Preface To Beatboxing: Hip Hop Dreams

I used to be more quick tongued than I currently am - I am older, obviously - much of my brain has been slowed by time & probably whiskey (mmm, whiskey) - but I remember when I was a teenager, as my little brother became an aficionado of the new "rap" scene (as he called it), I could make fun of MCs with dumb lyrics & even tried basic beatboxing. It was easy enough for me to "rap" stupid for enough time that my friend Russ told me I was a closet MC. That became my fake hiphop moniker: Closet MC.

I couldn't do it now. Tongue-twister lyrics that I sing to myself in the shower are hopelessly garbled. I find myself singing certain songs more slowly so I can wrap my teeth around them. I am a decrepit old bastard.

My little brother actually wanted to be an MC, though. To me, at the time, especially as I was starting to get into postpunk like Joy Division & the Smiths, hiphop seemed alien & dumb. All that bragging, all the overt sexuality, it was so unseemly, especially when Morrissey was being so humbly self-deprecating & the most songs I liked were about begging for a kiss you could never get, not dancing, sweating & having sex. What a naif I was!

I teased my brother about his ambitions, which is the nice way of saying I gave him a lot of shit. It didn't matter - we weren't very close by that point, & didn't want to be. He was out of high school & his posse was a bunch of neighborhood kids barely out of ninth grade. I once found a lyric sheet he had written - boy I wish I could remember his rap alias! - & it was boilerplate self-aggrandizement. I do wish he had recorded something. Maybe he did. But I never heard it.

I did record stuff, although it's mostly lost now, in a "band" which was my friend Russell on guitar (he'd add other instruments alone, later) & whomever we could shanghai into hanging out with us. All the lyrics I yelped were made up on the spot, usually to crack up Russell. He would sometimes suggest titles, & we'd go from there. One suggestion of his was a mocking bluesy tune called "Battering Ram" in which I, of course still a virgin, sang about my carnal prowess. If I remember the chorus right, it went something like:

I'm a battering ram,
I'm a battering ram,
I turn girls into spam,
Cause I'm a battering ram
I'm a battering ram,
I'm a battering ram,
I wonder who the hell I think I am

My favorite part was when, at the end, Russell interjected "His bedroom is an obstacle course," & I sang,

Watch it jump through the hoops
Do loop-de-loops
Battering, battering ram

In addition to a very insulting cover of "Sharp Dressed Man" & a shabby cover of "I Will Follow" (which I somehow made as creepy as possible by adding, "I'll follow you to your house - to your grandmother's house - I'll sneak in the bathroom"), we had songs with lovely titles like "Vandal With Me," "Officer Burrell Has Some Documents For You To Sign" & "Teenage Zombie."

None of this really has anything to do with hiphop of course. But what if I *had* pursued my hiphop dreams? Where were my friends who could beatbox? Alas, not in white Garland Texas in the mid-80s!