....wayward chorus truncates the aching anthems of youth behind ( Naughty by Nature/ MC LYTE circa 1991, autumn)...

These two songs capture the autumn of my seventh and eighth grade years perfectly. The feeling of searching for identity in the broken glass foliage of the south side, feeling trapped as the hard breath of autumn filled our lungs with a petty promise of something we would never obtain, immortalizing the desolation of the mired sociological milieu we stemmed from and vaunted by blaring out hard core shit-you-not rhythms of the defeated. By telling it like it is. Stranded in the cement silt of the south side of Peoria where back in the day a national survey conceded that the trinity of sagging doled-visage empty eyelided brick abodes constituting lower income housing projects ranked lower than the likes of competitors in Compton and Cabrini Green-- was the mis en scene where a thirteen year old boy fell into the chorus of the streets. It was autumn 1991 and I was in 8th grade and lived and died for these urban heart beats.






We talked about gangsta disciples and Vice lords and brandished crooked peace signs with our fingers. We ambled in a perennial limp, as if we had a bullet lodged in our flesh, pain winking somewhere below our left kneecaps. We wore our shirts practically draped down into our ankles, our jeans representing a sagging denim puddle dripping around our overpriced air jordans which we kept impeccably white enough to pass for shoe clerks in Vatican city. We wore starter caps with the tags still affixed to the top so they looked as if they had been shoplifted. We talked with our hands near our waists, gesticulating vividly with rabid twitches of our fingers. We addressed each other as "G" and "Dawg." We monopolized autumnal afternoon walking around in a triangle of bodies , our limbs and joints oddly cantering between the leaves and litter and graffiti hieroglyphics tattooed on the lower necks of buildings.

Everywhere we went we seemingly dribbled the rubbery orb of a basketball between the arch of our thighs.

We tried to be as bad-ass as possible. Even though the majority of us were white and had had our asses (literally) handed to us on more than one occasion by the GD's down the street.


The video posted above seems to vividly encapsulate that time period with the authenticity of angels. The feeling of trying to fly, soar, create and give, scream and kick and still, somehow, feeling that all you are is a statistic, an unwanted pregnancy trying to sprout between the abandon cracks in the sunken parking lot across the street from the old distillery long gone.

Drop that, and now you want me to rap and give
Say something positive, well positive ain't where I live
I live right around the corner from west hell
Two blocks from south shit, and once in a jail cell
The sun never shine on my side of the street see
And only once or twice a week I would speak
I walked alone, my state of mind was home sweet home
I couldn't keep a girl, they wanted kids and cars with chrome


I see this sodden (sad, fucked up and lonely) realization every year. That so much of what molds a young persons periphery and promise on life tends to stem solely from the arable soil in which he is planted. Every year I hear of kids I grew up with who are in prison, who are working piss jobs to pay child support for progeny they no longer remember fostering, kids I graduated high school with who now have kids who are ready to graduate from high school, kids who were found dead behind dumpsters, in SUV, shot. Murdered. Kids who have been dead a long time ago.

The scene one minute into the video where bevy of street urchins are being chased by the utilitarian nothingness is so reminiscent of that year it defies me not to cry in a pond of nostalgia.

Inside the stanzas and beats of the song itself there is hope. The proverbial bird singing inside the trapped linearity of the cage. I love the juxtaposition of heartache sprinkled over the keyboard with an anonymous Greek chorus pulling a Bob Marley telling us that every little thing is gonna be alright. The same is true with MC LYTE's POOR GEORGE (below):

The saga of a beleaguered tryst turned tumultuous beautifully backed by a stirring reverb that harbors recollections of youth. I remember Gia Walker rapping this song on the playground. Revisiting this song now seventeen (fuck!) years from when first I heard it, still resonates with a truth of the heart. How no one is promised tomorrow and how giving of oneself, ones feeling, ones all should not be deterred no matter what.


I wish I woulda told him how I liked him so much
How he made me feel with the slightest touch
Now hes gone and I cant tell him nothin
Wish he was here so I could say somethin
The story is not to say that Im in sorrow
Just to say no one is promise tomorrow
If you love someone you should say it often
You never know when theyll be layin in a coffin
Wake up, its important that you know that
No one on earth is promised tomorrow...

I still think about Kris Noel, also, when I hear this song, my friends sister who died of cancer my eighth grade year and how a year before she fashionably tied a bandanna around the white dome of her skull to disguise her ailment in the lunch line and how, a year before that, we would always play "bloody knuckles," while we waited for the doors of the school to open our fingers welded into an ashen corsage of dactyls and wrists, each pressing down hard into the others fingered flesh waiting for the other to capitulate or to scream.