Angry Black White Boy by Adam Mansbach Page A

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