Word to your Mutter

My roommate and I once asked a friend if he could give us a ride home from school. "Fo shizza! Bitch, you don’t hafta axe, you know you is my girls, and I is yo nigga. Aight let’s bounce." In lieu of normal conversation, he started to rap about how he disliked his Philosophy professor but quite enjoyed marine biology. He cleverly rhymed Proustian with crustacean. In clashing contrast, my feeble comments resounded like a dead wall next to his mellifluent metering. My roommate, a stickler for grammar, pulled the stick out of her ass and beat him on the head with it. " ‘That oughtta learn him?’" she screeched in quotes. "Who schooled you, boy?" A heated discussion on linguistics ensued which rabidly devolved into a turf war between public skool and private skool. We got kicked out of the car as he did a drive-by of our apartment.

I do not know what became of my rapper friend, but last I heard the university exam board did not accept the use of esse in his essay. The lack of a degree would force him into a life of meniality, which naturally he opposed and opted instead to illegally deal in Cliff Notes– the Ebonics Version, to other students who might be bound to the same fate. My roommate, on the other hand, dropped out of college willingly as she found herself unable to face the challenges of an increasingly technologized society. A highly competitive Scrabble player, the last straw hit the fan when she lost to a Nicaraguan farm boy in an online game. She retreated to the simple life of retail at a high-end clothing store, where she could run her fingers through $200 distressed denim and strangers would call her "Miss" all day.

Which brings me lopsidedly to some point I’m trying to make, where what I now hear is a lot of shite on the radio and TV. Why I don’t just turn it off or put on a CD is because I’m paradoxically enthralled by these pop currents of packaged pap. I admire J.Lo’s mechanical abs and precision curves. I enjoy Justin’s jitterbuggery, and Slave4U will forever remain a pleasurable guilt. Imagine my anguish when the gray-haired Xtina, whom I despise from the depths of my bilious heart, came out with an artsy video that could’ve passed for one of Chris Cunningham’s. But there has also been this ongoing trend of R&B songs which, so happy and peppy yet groovy and sexy, defy all words and description that the only thing one can do, is do like everyone and stick your Zippo to the ceiling grunting, wuh wuh!

Whut duh? If pop music is a reflection of our collective consciousness, then what does it mean when a lot of the songs in heavy pollution contain lyrics that sound like they were uttered by a salacious six-year old, a schizoid stutterer or a syntactically-helpless simian? Case in point: R. Kelly, Queen of the Damned widower of previous Bump-n-Grind fame, is out with Ignition (Remix) a song which addresses his automobile as woman, or his woman as automobile (does it make a difference? It’s R. Kelly):

No I’m not tryin to be rude / But hey pretty girl I’m feelin you /

The way you do the things you do / Remind me of my Lexus coup /

That’s why I’m all up in yo grill / Tryin to get you to a hotel …

But here’s the kicker:

So baby gimme that toot toot!

And gimme that beep beep!

I’m quite sure R. is not asking her to pass a gas station. "Toot toot" and "beep beep", onomatopoeic words we learn early on to relate to objects such as cars and trains, become efficient euphemisms for you-know-what. Goes along well with honk honk, boom boom, bang bang, ding dong and other monosyllabic twin doorbell sounds that Pinoys are often nicknamed (Scott Gareau wrote an excellent essay on the topic; I’m going to name my first daughter Bling Bling for good luck).

B2K feat. P. Diddy do one better with their floor-filler Bump Bump Bump. Not satisfied with a single repetition, they opt for a crowdy threesome:

Girl just come wit me, come on lets go and do the damn thang

Baby turn around, and let me see that sexy body go

Bump bump bump!

It may conjure up images of a hefty body bag being kicked down the stairs, but no. It’s a phrase packed with libidinous energy, part male vehicular accident fantasy and part inability-to-string-together-a-sentence.

Then we have the king of incoherence, master rapper Jay-Z (I myself let out a woop woop…woop) who probably started the whole thing with his fill-in-the-blanks "Can I get a wuh wuh, can I get a woo woo?" and more recently, his self-ascent into hip-hop heaven in his hover-crafted "H to the Izzo, V to the Izza" which is long for HOVA, which is short for Jay-Hova, or God as we commonly know him. Jesus Jiggawho?

There is slurry line between the creative play on words and the corruption of language. The culture of texting is somewhat evidence of this, but then again language was never typeset in stone. I love hip hop in most of its grammar-wrangling manifestions, and even picketed a wedding DJ once when he cut Missy off midway to cross-fade into some insipid, wordless house anthem. But if the radio ratio of tooty-titty party songs to songs with actual poetry tip on the side of jiggy, that is merely a mirror of how the popular mind wants to see itself. It is also a probable indication of how we might be communicating in the soon future, a return to pure sound. "Yo yo yo yo. Let’s go boop boop in my biddy-biddy-bop. It’s getting hottah hottah in herre. Kaching! Your singsing is super-bling bling."

In the realm of the senseless, booty is lord.

High rolling, fast ballin’, ice choked around your neck as if love didn’t cost a thing except designer jeans. Of course, this material image is ridiculously out of reach to 99.9 percent of the population (though there’s always the tiangghetto-fab version). Liking the music is one thing, but its excessive leakage has led to a transformation among the youth, indeed check out the Wasaaaa?-bi kids on a Friday night. It is just an image however, a lust for a kind of schmoozy and boozy designer club life devoid of much thought. A rehashing of oneself again and again till all meaning is drained. Like when you read or say the word WORD over and over again till you forget what it is… But we are what we think, and we are what we speak.

And speaking of rehashed browns… I encountered our own huvva huvva version on MTV Lokal. Jay-R! "Get ready…I’m Ur Design 4 Luv," he raps with his game face on, shimmying, side-stepping, and sloshing in the spa with a group of suspiciously foreign-looking girls. Exactly everything we’ve seen before, but on Beta-cam. Following on his heels is the suspiciously foreign-looking Billy Crawford, who in practically the same video direction except his is on the rooftop, cavorts and canters with nubile belly-baring young women. Keep on Trackin’ is the name of his tune and no, it’s not a vernacular edition of the Grateful Dead classic. "Keep on trackin’ with me/ something something with your feet / something something to the beat." Go ahead, fill in the blanks, you can’t miss. Word up.