the same boat now
boom shocka lock
hip hop is not plymouth rock
any more than america’s the great melting pot
i could recite
a battleworn litany
of moments & events gasps of death
from the sugarhill gang’s
grandmaster caz
grand larceny creative
the borrowed notebook that made rap famous
to the train buff
graff’s chemical death bath
somebody said you could actually hear the colors shrieking
as they melted into welfare cutbacks
and all the way up to sprite ads
but nunadat is where it’s at
suffice to say the other day
the faded ghost of hip hop’s past
tiptoed to my side & grabbed my wrist
arms out pressed us sideways
fingertips to tips
we did the wave
b-boy vulcan mindmeld
b-boy energy ripples twist into infinity
but then i always been the type to get sentimental
over shit that might’ve never existed
so i can’t say for sure
if all this means
that hip hop’s not as raw
or that i ain’t twelve no more
then again check out some of these cats who are
leave it to a music that saturation mined
the backlog annals of recorded history
lookin for the perfect beat
to double back & diagnose itself
with advanced acute nostalgia
for its own barely vanished youth
you’d think hip hoppers
would be natural historians correct
but only for eight digital seconds at a time
Macon refolded the paper slowly, drawing out his face time, and nodded humbly at the floor as the audience accorded him a smattering of applause. He looked up to realize that the room had half-drained during his reading, but he told himself it was to be expected; folks only came for the slam. The sliver of Macon that had expected to be mobbed by newborn fans was disillusioned, as usual, and as usual his ego swooped gracefully to the rescue, catching his self-image on the first bounce. Fuck all that theatrical bullshit, he thought as he returned to his spot against the wall, I hit motherfuckers with some content and if they’re not ready for it, then fuck them. This place is wack, anyhow. Another ten years, hip hop’ll be like jazz: The only black folks in the club’ll be onstage.
“So what’s the verdict?” Macon asked, hoping he sounded like he didn’t care. The blonde smiled at him, and Macon chose to interpret the sight of her gleaming upper teeth, the front two endearingly crooked, with a liberal dose of self-aggrandizement.
“Not bad at all.” He tried not to hear pity in her voice.
“Yeah? It was okay?”
“I’m willing to go with okay. Now stop fishing for compliments. That’s not my style.” Her style—it was a loophole, and Macon squeezed himself through it:
It isn’t that my poem wasn’t
dope, it’s that she doesn’t want to say so.
Macon scoped her when she looked away and told himself she was playing it cool because she liked him, but he didn’t believe it. New York loomed large and menacing, and for a moment Macon felt inconsequential, mortal, a yellow leaf spiral-flitting to the ground only to be taken up by the current of rainwater in the gutter and whisked down the street and gone. The suburbanity of the image disturbed him.
The blonde stuck out her hand. “I’m Logan.” A roving stage light lit up her aquamarine eyes and they pinned Macon like a butterfly. He went limp with strange embarrassment, as if she’d caught him doing something nasty, glimpsed some hidden lameness. Macon felt awkward in his clothes—hot, itchy, smelly—and wondered if the backpackers’ uniforms shielded them from some pernicious radiation to which he wasn’t hip.
“Macon. This is my first time reading in New York.” It sounded like an apology. “I’m from Boston.”
“Really?” She cocked her head. “Where’d you go to high school?”
“Newton South?”
Logan frowned. “That’s not Boston. That’s the suburbs. Birth-place of the Fig Newton.”
Macon’s heart punctuated her line with a rim shot; he felt himself begin to perspire and wanted to bolt then and there, before Logan called
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