Writing about my Hip Hop history (Part 1)

When you are job hunting, I think updating your resume and curriculum vitae becomes almost essential. When I happened to look at my own resume, I started thinking, "Come to think of it, when did I start liking Hip Hop?" and decided to write this article.

I should state at the outset that the term [Hip Hop/Rap], which will appear frequently from here on, refers to them as music.
This is because I know that if I don't write things like this, annoying people will keep popping up later.

So, from here on, I will use my usual writing style.

Early Heisei era, YA is born.
I grew up in a very ordinary family. Neither poor nor rich.
My father loved Jimi Hendrix and Janis Joplin. The BGM he always played in the car was Jimi Hendrix's performance of the American national anthem, The Star-Spangled Banner, at Woodstock.
His catchphrases were "I wanted to go to Woodstock" and "Everyone died from drugs."
My mother was a fan of Yumi Matsutoya/Yuming.
She would efficiently do housework while playing FM Yokohama in the background.

I've heard it said that "how far back you can trace your childhood memories determines your language acquisition ability."
The oldest memory I can recall is probably getting lost in the mountains (Yokohama is vast, you see) near my house during kindergarten.
And, I saw a Japanese soldier there. A Japanese soldier who was staring right at me. Really.

I was immersed in Donkey Kong, Mario RPG, and Pokémon (I had the Blue version), which are familiar to my generation.
Why did the glitch to get Mew spread all over Japan? It's still a mystery to me personally. When I entered the command I heard somewhere and started the game, Satoshi was stuck inside the fence, unable to get out.
I learned the lesson here that "you shouldn't blindly believe hearsay/rumors."

I didn't ask for it myself, but for some reason, I was made to play the piano.
I suddenly remembered that when a junior colleague at my previous job asked me, "Did you take piano lessons when you were younger, YA?" and I replied, "Why?", they jokingly said, "People who played piano are noisy when they type" (I wonder if that's true?).
By the way, I gave up on the piano when I hit a wall with Lange's "Harvest Time".

Junior high school days
Since I lack expressive power, this will be quite rough, but there was "wisdom in the conversations around me." If there was a group discussing Einstein's theory of relativity at lunchtime, there were people battling with English cards for Magic: The Gathering. And they had English-Japanese dictionaries next to them. Students discussing news reports, etc.
This was a culture shock. At the same time, after a year or two, it became a daily routine.
Of course, there were many students playing outside in the schoolyard, and I was relatively more like them. In the midst of that, on my way back from the schoolyard to the classroom, one student (M-kun) called out to me.

Readers who have read this far probably already know. Yes, the H of Hip Hop hasn't even appeared yet.

Dopamine activation attempt number one

At the time, it was the heyday of the MD. Each classroom had an MD player, and it was okay to play your favorite music during lunch break or after school. M-kun handed me an MD and said, "Overseas music is seriously cool, try listening to this."

If I went to karaoke, I would sing popular J-Pop, and I thought I knew the music that was popular at the time. Attracted by the word "overseas" that appeared there, I listened to it with M-kun in the classroom after school. As for where the roots of being "attracted to the word 'overseas'" lie, it must be my parents. The car was always filled with Western music, and I was dragged along to watch Hollywood movies without understanding what they meant. When there was a kissing scene, my mother would tell me to "close your eyes." One way or another, there were opportunities in my life to come into contact with "overseas" or "English" in some way. There is often an opinion that "it's tiring to watch movies while reading subtitles," but since I had been trained since childhood, I didn't feel any such pain at all.

And then, dopamine activationIt was. A shock like never before raced through my whole body.Jay-Z'sDirt Off Your Shoulderit was.

A beat and sense of rhythm I had never heard before. I had no idea what he was saying. But,I honestly thought it was super cool. I cannot sleep with my feet pointed toward the producer, Timbaland (a big lie).

Perhaps there will never be an event that surpasses this shock, impulse, and emotion in the future. It is impossible for my vocabulary to express that excitement in words.
However,there is no doubt that it was the day and moment that dramatically changed my life.

Well, from there, I started listening to "Western music" on the radio.
I listened to the radio personality saying, "Now, I'd like you to listen to..." and wrote down who was singing no matter what. I watched Western music MVs on cable TV's MTV regardless of whether it was late at night. My ears felt really good. I remember well that my father, who was watching from the side, would exercise his adult authority, saying, "It all sounds the same, so I'm changing the channel to baseball."

I was at a sensitive age. I wanted to imitate the clothes of the white people, black people, and others who appeared in the MVs no matter what. Among them, (in the words of the time),B-style fashionis both my dark history and my youth. By the way, at that time, I was thin and had sloping shoulders. There was no way such clothes would suit me. And, I got into trouble many times in my hometown.
M-kun and other "Western music lovers" at the time introduced various artists to each other. Usher, The Black Eyed Peas, Hilary Duff, Linkin Park, The Killers, Maroon 5, etc. It wasn't about Hip Hop, but I was just sinking into the swamp of "Western music."

Since I was just listening to music without studying, I naturally failed my high school entrance exams. I went on to a bottom-tier private school in the prefecture. By the way, M-kun, who first introduced me to overseas music, went on to a preparatory school in the prefecture and then went to Kyoto University right after graduating (this is a fact).

While listening to Western music every day, I couldn't suppress the initial shock and started to show interest in Hip Hop. I would go to the HMV in Yokohama Vivre at the time, listen to new releases for hours at the free listening corner, and check if there were any new artists. I really feel sorry for the store clerks at the time. Because I was really occupying the listening corner for hours (and thank you so much for not stopping me).

Well, I went on to a bottom-tier high school at my own risk.
Immediately after enrollment, there was something called a "freshman exchange," where we would have a barbecue at a park in the prefecture in casual clothes. Since we usually only interact in uniforms, people who want to enjoy their youth at times like this put effort into their casual clothes. Me too.

Dopamine (?) activation number two

Many of the boys around me were into the B-style.
That's because, at the time, it was explosively popular—baggy jeans and the now-obsolete style of wearing pants low. Plus, polo shirts that were way too big, like XXL, that didn't fit. People with a bit of money wore Timberland boots or dressed in APE. Or, there were those who tried to look cool just by wearing a fake New Era cap.

I was a little happy. In my mind, I thought everyone who dressed like that listened to Hip Hop. Even as someone socially awkward, I managed to proactively ask them, "Hey, do you like Hip Hop?" or "What kind of music do you listen to?"

I still remember it to this day. Even though I talked to dozens of people, the vast majority of high school students who dressed like that didn't listen to Hip Hop.
In other words,they were wearing those clothes as a "fashion statement," which triggered a dopamine (?) rush in a bad way.

My middle school days were too stimulating.
If you entered the classroom in the morning, someone would be writing mysterious mathematical formulas on the blackboard, and sleeping during class was strictly forbidden. Even if it got a little noisy, the teacher would say "Quiet down a bit," and it would actually become quiet. However, in environments where we could play or during our own time, we would be completely immersed in that.

That situation changed completely. When we arrived in the morning, everyone would be sitting on their desks, and the balcony smelled like cigarettes. Classes were also completely chaotic. I learned later that the principal at the time would go to the police almost every day to apologize profusely. The emptiness of being in such a place. And the pity.

I would often go home and complain to my family. "Something stupid happened today," or "There's no wisdom in everyone's conversations." I would say things like that to vent my stress. It was the worst adolescence.

At times like that, my mother would always say: "Most high school students are like that. That place (middle school) was just special. But you are in the middle of it too".

I safely became a member of the "going-home club" (non-club member).
My memories of high school are just the Hip Hop I listened to at home and at HMV, and the Yoshimuraya head shop of the Iekei ramen style.

Let me introduce a little daily routine.
1. Get home from school -> Open the computer and dig through MySpace for new Hip Hop releases -> Look up artist names -> Get to know who is who.

2. Move from school to HMV -> Listen to Hip Hop for several hours -> Eat at Yoshimuraya -> Go home.

The middle and high school students reading this article are probably wondering,What is MySpace? To put it simply, each artist had their own MySpace page where they would release new music for free—anyone could listen to it regardless of whether they had an account. Some artists even set up message boards where anyone could write anything, and it was a site that became explosively popular in the West in the 2000s as asocial network with a strong musical focus.

When I got home, all I did was stick to the internet and stare at MySpace. At the time, US Mainstream Hip Hop was all about Dirty South: I would dig and dig for new artists or songs that I intuitively thought, "Oh, I might like this." By repeating this, I naturally lost my "English allergy," and even without knowing what was written or what was being said, I started to become interested in English.
And so, I challenged myself on the message boards of various artists' MySpace pages with an English-Japanese dictionary in hand, and every day I was written off as trash.

"I'm writing from Japan" -> "If you're not a girl, go home" -> "What kind of songs is everyone listening to?" -> "F○ck You".

"I'm writing from Japan. I want to talk to everyone" -> "If you don't understand English, go home" -> "I can" -> "NOPE".

I want to praise myself for not giving up here. I looked up every bit of English, including slang that appeared on the message boards, and I had the perseverance to look things up myself without needing Japanese translations by intentionally buying imported albums. In reality, there was no grammar to speak of, but I would look up English words I heard in lyrics and write them down in my own English vocabulary notebook to memorize them.

I wasn't doing any special studying, and I kept pretending to sleep in the high school classroom, but my English grades were always at the top. I think it was ultimately the result of looking up everything except for subjects like "I" and "You."
Third-person singular? Present perfect tense? Subjunctive mood? What are those?

Well, with that, the second half of my second year of high school arrived.
Friends or close people? I don't have any of those.
The events from here on out, the story of the dopamine release, will be for another time... (there are about three parts).