A B |
Contributed by
Martin McKenzie-Murray Broadcaster, Writer, Student Untitled Creator: Martin McKenzie-Murray When I was 11 I received an ant-farm for my birthday. It was small and cheap - between perplex walls yellow plastic contours formed the artificial habitat, and I would take off the yellow roof and drop bread crumbs into the sand. The ants all died the following week. For my birthday the next year I was given my first ever album by a kid down the road. In the days before I had given him a blank tape, swiped from my parents' stash, and he had responded by pirating NWA's Straight Outta Compton on his dual-cassette deck. I loved it. For a white, middle-class kid, the album provided its owner with a righteous sense of rebellion. But with further listens, the album yielded things of greater interest. Of course, the politics (or apolitics) of the ghetto were lost on me. I was simply thrilled by the profanity, and amazed at the stories: murder without remorse; the rise and fall of drug empires and the cruel and unusual treatment of women. None of it made any real sense, but I was always entertained. I was piqued by News From Another World, a world where the rules were strange and adult and black. A world whose one underlying rule was that there weren't any rules, and the vicarious pleasure this afforded its young, white listener is obvious. I was the young voyeur of race and class, and my now barren ant-farm was forgotten for this greater, more interesting microcosm. And so my love for hip-hop was sealed and throughout high-school I befriended others like me. Our tastes were very certainly unpopular, and, for that school and that time, reserved for the least socially agile. Yes, the few who bought The Source (the teenage hip-hop aficionado's bible) and discussed the merits of the latest Wu-tang Clan album were nerds, people who sat very far away from the raw, thuggish stereotypes of hip-hop culture. I was soon put on to "Getting Hectic" - a late-night hip-hop show that ran on RTR fm (Perth) on Friday, or Saturday nights. Before it began - I think it started at 11 and ran 'til 1 - I would load a blank cassette into my tape deck and wait in the dark, my index finger diligently hovering above the "record" button. And so I would collect and edit hip-hop gems in the dark over the following two hours, although it was sometimes less than that when an unsympathetic Sandman came to take me away. Those mornings were terrible; the ones when I would awake on my bedroom floor, slumped over my radio, aching with the knowledge that I had missed my favourite show for another week. But other weeks were more successful, when the show itself was great, and I had managed to stay awake to capture it. This tape is testament to one of those nights - some time back in 1996 (or was it '95?), and the music still stands, if not my editing. |