The Sonic Vandals: A Hip Hop Story

Copyright 2012 by Art Rosch

           It’s one thirty in the morning.  A sound starts in the distance, barely audible.  The sound is almost subliminal, but it grows.  It grows at first gradually, but quickly acquires momentum as it approaches.

            Boom!  Boom!  Ka boomboom!  Kaboomboom!  Louder and louder it comes, like an approaching stampede, like an apocalypse.  BOOM BOOM KABOOM!  It crescendos and throws me from sleep like an earthquake.  BOOM BOOOM BOOOOOM!

            Then it fades away at the same speed at which it arrived and passed.  Boom boom.  Kaboom boom.  Kaboom.

            It’s a Boomkar.  It’s a vehicle whose purpose is to transport sonic vandals all night, waking  those who are asleep.  It is a variant of tribal drum language.  It may signal other Boomkars, some from hostile tribes, to converge upon a battleground.  They are Cadillac, Pontiac, Toyota, Honda, Dodge, Ford and other vehicles whose back seats and trunks have been converted into loudspeakers. These procedures transform hip hop bass lines into lethal sound weapons.  They are expressions of power.

            Battle is joined at a mall parking lot.  Vehicles arranged in ranks like Roman legions crank up their amplifiers. 

The balcony of my apartment has a perfect view of the Northway Mall parking lot.  I witness a BoomBattle first-hand.  It's dreadful.  The karnage is indescribable.

            It begins with the appearance of the chieftains from opposing tribes.  A Humvee and an Escalade roll ominously forward until they are nose to nose.  Their commanders emerge from the vehicles to relay hand signals to their deeji at the control consoles.  All Boomkar warriors are deaf.  They have no choice but to communicate with hand signals.

            The leader of the Escalade Krew is the infamous Doctor Doghouse.  Stepping out of the black Humvee is the equally notorious B.G.F. Fatpimp

            The Escalade’s Doctor Doghouse crosses his arms to form an “X” at chest height.  The fingers of both hands are flashing the "devil's horns" sign, the most notorious challenge of  gang sign language.  He wears shorts that almost reach his ankles but are so baggy he could fit two of himself into each leg.  His opponent, Fatpimp,  weighs three hundred pounds, but is dressed much the same. His shorts could house a large family of desert Bedouin with room to spare. Brand new baseball caps with their still-rigid shapes and original price tags are worn sideways at such and such an angle, just so. The chieftains posture at one another, fingers pointed in all directions, arms crossed, knees bent, shoulders rolling.

          One would assume that these are signs of insult, that is,  the tribal champions are flashing merk.  Of course, flashing merk don’t mean shit unless actual weapons are involved.   Nobody's gonna get capped sideways.

This is easy merk, not the hard kind.  The weapons are the Boomkars themselves.

The next part of the ritual is for each chief to reach into the pocket of his giant shorts and produce a knot.  At this point there is an advantage to the Escalade, because Doghouse’s knot is head up in c-notes, real hundreds, and as he withdraws the thick rubber band, he can easily show that the c-notes aren’t just bush for ones and fives.  The knot is deep in c-notes.  Fatpimp loses a load of headroom, his knot shows a couple c’s a couple twens, and a whole lotta ones.  Bad tone for Fatpimp.  Sometimes low quap is worse than no quap.

            The chiefs walk in their stylized manner, limbs loose and arms flailing, fingers folded into complex semaphores.  They circle one another, making a figure eight, which takes each chief around the opponent’s ride.

            Then the Escalade fires up its amps. 

            Boom, kachic!  A boom boom.  Ka chik-boomachic boomachic!

            I am at least a quarter mile distant, and the concussion of the bass roils my intestines. 

            In response, the Humvee emits another riffle: Kachik boom!  Kachik boom boom boom! Kachik- kachik-kachik-boom.  Taboom boom!

            Only a few words of the incantation are audible. The bass and the snare slap dominate the asphalt-juddering roar.  There are repeated calls of key code phrases.  “Motha fucka!  Motha fucka!  Motha fucka!  Yo! Yo!  Mothafucka Yo!”  That's the Escalade.  The Humvee snarls back.  “Gonna get up yo booty!  Gonna get up yo booty!  Phat bee-ahtch gonna sit on it, sit on it!”

            Cracks begin to spread from beneath each vehicle.  The vocalizations, I believe, are calls of love to the chieftains’ ladies.  Or perhaps they are calls to the fathers of women in other tribes, women desired by Fatpimp and Doghouse.  These calls are meant to demonstrate the impressive character and power of each chief.

          My scrotum is vibrating from the din.  Both cars hold equal volume and blare at one another.  The Escalade’s hubcaps suddenly blow into the air with such force that one of them shatters a sixty foot mercury vapor lamp.  Doctor Doghouse makes a sign to his deej: up the volume!  Turn on the extra amps.  Kick out the jams, motherfucker!

            The Humvee begins to fold and rumple along its width.  The imperial nine and a half foot grille and headlights compress.  The roof folds upon itself until the vehicle is perhaps eight feet wide.  Seven and a half.  Six feet!  Cracks widen beneath both Kars.

            “Mothafucka!  Booty.  Mothafucka!  Booty!  Get up get up get up!  Clap yo hands! Get up!  Booty.  Fucka!  Ooo.  Kachik.  Beeahtch!  Boom boom boom!”

           The pavement gives way with a giant splongk! and both cars fall into a sinkhole.  Doctor Doghouse’s fingers are gripping the ragged edges of the crater.  He manages to climb out.  His torn shorts are sucked under his armpits.  Droopy white socks look sad and lost sitting atop sneakers that look like M-1 Abrams battle tanks.  He looks back into the hole.  There is no sign of the Humvee’s Fatpimp.  The vehicles belonging to Doghouse’s tribe suddenly roar to life, each one circling the phalanx of their opponents’ Boomkars.  Their amps are turned all the way up.  The acrid smell of burning electronics reaches me on my perch above the parking lot.  Smoke blows from the trunks and windows of Boomkars.  The din is cataclysmic.  Escalade Boomkars circle the defeated Humvee tribe’s Boomkars. 

            Boom boom kaboom boom kaboom boom boom!  Chik chik snap bap boom, chaboom!

            There is a distant wailing.  The Boomkars skid in swathes of rubber as they disperse in all directions.  Twenty, twenty five police cars are screaming their way to the Boomkar Battle. 

            By the time they reach the scene of the karnage, all that remains is a giant sinkhole with the wreck of a Humvee in its depths.  B.G.F. Fatpimp is gone.  A faint boom boom seems to emit from the hole.  That may be my imagination.  Or perhaps it is a dying echo bouncing off a building far away, a feeble remnant of the battle between tribes of sonic vandals.

The Mutation of Language or Mad Monkey Mangling

May 28 2010

            It all begins and ends with the vernacular word “nukular”.     

I am, I freely admit, a linguistic bigot.  If I hear the word “nukular” emerge from someone’s mouth I immediately assume that this person is an ignorant rube, a redneck, a born again fully saved right wing ignoramus who eats Jimmy Dean sausages for breakfast, lunch and dinner  I don’t know how “nukular” got started but it must have been in some classroom where an unqualified teacher was too lazy to correct his or her students.  From that vernacular “point zero” the usage went viral by word of mouth and spread its load of Bubba toxins to begin poisoning the language.

           

Following the un-word“nukular” comes a whole doomed Titanic full of un-words with tacked on extra syllables.  Today I encountered the putative word “irregardless”.  Why?  Wasn’t it easy enough to say “regardless”?  Or would that imply the speaker might be afflicted with impotency?  There are C-Y’s flying around like clouds of mosquitoes.  Pretty soon the word “tolerance” will morph into “tolerancy” and then our whole language of Englishity will topple from its preeminence as the lingua mundus, the universal language of the planet.  It will be replaced by Mandarin Chinese.  The West will be really fucked because most of us have tin ears and can’t distinguish the subtle tonal elisions of spoken Mandarin.  For the sake of efficiency the written language will be phonetically rendered in Roman script.  Henceforth, when Chinese is used in worldwide commerce, those who are fluent in its use will regard Anglophones as retrograde rubes with a reputation for recalcitrant nostalgia and revised memories of a time when they were a mighty cultural force in the world.

Many years ago I was driving around with a bunch of my high school buddies in a luxurious car owned by a boy named Mark Malzberg.  He was the richest and stupidest kid in the school  We drove first to Hamburger Heaven, but no one was there.  We drove to Steak n’ Shake, but it was also a boring wasteland.  We tried White Castle.  We tried everything we knew in our pathetic repertoire of sixteen-year-old social watering holes.  After an hour or so of pointless meandering, I said to him, “Mark, we’re really getting nowhere fast.”

           

Without missing a beat and in all seriousness, he looked over at me and said,  “Yes we are!” 

He had disagreed with me with unintentional brilliance worthy of Yogi Berra.  I never forgot that beautiful error. 

 

            Later, during my two weeks in college, I dated a girl who was nearly finished earning her degree in medicine.  She was flush with idealism about serving the world and had set her sights on working in Lebanon during its umpteenth civil war.

           

We were in the parking lot of a fast food place, relaxing with burger and fries.  The car was hers.  I got around on a Schwinn Varsity that weighed seventy pounds.  The bike rack for my English Lit class was reached after a climb of forty-two steps.  Most of my other classes were in equally huge buildings with equally remote bike racks.  This could be one explanation as to why my college career lasted two weeks.

Anyway, back to the medical student. With great sincerity she said, “I think I could do good work with the Lebanonians.  I’m looking right now for a course in the language, so I can speak fluent Lebanonian by the time I finish my residency.”

She had just eaten a slice of raw onion that had come with the cheeseburger.  I had been contemplating a tender kiss.  The onion was no deterrent.

           

Then she called the Lebanese “Lebanonians”.

           

My desire for kissy kiss evaporated.  The taste of this incredible faux pas on the lips of an almost-physician was far more of a turn-off than any piece of onion.  I would never date a woman who calls the Lebanese “Lebanonions.”

           

I was then seized with the desire to test her further.

           

“I understand that Saudi Arabia needs good doctors,” I said innocently.  “There’s a famine in Syria and the Arabs are being flooded with starving refugees.”

           

“I don’t think so.” She replied with a frown.  “I’ve heard that Arabonion is a terribly difficult language, with a funny alphabet thrown in.”

           

I couldn’t resist.  “How about Israel?  The Hebronions can use doctors.”
           

“Are you kidding me?” she protested.  “The place is loaded with Jewish doctors!  I don’t know why they all go there, but they do, oh believe me, they do.”

           

This budding romance was now wilted.

           

Returning to the almost-present, we have, as a nation, just survived the presidency of a man who can say, “I wouldn’t misunderestimate those people,” and a thousand other toothy Bubba-isms.  Who needs to speak decent English?  The teachers don’t understand the difference between irrelevance and irrelevancy.  Any kid can grow up to be President whether or not he or she speaks like a moron.

           

What would happen if it went the other way?  If people started chopping off extra syllables and started excavating the words as if syllables were valuable ore?  Irrelevance would become Irrelev.  Regardless would become gardless.  Nukular would become Nukew.  It would sound like we were speaking Esperanto or Klingon.  The use of texting devices will accelerate this word surgery until we are speaking in abbreviations.  I’ve already heard it.  I use it myself, though I only use it to speak to my cat, to whom I will say “STFU” when she whines and manipulates me for a treat to which she is apparently addicted. This means “Shut The Fuck Up!”  Being a gentleman, I merely growl “STFU” at the cat and then get the bag of treats from the pantry.

           

I must take a moment to exclude from my rant all the f-zantastic slang that has arisen to fertilize our language.  The source of this River Nile of Slang has generally been African American culture .

           

It occasionally grates on my nerves when I see an Eminem wannabe get into his car and call out to his friends, “That really p-zisses me off, yo!  Somebody should tell that Zima queen and her friends to chill on the za befo they do the be-ho’s.  Strew?”

           

In any case, our language is mutating at speeds too fast to comprehend.  The new tongue can only be learned via total immersion.  It requires hanging with fifteen year old black poet-children with skateboards and pistols.

           

One purpose of slang has been exclusion.  When millions of Africans were kidnapped and shipped westward across the ocean, they became the property of people who suppressed their entire culture.  Slaves were forced to speak the masters’ language.  They devised alternative uses for this language but were actually circumventing it.  They reinvented their culture with slang, Santeria and the Blues.

           

Little has changed from that original motivation.  Slang is still a language of exclusion.  American slang matured in a culture of jazz, blues, segregation and restriction.  In the sixties it spiraled off in another direction, becoming a barrier between adults and their adolescent offspring.  It has since drawn most of its energy from generational alienation.

T

he speed at which language now mutates is exponential.  It seems inevitable that slang will fracture into dialects whose boundaries are age groups. The only means of communication between these boundaries is likely to be a return to conventional English.  It will be the only way a seventh grader can speak to a ninth grader.

                       

Slang is creative.  This other mutation, this hick stuff with words like “conversate” and “orientated” is just irritating.  I may have exaggerated my bigotry (I may just be a snob) but I’m not here to function as the Language Police.  English is a living language that has been changing for more than a thousand years.  It has probably changed more in the last decade than it has in the nine hundred ninety years before this time.  There are now many occupations for which there existed no word or term twenty years ago.  What was a “webmaster” in 1975?  What was a Twitter?  Software?  HTML?

             

We live styles of life and make our income from a plethora of jobs that did not exist a few years ago.  There was a time when a family of blacksmiths stayed a family of blacksmiths for five or six centuries.  Now it’s difficult to find a blacksmith.  Soon it may be difficult to find a family.

           

I am unable to appreciate hip hop because I can’t follow the words.  They’re too fast!.  There’s something about the speed at which people think, listen and speak that has accelerated.  I’m amazed when I see a Hip Hop performance and can do little more than latch onto the spoken rhythm, to hear the rapper’s words as a form of percussion.  Yet I see in the audience people mouthing the words along with the performer, speaking and comprehending and I wonder what I’m missing.  I can’t help being a member of my age group.  Words have always been precious to me and I feel excluded and lost.  Hmmm.  I feel excluded.  Uh oh.  That’s not good.  Maybe I’m seen as a member of some kind of over-class from which certain realities must be hidden.  Am I now too old to be culturally relevant?

Am I “out of it”?

           

I never thought I would become a victim of slang.  If you catch me in a zifflenook it might just be a Rangoon boof alarm.  Aight?