MO' META Blues Part 4

My best friend at the time, Mark Mansaray, watched Dancin' on Air with me every day, and we loved the music and the sense of community. Most of all, though, we loved the girls, two in particular. He had a crush on one named Melissa, and I had a crush on one named Domeeka. Over the summer between ninth and tenth grade, we decided that we were going to write letters to our girls, and so we did. "Dear Dancin' on Air, my name is Mark [or Ahmir], and I'm a big fan of the show. I think that Melissa [or Domeeka] is very pretty." They were your basic fan letters, very innocent, and we certainly didn't have any thought of actually meeting these girls. At most we thought that the letter would be read on the air.

Amazingly, my girl Domeeka responded to me. She called me on the phone and we sparked up a friends.h.i.+p, though it never developed into anything romantic. I think she thought I was a dweeb. Mark's girl, Melissa, didn't write back, but I somehow found out that she was a student at the Philadelphia High School for the Creative and Performing Arts, or CAPA.

I went straight to Mark and told him, "Look, man, I know what I have to do. I have to go to CAPA. Melissa goes there. If I switch over there I can meet her and get the two of you together. I can hook you up in time for prom." It was like a romantic comedy plot: "Would you throw away a potential college career for your best friend's crush?" The truth, of course, was that I had found a lever that I thought I could lean on to liberate myself from City Center Academy.

My parents didn't resist the idea of CAPA, but it quickly became apparent that I had decided too late. I hatched my Mark-Melissa master plan in July, but auditions had been held all the way back in January, and my application was rejected almost as soon as I submitted it. That's when my father stepped in and played the Lee Andrews card. It wasn't the kind of thing he did very often, but when he did, it worked like a charm. I didn't even have to audition.

The first few days at CAPA redefined "culture shock" for me. I went from a small school of twenty to a school of two thousand, and the first day alone was surreal. It's like I had been transported into the movie Fame. Look, there's a knot of goth kids. There are some ballerinas over there in the corner. There are jazz students with their instruments out in the lunchroom.

It bore some resemblance to the school I had attended when I was a little kid, but with one important difference. Back then, I was just an observer-I went there because I was interested in music, but also because my sister attended, and as a result I existed on the edge of her social sphere. At CAPA, I was on my own, and the newness of it all washed over me like a flood. I was like a country boy in a movie about the big city, looking all around me, gaping at the tall buildings.

My mission was to find Melissa. I heard that she worked in an office on the second floor. She was a student volunteer who handled transit tokens, which seemed tremendously exotic to me. Free tokens for students? That would have been unthinkable at a private school. I asked around to find out what I needed to do to get them, and people told me to go to the second floor, ask Melissa, and pick up my two packs of free tokens.

When I saw her, I couldn't believe it. There she was, in the flesh, the girl that I had promised I'd get for Mark. Predictably, I was tongue-tied. I managed to mumble something about tokens, and she smiled and told me that I was a little early. "Just sit over there on the bench," she said, "and they'll bring them along in a few minutes."

And that's when my mission changed, though I didn't know it at the time. I was out there sitting on the bench, waiting for token delivery, when suddenly a non-teaching a.s.sistant (or NTAs, as they were known at the school) burst into the room holding a kid by the ear. The kid, the perpetrator, looked like a serious roughneck, with DMC gla.s.ses and a crazy box haircut. When my mom worried about the kinds of kids I would meet in public school, this was exactly who she had in mind. He was thugged out to within an inch of his life.

The NTA threw him down on the bench next to me, and we got to talking. "Motherf.u.c.kers," he said. "f.u.c.k this s.h.i.+t. f.u.c.king NTA jealous because he can't get no p.u.s.s.y." That was how I met Tariq Trotter.

Motherf.u.c.ker. f.u.c.k this and that. f.u.c.king NTA jealous because he can't get no p.u.s.s.y. My eyes were as wide as saucers. "What happened?" I asked. He explained that he was in the bathroom with a girl, and that the NTA had inconvenienced him by interrupting his tryst.

I don't even remember whether I got my tokens that morning. I wandered out of there in a daze, and by lunch I realized that I wasn't the only one who was obsessed with the story. The word spread like wildfire about the freshman who was getting some from a girl in the bathroom. And not just any girl. She was super bangin', a ballerina. What were they doing? No one knew for sure, so they let their imagination do the talking. By the end of the week, Tariq had a hero's credibility. He was an overnight legend.

It's probably a stretch to say that we were friends right away, but we were something to each other from the start. It was like the prince and the pauper, a sheltered Christian kid and a cool, rebellious thug. To say that I was intrigued was an understatement. My dad would have beaten my a.s.s if that incident had happened to me, but for Tariq it was a badge of honor. He had no dad around; his father had pa.s.sed away when he was two years old. Then Tariq had burned the family house to the ground. His mother had a troubled life herself, and she moved to South Philly while he was sent to live with his grandmother.

He was at CAPA because he was one of those thug creatives, a kid who kept up street appearances and projected toughness but who was also immensely gifted as a visual artist. He could draw, paint, sculpt. He could do anything. It's strange to think about now, from a distance of more than twenty years. I went to CAPA to be a musician, and that's exactly what happened. He went to CAPA to become an artist, and became a lyricist. If we hadn't started the Roots together, if he hadn't become a hip-hop star, I wonder what he would have done in the visual arts.

Tariq got suspended for the incident with the girl in the bathroom, and he was gone for much of that first semester as I made my way through CAPA. When he returned, it was like one of those scenes in a movie when a guy comes back to the neighborhood after doing time. We were happy to see each other, but pretty soon we settled into our roles: I was the dweeb and he was the cool kid.

Because it was high school, much of the social capital came from fas.h.i.+on. My mom was a great help in this regard: she always had a hip, East Village kind of fas.h.i.+on sense. She would take me to thrift stores and when I would complain, she'd explain to me that the people kids idolized, the fas.h.i.+on trendsetters of the day, weren't doing their shopping in the mall.

My role models were musicians, and the world of rock and soul fas.h.i.+on was changing fast. Prince had gone through his hippie phase with Around the World in a Day and was starting a kind of paisley junkyard aesthetic for Sign O the Times, and I was emulating that as best as I could. And then there was the Time, and Morris Day's whole zoot-suit look. Under my mother's tutelage, I figured out that the cool baggy pants Morris Day was wearing could be had for three dollars at Goodwill. The same way that rap had helped me find my ident.i.ty in 1979, when "Rapper's Delight" came out, fas.h.i.+on started to separate me from the pack. I didn't have Lee jeans, or Sergio Valente, or Jordache. I had jeans with holes in the knees, jackets accented with splashes of paint.

A few years later, the teasing would stop when De La Soul made that kind of thing popular. But the teasing started with Tariq, who dressed in Run DMC sweatsuits and whatever else was considered authorized thug fas.h.i.+on. It's strange to think about it now, because we've reversed: he'll think nothing of paying some crazy amount for a mohair suit, and I've gone back to casual. But that was the way our styles shook out then, and he mocked me mercilessly. He told me that I was a man out of time. He wondered if I was trying to be white.

Trying to be white? What the h.e.l.l does that mean? I've never understood that. How could anyone be white when they aren't white? Seems like a simple enough thing to prove, right? Hold out your arm next to someone else's arm and do a simple swatch test. Of course, what people mean when they say that is that there's some kind of authentic black experience that the accused isn't properly expressing. But what is the authentic experience? Clothes that wannabe g.a.n.g.b.a.n.gers wear on the street? Hood style? What's authentic about that? For that matter, is fas.h.i.+on even a good marker of authenticity or race, anyway? Aren't clothes a second skin you wear over your real skin to obscure who you really are? Can they also express who you really are? My mother told me that you had to go to thrift shops to find your own style, which made more sense than going to stores, but weren't both forms of borrowing where you were always aspiring to have something that was truly your own? The question marks were piling up and I wasn't even ?uestlove yet.

But Ahmir had questions, too, and the fishhook of the punctuation wasn't catching anything, and it wasn't straightening out either. I remember once, when I was a kid, hearing Johnny Winter singing "Tired of Tryin' " with Muddy Waters on guitar, on the Nothin' but the Blues alb.u.m, and hearing him sing and liking what I heard and then looking at a picture of him on the alb.u.m and double-taking, maybe triple-taking, and then wondering what it meant to be black (or white, or albino) and play black music (was it?). And was Johnny paying tribute to Muddy by recording a takeoff on "Tired of Cryin'," by Howlin' Wolf, one of Muddy's personal and professional rivals-and, while we're on the subject, one of the most authentically black voices in the history of popular music? Except that the closest artist to him vocally was Captain Beefheart, one of the whitest-if by "white" you mean the kind of fractured art rock he was practicing-except that he was playing the blues, and the blues are black, except that he was white and the blues were his, so maybe there's no color in it at all except the color you put there. The exceptions don't prove the rule. They shame it. They banish it. In one of Beefheart's songs, "Dirty Blue Gene," he explains why black and white are never black-and-white: "The s.h.i.+ny beast of thought / If you got ears / You gotta listen." You heard the man. You gotta listen.

Were there answers underneath the questions? Was there a light at the end of the tunnel? Maybe, but I wasn't old enough or wise enough to look for them, not then. The answers had to come to me. And right around that time, one of them did. It came to me like it came to everyone. We got Prince. More to the point: We got Princed. The kids of the eighties were just sitting there, minding our own business, when all of a sudden the same artist who had freaked out our parents with his unholy mix of s.e.x and salvation on 1999 returned to action with Purple Rain. That record took whatever categories remained and burned them all down. He says it right at the beginning of "I Would Die 4 U": "I'm not a woman / I'm not a man / I am something that you'll never understand." (Of course, later on in the song he says "I'm not a human / I am a dove," so maybe it's not a good idea to take the lyrics at face value.) But aside from gender, he split the difference in so many other ways, too: race (people said he was half black, like the character in the movie), fas.h.i.+on (Was he a leather-jacketed punk? A French aristocrat with frilly cuffs? Was that eye makeup? Lipstick?), and of course, musical genres. I once read an academic paper that argued that the song structure of "When Doves Cry" is modeled on female rather than male desire, because it has a relatively flat melody rather than the surging arousal-to-climax pattern that would mark it as masculine, not to mention that it is stripped of all ba.s.s (more masculinity surrendered in the instrumentation) and that most of the tension comes from the call-and-response arrangement of the vocals. But flat notes? Bare instrumentation? Call and response? Sounds like blues to me.

But whatever it is-and I'm sure it's nothing that it's said to be, and everything, and more-that song, and that alb.u.m, did more to bring together freaks and geeks and thugs than almost anything else from that decade. Tariq and I could agree on it, and we could both agree with the hulking football player who was coming up the street, headphones on his ears, Walkman in his jacket pocket. Prince was a unification treaty written on sixty-two inches of purple parchment.

Quest Loves Records, Part II "When you live your life through records, the records are a record of your life."

1980: Diana Ross, Diana / The Commodores, Heroes

I spent the entire summer of 1980 living in the Virgin Islands at a resort called Frenchman's Reef while my parents gigged nights. The Diana record was the only contemporary record that I heard during that period, because the owner of the nightclub where my parents were playing had it on continuously as filler music between my father's shows. It was also the first summer I earned real money for myself-I was doing lights for my father's band, working the spotlight and that kind of thing, making sixty-five dollars a show. By the end of the summer I had over $1,000, and he promised me that I could buy a bike for myself when we got back to the States. So we went to Kiddie City to get my first ten-speed Saxon bike, and next to Kiddie City there was a chain called the Listening Booth. I bought the Diana record there, on ca.s.sette-that was the period of phasing out LPs and eight-tracks. I also bought the Commodores record. My father loved the Commodores. He loved Lionel Richie and was doing many of his songs in his show, whether "Three Times a Lady" or "Still." Of the Commodores' platinum sellers between 1976 and 1981, Heroes was kind of the dud in the collection. They wanted to get closer to their gospel roots, but that meant that instead of a slow, sappy love song they had a slow, sappy gospel song, "Jesus Is Love." I liked it because of the consistency of the logo. I was always liking records for the wrong reasons.

Extended Playlist

The next-door neighbor's older brother was a DJ, the first I observed. He let me sit and watch as long as I wasn't in the way.

... Michael Jackson, "Rock with You"; Styx, "Babe"; Ambrosia, "Biggest Part of Me"; Kenny Loggins, "This Is It"; Jermaine Jackson, "Burnin' Hot"; M, "Pop Muzik"; The Rolling Stones, "Emotional Rescue"; Rupert Holmes, "Him"...

1981: The Time, The Time / The Jacksons, The Jacksons Live!

This was the beginning of a dark period of my life. My grades had taken a dive. I was getting in trouble in school and on punishment frequently. I was doing uncharacteristic things-nothing extreme, violent, or criminal-but things that simply weren't in keeping with my character. There was a kid in sixth grade whose mom allowed him to bring his boom box to the cafeteria. He had a ca.s.sette of the Time's first record, and this was the first time I heard anything coming out of Minneapolis that wasn't an early Prince single, "I Wanna Be Your Lover" or "Soft and Wet." When "After Hi School" came on the boom box, we thought it was the coolest thing ever and we were dancing to it. At the end, though, I tripped over the cord and knocked his boom box onto the ground. "You destroyed it," he said. "You owe me money." He wanted twenty dollars for it. Now, I went to performing-arts school. There was no thug element there, not really. But this kid came from the streets-he could act his a.s.s off, but he was at heart a tough kid-and I didn't want to get in trouble with him. I had to get that money by any means necessary. I knew that my dad kept at least $4,000 hidden in the library. I figured, I'm just going to take a twenty. A perfect crime. I took twenty-five instead. I supposed I would get The Jacksons Live! and then Voices by Hall and Oates and a Rick Springfield record, because there was a girl I knew who liked him. My plan failed. My dad was a meticulous counter. He even knew how many inches high the orange juice was in the jug, so he could tell when someone had drunk some. I had been disciplined with whippings throughout my life, but when he found out I had taken the money it was that and then some, a Kunta Kinte/Django Unchainedlike whipping. That incident set the course for our relations.h.i.+p and how it remains today. My father and I are not particularly close. It's strained at best. And that defining moment came in the name of records. More ironically, it came in the name of a Jacksons record: If Joe hadn't given his kids all those whippings, they would have never made the record, and I would have never gotten my whipping.

Extended Playlist

I'm on my own now. Donn is with my parents in the show. This is where school and friends started to influence my tastes.

... Boz Scaggs, "Miss Sun"; Devo, "Through Being Cool"; Rick James, "Super Freak (Part II)"; The Time, "Cool/After Hi School"; Grandmaster Flash, "The Adventures of Grandmaster Flash on the Wheels of Steel"; Patti Austin, "Betcha Wouldn't Hurt Me"; The Afternoon Delights, "General Hospi-Tale"; Earth, Wind & Fire, "The Changing Times"...

1982: Prince, 1999

I have written about the difficulty of keeping Prince records in the house, especially as my parents became more religious. What that also meant was that I got better at distracting them at key moments in songs. In "Lady Cab Driver," on 1999, there's a Jo Jones/Prince dialogue that starts innocent and then gets s.e.xual (and spiritual) fast. At that time, black radio was doing live remote shows from clubs on Sat.u.r.day nights-"Come party with us at Richard's on Broad Street from 9 p.m. until midnight," they'd say. "Our DJs are compensated for appearances." One Sat.u.r.day, that song was on the radio, and I realized they were about to play the 90-second s.e.x part. I needed a distraction. I didn't want to run to the radio and turn it off, shrieking the whole way. Instead, I ran to the kitchen, where there was a bowl with some salad leftovers from the night before. I sacrificed the bowl. Down it went to the floor and shattered. By the time we got back from cleaning it up, Prince was on to the guitar solo. Over the months, I developed similar tricks for distracting: lots of coughing, lots of wheezing. Once I pretended I stepped on a thumbtack.

Extended Playlist

We finally got our second urban radio station in Philadelphia, Power 99. It was all-inclusive. Donald f.a.gen should have named his song "What a Beautiful World." It would have been easier to find.

... The Time, "777-9311"; War, "The Jungle: Beware It's a Jungle Out There"; Donald f.a.gen, "I.G.Y."; Cheri, "Murphy's Law"; Chaz Jankel, "Glad to Know You"; Joe Jackson, "Steppin' Out"; Kool and the Gang, "Steppin' Out"; Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five, "Flash to the Beat"...

1983: The Police, Synchronicity

We had a drummer named Frog in our group whom my dad always saw as a screw-up. My dad didn't dig Frog because he thought he didn't have it all upstairs. He saw him reading Jimi Hendrix books, which he a.s.sociated with drug culture, and I think one of the words in the t.i.tle was "voodoo," which he a.s.sociated with devil music. One day we were driving to a bar gig in Pennsylvania. We had two vans by this point. The family was in van one and the band was in van two. When we pulled up alongside each other, Frog was listening to "Mother." It's a strange experimental song with Andy Summers screaming his vocals. "Turn that devil s.h.i.+t off in front of my son," my father said. "No, it's cool," I said. "It's the Police." But my father was one of those people who, when he was wrong, was more right. "Turn it off," he said. I was twelve, so whatever he thought was a no was, in my mind, an instant yes. A few days later I ran into my best friend at school, John Cavallero. "What's that song?" I said. He played it back to me on his Walkman and I went out and bought the record the following Sat.u.r.day. It was the first rock record I bought on my own, without my sister's aid.

Extended Playlist

The first time we got MTV, we were at Poconos resort. But our MTV was sort of broken-you could either listen to the music or watch the visual. I would leave it on so I wouldn't miss "Billie Jean"; that's how I discovered these songs.

... The Police, "King of Pain"; Musical Youth, "Heartbreaker"; Frida, "I Know There's Something Going On"; Newcleus, "Jam-on Revenge"; Hall & Oates, "Family Man"; The System, "You Are in My System"; Prince, "Little Red Corvette (Dance Mix)"; O'Bryan, "Soul Train's A-Comin"...

1984: Sheila E., The Glamorous Life

By this point, much of the music I loved was contraband in my house. But I had successfully convinced my parents that even though Sheila E. sounded the same as Prince, she had nothing to do with him. (It's good that he used pseudonyms-he was listed as the Starr Company on that one-because they inspected the credits carefully.) Plus, she was a drummer, so it fit in with their idea of my education. That was the only alb.u.m from the Purple empire that I kind of flaunted. But then I f.u.c.ked up, or the record let me down. There's a line from "Oliver's Party" where she says, "She got drunk and called me a b.i.t.c.h just 'cuz I kissed him," and that was that. Good-bye, Sheila E.

Extended Playlist