Pete Rock Dropped Today and Why I Care

I'm clearly old af.

Because I wrecked my mom's whip and Pete Rock and CL Smooth were on the radio, "Reminiscing" and shit. 

And it wasn't on a Throwback Thursday. And it wasn't on a classic Hip Hop channel on satellite. The joint was fresh out and I was almost a grown-ass man. 

I had not been listening to Hip-Hop regularly for long at the point. I was one of those pretentious teenage jazz-snobs. The music was not "sophisticated" enough for me in the earlier phases of the game. 

But I was getting into it. And I played saxophone, so I appreciated the saxophone sample in the iconic T.R.OY. 

T.R.O.Y. was playing when that chick backed out of her driveway onto Wayne Memorial Drive outside Goldsboro. I clipped the back corner of her car and hit the ditch. The impact was just enough to deploy the air-bags on my mom's Dodge Shadow. Airbags were sorta new-fangled back then; they smacked me in the face pretty hard. The fumes from the propellant stung my nose.

Because Pete Rock's sound is endemic of the Hip Hop that dominated the Golden Era, I experience the violence and energy of the music in a different way. The intensity and heat of a certain flavor of Hip Hop slows down time for me--pulls me into the moment. 

The thump-bounce explodes through my psychology like post-trauma. So when someone says..."Yo son I feel that shit". In my mind, I'm like--"No, nigga...I feel that shit." 

Has the game passed Rock by? Who knows. I don't expect to hear anything like this on the radio or anything. But there will always be a place for it.

This post was written under the influence of Petestrumentals 2