Mama Said Knock It Off

My mother hates hip-hop. Can you imagine that? The two women I love the most can’t get along. Whether it’s the raunchy and degrading 2 Live Crew or the less-explicit Common, mama cannot stand my hip-hop collection.

Hip-hop was the only thing I cared about besides Thundercats and soccer when I was a child, but Mrs. K played Reagan and blocked the evil music from entering our hemisphere. My brother and I started our own Cold War and listened to it anyway, but me being the baby meant I had to be a bit more careful than him.

I would put my headphones on and hide-out in my room while 99 Jamz played the music our mother couldn’t stand. The Box was my favorite TV channel, but I always dove for the remote when I thought my mother was approaching my room. What would she have thought if she saw her eight-year-old son rapping along to, “And that’s realer than ‘Real Deal’ Holyfield / So now you hookers and hoes know how I feel”?

Things didn’t change much as I got older. Whenever I loaded It Was Written into my CD player, Mrs. K was complaining before “The Message” finished. “Tun off dat damn booga-booga music!” she’d scream from the kitchen. Man, I’m 22 years-old and still can’t play hip-hop in her presence without her pleading for me to silence the noise.

Despite her disliking of hip-hop, Mom has always been supportive of me becoming involved in it. She slid me $20 for studio time when I was just a youngbuck trying to create music. She withheld her objections to her teenage son staying out all night at shows even though she feared me getting in trouble. And when most of my friends were being pressured by their parents to pursue business or medicine, she supported me when I said I wanted to become a music journalist.

My mother cared about me enough to eventually let me love something she never understood. There were times when she was the stereotypical Jamaican with two jobs and a side-hustle, doing whatever it took to be a good provider. So in honor of Mother’s Day, I am going to sacrifice for the woman who has done so for the past 22 years. I am going to do something I haven’t done since 1991: go the entire day without listening to hip-hop. Mrs. K deserves to finally have at least one day without any booga booga music.

Then again, do you think she’d mind if I made an exception for 2Pac’s “Dear Mama”?