MO' META Blues Part 3

I know, I know... another Stevie. But every time I hear "Seasons" / "Power Flower" I'm right there, all over again, walking home with Donn from Broad Street, pa.s.sing through the urine-soaked subway that leads to the trolley that eventually takes us to 49th Street, to my grandmother's house. There is snow on the ground, maybe even in the air, and posters for the Steve Martin film The Jerk, which is coming out at Christmas. And it's late, too, on into evening: at the performing-arts school I go to, the bell rings for the end of the school day but that's just a signal to hang out with my friends, to go to the band room and watch the older kids practicing their ensemble version of Eric Clapton's "Cocaine" ad nauseum, to see the dancers out in the hall tightening up their ch.o.r.eography. I wait for Donn, and then we go out into the winter.

Extended Playlist

This has to do with watching Soul Train, which by this point had s.h.i.+fted from noon until 1 a.m. My sister would wake me up after Sat.u.r.day Night Live.

... Chic, "Le Freak"; The Jacksons, "Shake Your Body (Down to the Ground)"; Michael Jackson, "Don't Stop 'Til You Get Enough"; The Doobie Brothers, "Open Your Eyes"; Cheryl Lynn, "Star Love"; GQ, "Disco Nights"; The Sugarhill Gang, "Rapper's Delight"...

CHAPTER FOUR

So, that's what made you feel like the world had become a better place?

"Rapper's Delight"? I forget that you were eight at the time. The lyrics must have spoken to you: "At the age of eight I was really great," "At the age of nine I was right on time."

You had to be there.

I was there, my dude. I was thirteen years older, maybe not quite, but already a little world-weary. At that point in my life "Rapper's Delight" hit me like some c.o.o.nish pastiche, with all its tales of chicken eating, "super sperming," white Sa.s.son wearing, Cadillac driving, and love of country having. It was black Americana and hard to take at face value-Dewey "Pigmeat" Markham's minstrel shtick come back to life and set to a cover of Chic's "Good Times." It was a final piece of punctuation ending the polymorphic dictation of the sixties.

Really, Rich? It was music. It was fun. I liked it. Besides, who was talking about the sixties anyway? This was 1979, remember?

I know, Ahmir. It might've been '79, but the seventies were like the aberrant child of the sixties. And 1979 was the year that the seventies left home, not just literally, but also in a spiritual sense. Gone was the existential longing that you could find at the core of songs like "Dock of the Bay," "What's Going On," or "Higher Ground." I figure it this way: when Sam Cooke sang "a change is gonna come," I didn't foresee that change being one that would allow for n.i.g.g.as to be rapping about "busting b.i.t.c.hes out wit dey super sperm." I just felt a kind of revisionism kicking in with this up jump the boogie to the bang bang boogieing. I had already pretty much stopped listening to radio some years before, so hearing "Rapper's Delight" simply strengthened my resolve. But as retrograde as that was, there was something progressive in the world, too. When I was thirteen, my brother-in-law took me to see Rahsaan Roland Kirk at a West Philly bar called the Aqua Lounge. The performance was nothing short of amazing. I knew nothing about Rahsaan at the time; I just thought he was some blind n.i.g.g.a playing at a local bar. But that show, and that music, taught me just how elegant the quotidian lives of black people could be. That moved me, and then moved me over convincingly to jazz. Later on I had a weekly radio show on Temple's jazz station for about ten years.

Jazz? We were talking about hip-hop, weren't we?

Hold up. Let's go back before we charge forward. I grew up in Philly, too, about fifteen years earlier. That puts me in a different generation, younger than your father but older than your sister. From early on, I was listening to music, partly because it was such a rush. Think about how much music changed in that period. When I was three I was dancing to Ray Charles. Louis Jordan was in the recent past. Five or six years later there was Motown, which seemed modern even to an eight- or nine-year-old. And then just four years after that there was the Beatles, and then Sly, Stevie Wonder, Jimi Hendrix. Music was picking up steam. I had a brother who was in the service, and one year he came back with a real stereo. It had a reel-to-reel player and a weighted turntable, real speakers, and real headphones. This was like in the mid-seventies, right around the time Stevie's Music of My Mind came out. For me, the combination of that record and that real-and I mean tubes real-stereo was magic, man. We'd just go into his room and turn on the fan and chew on ice and listen to records. It was beautiful. Of course, twenty years after that, I was with your a.s.s and the Roots on the tour bus, watching y'all get your heads around this same music, and it was annoying.

Annoying??

By that time it was all on CD and you could easily skip tracks if you wanted or change the order. Even more annoying, you guys reprogrammed all my a.s.sociations-now it's just stinky socks on a f.u.c.king tour bus. This whole s.h.i.+t is made worse by the fact that music is now available to everyone, all the time, in every place. That doesn't necessarily reward real connection with music. When I really like something, I tend to never listen to it again. I want to remember the feeling even more than I want to remember the music. If you get that record back out, you risk learning that it's not as good in reality as it is inside of you. Better to have the memory than to go back and have to adjust your truth. And even if it is every bit as good, you're just going to deconstruct it, like this. You're going to use your brain instead of your feelings. As you get older, feelings are hard to come by.

But you had those feelings, right?

f.u.c.k yes, I had them! All my life. That's what I was saying about my brother's room and ice and the fan. Weren't you listening? But after that period came along a kind of vacuum. Disco was cute at first, I guess, but it rolled into this very unthinking and unfelt R&B, and what was beautiful in popular music started to become less and less present. That's when I stopped with the radio and moved over to jazz, real outer-s.p.a.ce stuff.

So you weren't listening to "Rapper's Delight" at all?

f.u.c.king hated it. It was awful. But I kept hearing things like it, and soon enough I had a sense that this was something new that was breaking the back of the generic s.h.i.+t that was happening in black music. I became especially interested once the sampling came around. I mean, look at the difference between Public Enemy's first alb.u.m-which was okay, maybe a little old-school noisy-and It Takes a Nation of Millions to Hold Us Back, which blew my f.u.c.king wig back. And then you had groups like De La Soul, who could certainly rap, but that wasn't the only point, was it? They had that whole Native Tongues alliance with A Tribe Called Quest and the Jungle Brothers. That's what I was looking to get out of it, a bit of a black cultural paradigm. People would see me coming from the record store and I would pull out an MC Lyte record along with Cecil Taylor or Big Daddy Kane.

And that made you want to be part of it?

It didn't hurt. I got into hip-hop because of what wasn't there yet, because it was nascent. I wanted to be part of it and the production process. Because of the whole MIDI revolution, even as an untrained musician you were able to create. I loved music, but I had missed the boat on being a trained musician. I was studying electrical engineering. I wanted to make toys and games for a second. I studied poetry with Sonia Sanchez for five semesters. She'd put you through your paces both academically and spiritually. Every cla.s.s was like this crash course in life lessons, and every week you left the room a different (dare I say better) person. My experience with her was about the words. From the words came this language and from that language came a music, an expansive music. So, the actual music that I was interested in was this distinct thing, falling far off any sensible career path and even further off from what I was actually capable of doing. I loved Dolphy and Ayler, Monk and Hemphill, Strayhorn and Shepp, but I was never going to play with that level of inspiration. And then there was hip-hop, perhaps the most elemental, black DIY music since the days of the proto-blues. Hip-hop attracted me as someone who loved music but whose facility was a precious little thing. I began to realize that hip-hop was something old, something new, something borrowed, and something blue. It had my attention and my attention was enfolded into that of an entire generation.

CHAPTER FIVE

What do you do when just listening to the music you love isn't enough?

I guess you do what I did, which was to become a serious music-press nerd, the kind of kid who collected back issues of Rolling Stone and memorized all the record ratings. The magazines soon became as important to me as the alb.u.ms they were writing about. I loved the Robert Risko ill.u.s.trations in Rolling Stone, the portraits that accompanied the lead reviews in each issue. On the walls of my bedroom I created a kind of Risko wallpaper made from hundreds of reviews. And every Sat.u.r.day I would go down to the Philadelphia Main Library's reading room and go through back issues of Rolling Stone. It was so ancient back then: you had to request the periodical and wait for it to come out to you on a microfilm reel, after which you hooked it up on the reader, which was kind of like a reel-to-reel tape recorder, and found out what critics had written about the records, whether it was Hall and Oates or Cameo or the Zombies or Warren Zevon or Parliament. Take Her Satanic Majesty's Request, the Rolling Stones record from 1967. It wasn't very acclaimed at the time, because it was considered derivative of the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band. I had my own ideas of the record that came from listening to it, but I also wanted to know the ideas that other people had at the time. I immersed myself quickly, and I don't think I've ever really gotten dry.

There are artists who will tell you that they care what a record sells, or whether they get to put their video in rotation at this channel or website or whatever. I can say with confidence that I'm indifferent to those things. Even today, my esteem comes from record ratings. When I started out with the Roots, The Source was the standard, but for me, Rolling Stone was still the mountain that had to be climbed. In my head, I imagine that when I'm dead, when I can no longer defend my records or explain them, the periodicals will stay forever, like they did in the reading room at the Philadelphia Main Library, and those reviews will become the final word on the things that I've created. Maybe I imagine it this way because I expect that the people of the future will be people like me. Who's to say that when it's time to look up the history of the Roots, and some kid wants to learn about Phrenology, that Rolling Stone's review, or Spin's review, or the Source's, or Pitchfork's, won't tell that kid everything he or she thinks? Those words will still be there. The words are always there.

Even so, I don't want to suggest that I'm totally beholden to what reviewers believe. I have a strange relations.h.i.+p with good and bad reviews. If a great artist makes an alb.u.m that critics don't like, or that they're suspicious of, I make a beeline straight for that record. I'm the music sn.o.b who takes up the "wrong" records, like U2's Rattle and Hum, which was maligned at the time for being slavishly imitative of American music. That game-trying to guess how a record will be received, and why, and if it'll be overrated or underrated-has always appealed to me. When I was a kid, I used to listen to records before I read the review and try to guess what ratings that record would get from major magazines. No-it was worse than that. I would have a friend tell me what Rolling Stone's lead review was, and then I would get the record and figure out in my head what rating I would give it. Sometimes my review was too high, and I'd read to find out why. Sometimes it was too low, and I'd see if I bought the critic's rationale for the higher rating. When Ragged Glory came out in 1990, I didn't know much about Neil Young. I think that was the first record of his I bought. I listened to it and I knew it was strong: lots of guitar noise; a big, thick, sludgy sound; a kind of clear-eyed darkness in the lyrics. I did my internal calculations and thought to myself that it was probably a four-star record. Then I checked Rolling Stone. The headline was "Neil Young's Guitar Ecstasy," and the writer, Kurt Loder, gave the alb.u.m 4 stars. That blew my mind. Holy s.h.i.+t, I thought, they just declared him the lord Jesus Christ.

I was and am so devoted to the review process that I write the reviews for my own records. Almost no one knows this, but when I am making a Roots record, I write the review I think the alb.u.m will receive and lay out the page just like it's a Rolling Stone page from when I was ten or eleven. I draw the cover image in miniature and chicken-scratch in a fake byline. It's the only way I really know how to imagine what I think the record is. And as it turns out, most of the time the record ends up pretty close to what I say it is in the review.

That's the kind of kid I was, even early on, trying to balance the pleasure I felt in hearing music with the pleasure I felt knowing that certain alb.u.ms were considered critically superior. Soon enough, this led to a pretty strange set of preferences. I remember being a teenager and being ashamed of my musical tastes, at least some of them. My Brian Wilson and Beach Boys fandom, which is as important to me as anything else, was almost like a p.o.r.n stash. Hide that s.h.i.+t, someone's coming! You couldn't look like me and be black in West Philadelphia and love the Beach Boys the way I did. I remember the first time I really came out of the closet for Brian Wilson. It was years later, after the Roots were already going. I was with J Dilla and Common and suddenly realized that there was a loop I wanted from "There Must Be an Answer." When I pulled the record out, they just looked at me like I was crazy. Pet Sounds? They probably thought I had put my hand on the wrong record. Now that kind of thing is cool. Everything is accepted as part of everything else. There's a broad hipster continuum. But back then, there were so many times that I had to explain to myself why "I Just Wasn't Made for These Times" meant so much to me.

So there was my obsession with Brian Wilson. There was Led Zeppelin. There was Miles Davis. There was Michael Jackson, of course-there was always Michael Jackson. But as much as I loved all those artists, as much as I saw their genius, the fact of the matter is that for a while, there was only Prince. It may be hard for kids now to recover a sense of how out there Prince was in the early eighties, how far above the crowd he was operating, especially since the Prince today is kind of the opposite of the Prince then. But in the early eighties, people spoke of him as a genius, and they weren't kidding, not even a little.

I have a vivid memory of reading the review of Dirty Mind in Rolling Stone in 1980. Ken Tucker wrote it, and he said something about how the record was an example of lewdness cleansed by art, and about how it was dirty but it certainly wasn't p.o.r.nographic. I had been following Prince since his first alb.u.m, and I knew the second record pretty well, with "I Wanna Be Your Lover," but it wasn't until Dirty Mind that it hit me-he was big news. The fact that a relatively new, relatively unproven artist could get a 4 star review from Rolling Stone blew my mind. It must have been around that time that I started to take the idea of a review seriously. I had a germ of an idea in my mind even at that age, and it came into focus pretty quickly, that I wanted to make records that were part of that same set, records that critics would admire and that would be marked as important. You know: 4 star records. A few years later, even though my whole room was wallpapered with Rolling Stone reviews and Risko drawings, I reserved a special place for Prince: I put his reviews right over my bed, on the ceiling, where I could see them all the time.

The same way I had become an independent businessman to get my hands on "Rapper's Delight," I started to come up with schemes to get Prince alb.u.ms. It wasn't like it is now. You couldn't just go online and have access to all the music in the world. You had to go to record stores, with money in your pocket, and acquire alb.u.ms. If they were out of stock, come back next week. When Prince's 1999 came out, back in 1982, it touched off a saga that lasted a half-decade. I would say, conservatively, that I purchased that record eight times between 1982, when it first came out, and 1987, which is when I stopped getting on punishment for having it. Every time I bought it, my parents managed to take it away from me, and then I'd have to go and get it again. It was a war of attrition, and the only one who won was Prince.

The story of that record and how my parents and I saw it so differently is the story of my family, in a sense. When I was young, in the mid-seventies, my parents were how I've described them to this point: this funky, hip, postcivil rights, postrevolutionary bohemian black couple. They listened to all the cool music and wore all the cool clothes and had all the cool att.i.tudes. In the early eighties, though, something switched over in them, and they became the black Ned and Maude Flanders. Beginning in 1983, they listened only to Christian radio, which included whatever soul stars had moved over to religious pop-Donna Summer, say. It wasn't that other music was banned, exactly. We still listened to Stevie Wonder, but there were other acts that were clearly on the other side of the line. By this point, I had rejoined my parents for tours sometimes, and one night in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina, we were in a hotel room on the road. Some TV show, probably Burt Sugarman's Midnight Special, showed Prince's "I Wanna Be Your Lover" video, and my father was jaw-dropped. "Is that boy in his diapers?" he marveled. I thought it was strange for him to fixate on that, because it wasn't exactly unprecedented: P-Funk had a guy who was always wearing a diaper, and that hadn't seemed to bother him. But Prince was just too salacious, and you couldn't call it.

Pretty soon, my parents weren't the only ones noticing, and the opposition to Prince hardened. It accelerated because of church, obviously, and how the people there acted after Michael Jackson's Thriller. That was right around the same time, and it had to do with the t.i.tle track: they couldn't take "Thriller" as a campy Halloween song. For them it was a Satanic message straight from the gut of Hollywood, a warning sign that made it more important than ever that parents pay attention to what their kids had on their stereos and in their headphones. A few months later, there was this other guy named Prince, and if you wanted to see how dangerous he was, well, just take a look at the cover of this 1999 record. Turn it upside down, for starters, and the t.i.tle changes from something futuristic and fun, to 666, the mark of the beast. Oh and also the part of the t.i.tle that's not Satanic when you turn it upside down, the 1, well that's clearly a drawing of a p.e.n.i.s. This went out on the church wire as something to be worried about, and my mother recognized it as something from my collection. "You have it," she said. Of course I had it. Everything I learned about s.e.x was from Prince. That was the first time I heard the word "wh.o.r.e," and probably a whole lot of other words, too.

At any rate, my mom found the record and threw it away. This would have been in the fall of 1982-the record came out in October and I had it maybe a month before it got tossed. Then winter came, and I shoveled snow until I got enough money to buy it again, at which point she found it... again. This time she was tossing records by Prince and any of his a.s.sociates, like The Time and Vanity 6. Vanity was especially problematic, as she was already getting a reputation as a scandalous, highly s.e.xual performer. My mother had probably heard about the Vanity 6 alb.u.m by then, with "Nasty Girl" and "Drive Me Wild," and she certainly wasn't going to let me keep that. I forget how I sc.r.a.ped together the money to replace it that time, but I had a sinking feeling that they'd find something else to object to. The third time I think it disappeared the same day I got it. The fourth time my father just cracked the alb.u.m over his knee-the second disc, sides 3 and 4. He destroyed it right in front of me, and slowly. He must have been so angry that he forgot it was a double alb.u.m, and I kept the first disc and hid it in my room, between the mattresses. Four months later, my mom was in my room to clean it, or at least that's what she said. (My theory is that parents don't want a room to be clean so much as they want to know what you're into when you're in there.) She found that hidden disc. That was like, another month of punishment. A few years later, I wised up. I found a friend who was an even bigger Prince freak than I was, and I bought the twelve-inch singles and brought them over to his house, where he would make me ca.s.settes of the music. Even that wasn't the extent of the concealment operation. Since I had three floor toms, I took the one I liked the least and bought two Remo drumheads. They were from the Ebony series-black and opaque-and I loosened the heads and stashed a bag of clandestine Prince ca.s.settes inside them. Even then, I could only listen when I snuck a Walkman to school or when I was practicing my drums, when I would hear Prince through my headphones and play something totally different so that no one knew what was happening.

That same year that Thriller and 1999 came out, something happened that was a tide-changer and was, in some sense, the true beginning of my life. Up to that point, I was a cute little kid, obsessed with music, in love with TV, carefree, traveling with the family band from hotel to resort, and attending an exclusive performing-arts school. But toward the end of sixth grade, I put a foot wrong, and the world tilted.

It wasn't my fault, exactly. I was at the drugstore with my mom after school and I naively asked her for two dollars for glue. That went fine. "Sure," she said. She probably didn't even think twice about it, and if she did, she was thinking about airplane models, or an arts and crafts project. Then, in full view of her-and, more importantly, within earshot-I asked for an extra paper bag. You should have seen her face. That was the beginning of the end.

Let's back up a day. Two of my friends were clowning around in school, and suddenly they nominated me for this secret project: get Testors model glue, get brown paper bag. What they neglected to tell me was that it was a secret plan for glue sniffing. I should say right off the bat that they probably weren't serious. They were little kids just like I was, preteens. I doubt they ever considered going through with it. Still, they went through with phase one, which was to acquire glue and bag. Or rather, they had me go through with phase one. And, as I proved in the drugstore, I didn't have any idea what I was doing. I probably had never heard of the idea of sniffing glue. Sure, there were drugs in the neighborhood, but I didn't really go out in the neighborhood much. I was an indoor kid, and mostly in my own head. My friends really picked the wrong guy to satisfy their glue-sniffing needs.

The glue did it, though, right then and there. That alarm was rung, and all of a sudden they became hypersensitive to everything else I was doing. For instance, I was a video game freak. Every kid was. Maybe I was a little more of a freak than most, because I liked studying patterns. My arcade favorites were Pac-Man and Ms. Pac-Man. I read books about them, studied them like they were the Bible. I got to the point where I could stretch twenty-five cents out forever, but I still needed a steady supply of change, so I started inventing ways of separating my parents from their quarters. "Ahmir, run out to the store and get me some bread." Ahmir runs to store. "Where's my change?" Ahmir shakes his head like he doesn't know. There couldn't have been anything more innocent than that, but after the glue thing, to my parents, I seemed like an eleven-year-old on the leading edge of more serious trouble.

And that was that. Within the month, my parents had a plan to take me out of performing arts school and put me in a conservative Baptist school. And it wasn't my grandmother's Southern Baptist, with Bible thumping and hooting and hollering in choir. This was Baptist schooling, South Philly style. My old school, the private performing arts academy, had been on the corner of Broad and Spruce, right next to Philly International Records. It showcased everything about Philadelphia that was cosmopolitan and forward thinking. The new Christian school where I was sent for seventh grade was in deep South Philly, Italian Philly.

In retrospect, I realize that it wasn't just about the glue. In my parents' heads, they felt like the performing-arts school was going to create a certain type of child, one who was supremely prepared for entertainment and the craft of making music. But at the same time, my parents had aspirations for me: they wanted to raise a future Jeopardy! contestant instead of a future Jeopardy! clue. I was doing fine, grade-wise, but they wanted me to know more about the world, to be more generally sophisticated. And, just as important, they wanted me to learn in a Christian environment.

Arriving at that new school in the fall of 1982 was culture shock and then some. The place I had come from had every diverse cultural background represented. From first grade I already knew a goth kid, a gay kid, a kid with a neurological condition, a thug-a.s.s graffiti writer who was ashamed to let people know he could do fine art as well. It was a bunch of talented misfits inside this artificially charged, highly rewarding environment. The new school, though, was hard-core. It wasn't easy to make friends, especially because I was the new kid. It was also the first place I encountered all the things that make junior high nightmares for millions of kids across the world. There was a school bully. There was overt racism. It was kind of like Everybody Hates Chris. Ironically, the evil influences that my parents sought to s.h.i.+eld me from-the big, bad, outside world-hit me full force, all at once.

To say that I wasn't happy there at first is an understatement. I cried and complained, but most of the time I wasn't even coming home to my parents, but to my grandmother, with whom I was staying while my parents were out on the road. A new chapter of my life had started, and for the first time I wanted to slam the book shut on it.

I was rescued by music again, though in a completely different way than I had been at performing-arts school. Toward the end of 1982, Michael Jackson had released Thriller. That's both a straightforward statement of fact and the beginning of an amazing, almost magical sociological process. Over the course of the next year, Thriller was everywhere. It became inescapable. It was, for a little while, American life, and during the year that it occupied the center of popular culture, it united everyone. Who liked Thriller? You did. White people, black people, skinny people, fat people, straight people, gay people, punks, rockers, hip-hop kids, thugs, nerds. You. Everyone alive. After Michael did the moonwalk on Motown's twenty-fifth anniversary television special, the sense that everyone was the same became even more p.r.o.nounced. The Jets and the Sharks put their weapons down. For me, the same kids who had sneered at me and kept me from feeling good about my new school became, by some invisible Thriller-powered process, my good new friends. It's corny to say that it was a lesson about how music can unite people no matter their superficial differences, and I'm not so deluded as to compare myself with Michael Jackson. But it reminded me that music has powers that sometimes extend beyond the notes and the lyrics.

The Great Christian School Experiment lasted through seventh and eighth grade, and then for ninth grade I went on to another school that my best friend at the time was attending, City Center Academy. It was a Christian school, too, but even more rigorous than the junior high, with only twenty students in every cla.s.s and math and science curricula that were more advanced than anything I had seen.

High school marked the beginning of an intellectual awakening for me, though it wasn't necessarily the one the school had in mind. There's a song on Stevie Wonder's Songs in the Key of Life called "Black Man" that ends with a kind of educational call-and-response section, where a chorus of students announces the name of a figure in the arts or sciences or politics, and then the rest of the kids detail that person's achievements and identify him or her as a minority writer or scientist or whatever. The kids on Stevie's record came from a Marva Collins school. Collins was a Chicago educator who became famous in the mid-seventies for taking kids from poor neighborhoods and beginning to educate them in a cla.s.sical fas.h.i.+on. She opened her first school, which was called Westside Prep, in 1975, and there was a vogue for that kind of school across the country.

My high school had opened right in the middle of the Marva Collins era, and everything there was oriented toward ancient Greece and Rome. There was an Eidolon club. The bas.e.m.e.nts were called catacombs. We were led to believe that those societies were the alpha and omega of civilization, so to speak. For me, this was confusing, because I was just starting to listen to Afrocentric rap, and the music was telling me something different than the teachers. In my headphones, I was learning that modern mathematics began in Egypt, but then in the cla.s.sroom it came from an Anglo-Saxon philosopher building on the thinking of the ancient Greeks.

The school was determined to turn us into intellectuals, but because I had discovered hip-hop and a handful of rappers who followed Clarence 13X and the Five Percenters, I had an alternative curriculum, at least for a little while. I was listening to Jungle Brothers, though they were subtle about their teachings. I was listening to Lakim Shabazz, who was rapping pretty straightforwardly about the Nation of Islam on songs like "Pure Righteousness" and "Black Is Back." I was listening to the first Public Enemy alb.u.m. Music, which had always been my primary teacher, was pus.h.i.+ng me toward a greater appreciation of African civilization, and soon enough my head began to turn a bit. I wouldn't say that I was rebelling, at least not overtly, but school started to feel like someone else's mind superimposed over mine, and my grades suffered accordingly. My parents, as I have said, were fairly devout Christians at that point, and the running joke about my religious life was that I became born again the Sunday before third-quarter report card. That's when the D in chemistry was coming. There was one year, believe it or not, when I got straight Fs, which would make me the worst student in the world.

I had reached the end of my road with that school, and in fact with private school in general. I wanted to get back to public school. At first, my mother resisted the idea; she was protective of me, and worried that if I went back to public school I'd get torn apart, or become a drug addict, or get stabbed in the lunchroom.

What got their attention, I think, was that my lack of effort started to show up not just in cla.s.sroom performance but also in music. I started talking about it less. There was less light in my eyes when I talked about records or watched bands on TV. I started slacking off on rehearsing. Even though I was still actively drumming in my father's group and in church, I didn't seem to have the same devotion to it. They started to sense that I was losing my spark, that I was shutting down, and when I told them that I wanted to get back to music in a more focused manner, they listened.

Around that time, a plan came together. There was a local TV dance show in Philadelphia called Dance Party USA. It's the program that made Kelly Ripa famous: she hosted it in 1986 for her first real television job. A few years before that, when I was in high school, it was called Dancin' on Air, and it came on every day at 4 p.m. We all watched it religiously. It was like a local American Bandstand-or, more accurately, Bandstand, which was the name of American Bandstand in the early fifties when it, too, was just a local Philadelphia show.