Last month was my Uncle’s birthday, so as a present to him I’m writing a self-absorbed post about my favorite song up to this point in my life, “Rhymes Like Dimes” by the legend, MF Doom.

When I was in middle school I started actually putting any effort into cataloging what music I enjoyed. Our family computer had a CD burner, and LimeWire was installed on the desktop so I was pretty much set. I hung out with the “counter culture” that the 00’s had bred. We had no real reason to rebel against anything, but the fuck else are you supposed to do when you’re a teenager in South Florida? So for a while I prayed at the altar of Guns N’ Roses, Pantera, The Used, and some My Chemical Romance when needed. I’m not yet at an age where I’m brave enough to acknowledge how obnoxious I must have been back then.

My social make up and musical literacy was heavily dominated by Caucasian and Spanish faces who would lob the occasional black joke my way. Being the token black kid with next to no buffer when it came to those jokes wasn’t always easy, so I spent most of the time disassociating myself from that scene. If I’m ignorant of black culture, I wouldn’t have to take it so seriously right? Besides, I was like the whitest (safest) black kid in the school right? Somebody throw on some more “Skynrd” right? Troubling.

My younger uncle is 3 years older than me and my hero. He had started high school and I’d bandy his name around to my friends like he was king of all of Coral Springs. I’d cling when we’d make the infrequent visit to his home. One day I mistakenly put on a random CD of all my angst tier shit and saw his entire body physically wince.  He’d made fun of my friends before and rightly called us out on the whole “rebellious teen” shtick, but now he hated our music? What had defined us? This was where I put my foot down. This is where our divide would begin. Because if you didn’t think Slash was the greatest guitarist to ever live, than get back on your walker grandpa and make room for us smelly adolescent teenaged shitbags.

A few years later my family would come into possession of my uncle’s old computer. We had burned through our eMachines by that point. I of course attempted to lord over it. “It used to be his and we had a bond and fuck whoever’s trying to do their school project”, type shit. He happened to leave some random files on there, but the most important ones were the mp3s. Just fucking gigs of bands and artists that were foreign to me.  I had to eat crow. He was right. My taste were entry level shit.  I spent most of my free time going over everything in those folders, until eventually, I got to Doom.

Let me paint you a picture so you know how into this I was. For an entire summer I carried around a giant fucking PSP with the basic memory stick with MF Doom taking up most of the space. I’d take it to the mall, cookouts, and family outings. Everywhere. When I started high school, I took it with me. I took it to competitions. I spent an hour bus ride just letting every bar sink in.

I went back. I found out about KMD. I branched out. Madlib, Dilla, Quasimoto, Def Jux, Wu Tang. All this stuff I had a passing knowledge of but ultimately distanced myself from, because if I had accepted it, then maybe I would have been picked on more. Nothing kills a middle school jam session like instrumentals. I kept quiet about the stuff I liked to friends because of the fear of being the other. It’s easy and popular to be that person who doesn’t give a fuck, and everyone aspires to that. But it’s hard because caring is really easy for most people. And  you don’t want to be the odd man out, unless being an unlikable git is supposedly your deal.