned, it’s either “Around the way Girl” by L.L. Cool J or “Miss You Much” by Janet Jackson. I loved those songs.
I use YouTube to look up old music but with the arrival of Spotify and almost literally every song ever recorded a search away, there’s the music that I really want to remember and listen to from my childhood.
En Vogue, “Hold On”
Snap, “I’ve Got the Power”
Arrested Development, “Tennessee”
CeCe Peniston, “Finally”
Black Sheep, “The Choice Is Yours”
Neneh Cherry, “Buffalo Stance”
Robyn S, “Show Me Love”
LL Cool J, “Mamma Said Knock You Out”
New Edition, “If It Isn’t Love”
Bobby Brown, “Every Little Step”
Shaka Kahn, “I Feel For You”
Whitney Houston, “I’m Every Woman” (a Shaka Kahn cover)
Ready for the World, “Oh Sheila”
Soul II Soul, “Back to Life”
Janet Jackson, “Escapade,” “Love Will Never Do Without You,” “Pleasure Principle,” and, frankly, most Janet Jackson
Let’s not dance around the issue. These are black artists singing R&B or rapping, sometimes both. Why don’t I include this music in my list of childhood favorites when they most certainly were?
Probably because of an insidious, unconscious perception. I mean, yeah, I like this music but it’s not my music. Why not? In addition to racism, let’s not discount that half of these artists above are women so there’s some misogyny and homophobia in there as well.
I grew up in an upper middle class white neighborhood where everything was either Led Zeppelin and classic rock, underground indie rock, or it was The Grateful Dead, Birkenstocks, hacky sacks, and jam bands.
(Quick aside: white people, why the hell do we listen to The Grateful Dead? I’ve hated that music since the second I heard it and yet generation after generation, Dead Dead Dead. Jerry Garcia’s death couldn’t kill The Grateful Dead. I never understood it and I never will.)
There was definitely a lot of hip hop to be consumed in my childhood. As a dutiful white kid, I loved – and still love – the Beastie Boys. But then there were the unforgivable white rappers. Vanilla Ice (I danced to “Ice Ice Baby” just as hard as every other seventh grader), Marky Mark and the Funky Bunch (“Good Vibrations” came on in the gym the other day and good God this song is bad, I get why Mark Wahlberg keeps trying to distance himself from it), and Snow, “Informer.” Has anyone, anyone at all, figured out what the hell that song was?
I listened to “Just a Friend” by Biz Markie, “I Gotta Man” by Positive-K, “I Wish” by Skee-Lo, and “Fanastic Voyage” by Coolio but there was something safe, poppy, and comedic about those songs. Same with “Shoop” by Salt-N-Pepa. Somehow “Me, Myself, and I” and Digable Planets were embraced by white kids. In the case of Digable Planets perhaps it was the jazz influence.
(Another quick aside: white people, how did we get away with taking jazz? At this point, it’s gone beyond appropriation, we’ve just taken it. And while we’re at it, The Isley Brothers should never forgive us for what we did to “Shout.”)
I listened to Snoop and Dre but in the nineties it was hard not to. Some people were hip to Run DMC. None of my friends were listening to Rakim, KRS-One, A Tribe Called Quest, or Nas, though. (I’m not even sure if I’ve gotten my hip hop bona fides correct here). But even if they were, we all made fun of our one white friend who was a little too into hip hop, which is still problematic. We weren’t prematurely woke high school students worried about cultural appropriation. We were almost policing our proper cultural roles.
For what it’s worth, I’m also a music classist because I listened to my fair share of Poison and Def Leppard in my day but I don’t consider that my music, either. Teased hair and white jean jackets seemed a little gauche. I’m trying to shed this whole what you like and what it says about you thing (though I’ve spilled some ink on it). It’s getting too tiring to either pretend to like something because it’s cool (Sonic Youth) or pretend not to like something because it’s lame (Journey).
I might have been able to let this go if it weren’t for a conversation that I had with my friend Tim some years back. If you know white people, you’ll know what I mean when I tell you that Tim is One of My Best Friends™. We were in our late twenties and Tim had just started listening to and really liking Led Zeppelin, which I found a little odd. “Dude, didn’t you geek out on them in, like, the seventh grade?” “No, in seventh grade I was listening to De La Soul and KRS-One.” It hadn’t occurred to me that a guy from a similar neighborhood who went to my high school might have different cultural reference points than me.
When I was in high school, “Free Your Mind” by En Vogue was a big hit. Back then being “color blind” as the song advises or saying, “I don’t see race,” was considered an enlightened viewpoint. I may not have seen race but I sure as hell made a lot of unconscious assumptions based on my own.
