ljm: i’m always hilariously late to the top...

ljm:

i’m always hilariously late to the top forty hip-hop game, and i don’t say that in a self-congratulatory OH I DON’T BELIEVE IN TV way or whatever (first of all because i…love tv, obviously). i hadn’t listened to anything harder than “that’s what little girls are made of” by raven-symone for about fifteen years when i learned, this year, that the adult me loved hip-hop.

i’m married to a dude ten years older than me who came up in rural indiana carrying around a square of linoleum and some k-tel tapes. he was the first one who told me i might like hip hop. he said i’d like the wordplay and he played aesop rock and mos def while we drove to dinner. it took me a while to come around to my own taste, but 2011 has been the year of doing so, mostly due to my rdio subscription making so many albums immediately available to me.

as it turns out, my taste tends to run more toward the classic, the sincere, the often-goofy. i listened to a lot of classic and sincere and goofy over the summer, while working saturday afternoon-to-night solo shifts at a local vintage store, skee-lo and heavy d banging out of crackling old speakers, me poking at my iPhone beneath a plastic chandelier. once a college-aged girl nudged her mom during the beginning of grandmaster flash’s “the message” and they did the intro together: it’s like a jungle sometimes, it makes me wonder how i keep from going under.

my favorite jams from the playlist i broadcasted from those busted old speakers every week, all golden summer, included:

“children’s story” by slick rick (do i even need to mention “lodi dodi”)
“gyrlz, they love me” by heavy d & tha boys :(
“no nose job” by digital underground
“i wish” by skee-lo (LISTEN TO THIS IF YOU HAVEN’T IN A WHILE, i never saw a single person who had been alive in the 90s who wasn’t thrilled to do the same)
“buggin out” by a tribe called quest
“roxanne, roxanne” by utfo
“mistadobalina” by del tha funkee homosapien
“i got a man” by positive k
“ragtime” by run dmc

so if you tumblr friends are getting home and want to dance around before bed or if you’re having a google hangout or whatever you crazy kids do these days, there are some songs that would be cool to listen to while you do that.