Campfire Songs part one.
I haven’t written in ages and ages. Here I am. No time has passed on the screen.
I went on a canoe trip with 7 excellent teenagers a couple weeks ago. We were paddling across Canoe Lake, the entry point for many trips into Algonquin Park. And the two guys in the canoe with me started singing. They sang the theme music from Pirates of the Caribbean (I had to ask what it was) and they sang a rude song from South Park about prostitutes (still mean to look it up). And then they busted into NWA’s Fuck the Police (probably spelled tha). One kid knew every word. The other did the chorus, with squeaky weird vocalizations filling in for the scratchy whatever that they used on the recording. Fuck the police – eaky eak – fuck – fuck – fuck the police! I was laughing hard.
Twenty three years ago I had been a camp counsellor and had heard the song for the first time this way: six kids marching up the camp road chanting it. I didn’t know anything about rap then – this was part of how I came to enjoy it. I was twenty one, raised on rock music.
So I returned from the trip and spent last week re-listening and re-listening to the track. I looked for a video (I didn’t find one – or rather, I found plenty of homemade ones). I didn’t have a TV twenty three years ago. And there was no internet (well…). I was overwhelmed by one line, which will always be, from now on, hollered by a kid with long hair in the front of a canoe, because it was the first time I had ever really gotten what it meant:
fuckin with me cuz I’m a teenager! (with a little bit of gold and a pager!)
The song is just astonishing: the precision of the rapping and the timing of the hits, all like beautiful punches in the face, James Brown funky, the shape-of-things-to-come sounds behind the words. I love it. But it had not hit me until 2014 that these guys, in 1988, were kids. Kids as young as the kids in the canoe, kids as young as the kids marching down the camp road. That’s astonishing to me now. The song means more to me now. Now I hear the bravado and the fear and the desperation more clearly.
Dig it: (there are plenty of homemade videos featuring horrible police brutality. I just want to think about the music here. Close your eyes. Turn it up first.)