My Introduction To Awesomeness

I was a naive child.

I was the youngest of six children in a conservative and religious home in a conservative and religious small town.  It was the olden days before the internet and I only knew one person (my grandmother) who had cable before I was thirteen.  And that's when cable was eight channels and three of them were fuzzy.  The town was about 95% white and about 95% Mormon.  Sometimes we would venture out of our little town to Salt Lake City (also very white and very Mormon-y) or go to Mesa, AZ during the winter to visit my Dad's parents (Mesa: white, Mormon).  Needless to say, there was not a lot of diversity in my life.

After high school graduation I began to attend the local junior college which -surprise!- was a parochial school run by the Mormon church.  The school enforced a strict dress code and a personal conduct code that homogenized the student body into a same-dressing, same-behaving gaggle of youths marching lockstep toward our heavenly reward.  I was a milquetoast lad in a whitebread world.

So in 1989, at the age of 19, when I watched Spike Lee's Do The Right Thing my mind was pretty much blown.  From the opening credits featuring Rosie Perez dancing to Public Enemy, to the highly charged and unfamiliar (to me) racial and social tensions of Bedford-Stuysevant, it's safe to say I had never seen anything like it before.

Concerning the song:

Up to this point in my life, the only rap music I had heard had been pretty harmless.  Stuff like this

Or this

and these guys were edgy as heck (who knew that they would become hip hop's elderstatesmen?)

but all these songs were about normal teenager tropes - chicks, parents, parties.

So me and my buddy Mitch rent Do The Right Thing and thanks to those opening credits, Public Enemy detonated a bomb in my psyche.  This was no teen angst, this was a powerful political concisousness aimed toward activism and empowerment.  I had never heard a voice like Chuck D's and even though Flava Flav was a total goofball, he was still pretty awesome.  Sonically it was mesmerizing.  I still listen to PE all the time.  They're my favorite rap group ever period the end nuff said.

Anyhoo, while I prepare to review Do The Right Thing, I thought I'd hit up this tangent just for the flimsy excuse to listen to a lot of late 80s and early 90s hip hop.  Time well spent if you ask me.