A few days ago I was driving to the store and listening to Backspin on Sirius radio. Much to my delight they played “Criminal Minded” by Boogie Down Productions. It started as I was pulling into the parking lot so I shut off the engine and sat back to enjoy this blast from my past. When this record came out in 1987 I was 13 and my walkman constantly had either this cassette or Public Enemy inside. Now here I was, 20 years later, feeling my 13-year-old self being awakened.

The expereince was intense. This track gave me a rush of adolescent hope, passion and angst that I had forgotten long, long ago. Goose-bumps rose on my flesh as I was broght back to the two-room garage apartment my family had been living in. I escaped the poverty, hunger, substance abuse and fear in my life by wearing headphones, blasting this song. I walked to the library each week and checked out tomes of philosophy and books on the history of Apartheid. I was a strange child. It does not suprise me that I had no friends. This was before the mainstream acceptance of rap and if I tried to talk to my peers about BDP or PE I got nothing but a solitary lunch table.

But this didn’t bother me. I had plans that transcended the kids I went to school with, my family, and the city where I lived. The cassetes I was wearing out and the musty books I read gave me a glimpse of a life beyond everything I knew. I was going to get away from all of it. I was going to use the passion burning inside of me to change the world. Here now, at 33, KRS-One and Scott LaRock were reminding me of this. With my eyes closed, listening to this song on the oldies rap station, I felt all those hopes of dreams of my young self as if it was again 1987. I was reeling.
Do you ever wonder what your younger self would say if she could see your adult life? I think mine would be bewildered and probably disappointed. What happened to the revolution I was going to lead? Where was the solitary, trail-blazing life I was going to lead? Life has a strange way of giving you the business. That little radical weirdo couldn’t not have forseen the way poor health would have it’s way with my body and mind. She couldn’t have imagined that the issues my parents struggled with, which I had despised, would find their way into my life as well. She wouldn’t understand the way manipulative, damaged people can crush the spirit of even the most self-confident person. Even with everything she had already seen in her short life the truth was she didn’t know what life was yet. Books and records were merely representations of it. The reality was life never works out the way you expect.

But on the positive side, my adult self is safer and more secure than that child ever was. I know a contentment and peace that she was deseparately searching for in her library books and this new thing called hip-hop. These days I’m a little more bruised up, dream a little closer to ground and for the most part music is just something I listen to on my iPod while riding the bus. I enjoy it but I know better than to use it as the blueprint my life. Still, for a few minutes, to feel what a song - just some rhymes and some beats - could do to me was exhilirating.

Then the song ended and I went inside to buy my groceries.