I was having trouble starting this column. For whatever reason, nothing jumped out at me this week. It's not writer's block, exactly, because I wrote a few hundred words and then decided they weren't up to snuff. It was more like false starts.
And then I decided to call my dad.
I planned on having him listen to some rap song and tell me what he thought about it. Then I was going to write about that. Or something. I was going to call it "Parents Just Don't Understand." I'm clever like that.
So I called my parents without looking at a clock, and my mom picked up and asked if I knew what time it was. It was late. My dad had been asleep for a while, after dozing off watching "Deadliest Catch." You know, dad stuff.
I'm going to do that next week. I will expound on my father's thoughts on whatever songs I choose to send him. He has great taste in music but stopped listening to new stuff after 1975 or so. He saw The Doors play with The Who in Brooklyn. He saw The Grateful Dead jam until dawn. He played Iron Butterfly and Hot Tuna for me before I could read. He's gone off, many times, when they've played the short (four-minute) version of "Light My Fire" (1967) on the radio rather than the full (seven-minute) version.
But my dad doesn't listen to hip-hop. He tries to keep up with my column, and sometimes asks me about it when it makes no sense to him, but, as far as I know, he has zero interest in the music.
What about rappers' parents, though?
All rappers have parents — even orphans had parents at some point — and I wonder how rappers' parents feel about their children. I mean, it's common knowledge that Jay-Z's mother loves him, as did Kanye West's late mother. Christopher Wallace's mother has gone on record saying how much she loved her late son, despite his insistence that "[he knew his] mother wished she got a f****** abortion."
Even with a line like that, Biggie Smalls' mom loved him.
Tyler, the Creator, the current propagator of horrifying hip-hop, recently tweeted that his mother has been going to all of his shows because she wants to support her son. While he is known to lie for fun, that sentiment seems about right. That means Tyler, the Creator, the boy who raps things like "and you call this s*** rape but I think that rape's fun," has a mother who loves him.
And hears him rap things like that.
Maybe it's just my own familial relationship (or prudish disposition), but I'm somewhat uncomfortable with the fact that my own mother could ostensibly read that. It's the mindset that there are some things parents probably don't need to know about. Like rap music, a genre that glorifies violence, sex and drugs like no other.
But then I think about the stuff they were into when they were our ages: again, my dad saw The Dead jam until dawn. When I heard that story for the first time, my mind reeled. I'm still not quite sure what to make of that.
So then we also have to wonder what rappers' children think of them. Ludacris has kids, as do 50 Cent, Lil Wayne, Eminem, Dr. Dre, most of the members of the Wu Tang Clan, The Game, Nelly and ... well, a ton of rappers, actually. It's not weird for rappers to have kids, but thinking that these guys are raising children is a little frightening. But the world keeps turning and each generation cringes thinking about — well, let's not think about those things.
So what do rappers' mothers think about them? They're probably proud that their kids are living their dreams. Parents can be cool like that.
And I don't think that my dad will want to listen to rap for my little experiment. But I know he'll do it if I ask.
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Mitchell Geller is a senior majoring in psychology and English. He can be reached at Mitchell.Geller@Tufts.edu.
