As a kid, my parents always bought me shoes from Payless. This is how I uncovered the connection between Ayn Rand and Kris Kross. Let me explain...
It was a BOGO, and my parents thought it would be a great idea for me to get two pairs of the exact same shoe. Do you know what happens when a ten-year-old has two pairs of the same shoe? He wears both lefts to school. And yeah, he plays it off to his friends as intentional and all that mucho macho mess, but he still ends up getting yelled at by the powers who thought that the two-pair thing was a good idea and, as a lesson, is forced to label the inside and outside of his shoes L1, R1, L2, R2.
With stylistics like this, it was no surprise that everyone on the block looked to me for artistic expressions of moral purpose. Sweatpant cut-offs, PlayStationed shoes, socks higher than Method Man on Jamaican Airlines. I was warming it up and showing those fascist suckers how it was done. I didn't need Jordans or Pumps. I had Pro Wings.
But going into 6th grade, I succumbed to the peer pressure of statism. So I saved up, tossed the generics, and bought a pair of Reebok Classics. Did the new shoes detract me from my self-interested ways? Not when I was still secretly wearing girl’s jeans. What up Ms. Rand?
Showing posts with label childhood. Show all posts
Showing posts with label childhood. Show all posts
Friday, May 28, 2010
Wednesday, March 24, 2010
Pop Pop for Beginners
In '94 I was listening to a lot of Bone Thugs-n-Harmony. I think everybody was. Between Thuggish Ruggish Bone and Foe tha Love of $ being some of the most requested jams on The Box—and I being 13 years old—it was hard not to.
One of the joys of listening to Bone was trying to figure out what these guys were saying (as anyone who has attempted to transcribe and decode a verse by Bizzy Bone can attest). But one Bone line that did not require an attuned ear was “pop pop.” This one was obvious. Pop pop was the sound of gunshots, as in, “We rippin' them guts with buck shots, pop pop.”
Per George Gerbner, my friends and I adopted pop pop into our everyday communication. We said it when Craig knocked Deebo the fug out, and we used it as trash talk when playing Samurai Showdown. For us, this phrase functioned not so much as the sound of a firearm but as the ultimate synonym for "in yo face!"
Over time, my use of pop pop faded. High school, college, marathons. All pop pop-less.
Years later, in grad school and in need a break from reading about Derrida (who, like Bizzy, requires a lot of decoding), I threw on some Bone, as those who need breaks from Derrida often do. The voices of Krazie, Lazie, Bizzy, Wish, and Flesh took me back to my adolescence—a time when I read comic books that were not about philosophers.
With Bone back in my life, the Bone-izms returned.
“What’s that?” Marj asked, referring to the two-count slap as we drove over a speed bump.
“It’s my antenna hitting the roof. Pop pop.”
Moral of the story? Language changes. The word "awful" was once favorable. Pop pop used to be rap lyric gunshot—now, it’s one of Derrida’s undecidables. People use it to describe sounds their cars make (ok, I use it to describe sounds my car makes), and cereals use it as their last line of defense. Pop pop is both accurate and un-accurate*, and neither accurate nor un-accurate, at the same time, both in the shower and out.
*Un-accurate is a Meta term. If Derrida is allowed to make up words, so am I. Pop pop, Jacques.
One of the joys of listening to Bone was trying to figure out what these guys were saying (as anyone who has attempted to transcribe and decode a verse by Bizzy Bone can attest). But one Bone line that did not require an attuned ear was “pop pop.” This one was obvious. Pop pop was the sound of gunshots, as in, “We rippin' them guts with buck shots, pop pop.”
Per George Gerbner, my friends and I adopted pop pop into our everyday communication. We said it when Craig knocked Deebo the fug out, and we used it as trash talk when playing Samurai Showdown. For us, this phrase functioned not so much as the sound of a firearm but as the ultimate synonym for "in yo face!"
Over time, my use of pop pop faded. High school, college, marathons. All pop pop-less.
Years later, in grad school and in need a break from reading about Derrida (who, like Bizzy, requires a lot of decoding), I threw on some Bone, as those who need breaks from Derrida often do. The voices of Krazie, Lazie, Bizzy, Wish, and Flesh took me back to my adolescence—a time when I read comic books that were not about philosophers.
With Bone back in my life, the Bone-izms returned.
“What’s that?” Marj asked, referring to the two-count slap as we drove over a speed bump.
“It’s my antenna hitting the roof. Pop pop.”
Moral of the story? Language changes. The word "awful" was once favorable. Pop pop used to be rap lyric gunshot—now, it’s one of Derrida’s undecidables. People use it to describe sounds their cars make (ok, I use it to describe sounds my car makes), and cereals use it as their last line of defense. Pop pop is both accurate and un-accurate*, and neither accurate nor un-accurate, at the same time, both in the shower and out.
*Un-accurate is a Meta term. If Derrida is allowed to make up words, so am I. Pop pop, Jacques.
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