What's Real

by Chelsey Lyles

My parents were hippies, complete children of the seventies. They were both so different. My father was raised Muslim, my mother Baptist, My mother was a pacifist and my father was a member of the Black Panther Party. My mother was all light and energy and my father could sit for hours in complete stillness and silence. The one thing they both agreed on is that they wanted us to think for ourselves, be whoever we wanted, all six of us.
So when rap hit the scene and we had to decide if it was “real” music the choice was completely up to us. I was only born in 89’ so my foray into rap is very limited. Everything that came out from the mid to late 90s was at my disposal but the earlier stuff was not really at the top of my list. All I can remember is commercial rap. Biggie, Dre., and Tupac were in my ears before I learned to tie my shoes. I knew every lyric to every song on Tupac’s Me Against the World album. I was watching videos and the news when all there was was rap.
Reading this week’s articles made me second guess myself for a minute, second guess my love for music that is as familiar to me as the smell of fried chicken or the texture of my hair. The idea that “keepin’ it real” is more important than a story that needs to be told is just beyond my grasp. The idea of authenticity simply never occurred to me. Art is art. Who cares where it comes from and how it is arrived at?
I won’t claim there’s good and there’s bad, authentic and inauthentic. All there is, is the music. So when I heard Eminem’s Recovery album and found my head bobbing along to “Not Afraid” I didn’t think about whether he was white but about the words that he was saying. It wasn’t about keeping it real but about the music, the culture that is hip hop.