Mighty Good Road

Ah, gangster rap. There was a time when you comprised my whole nascent CD collection. Whatever my older brother bought from Columbia House, I would dutifully buy three months later for myself. And it was all rap. Some of it was pop, like Nice&Smooth, some of it was socially consicous, like Public Enemy, and lots of it was gangster rap. Like NWA and Cypress Hill.

But it wasn’t until college that I discovered that the real hardcore gangster stuff was folk music. Murder, intrigue, passions, bloodlust. Heroes and villains. Lovers and haters. Sex and drugs. And folk artists played the dozens, did front-porch bragadoccios AND had banjos and harmonicas. And it was socially conscious too. So I can’t tell if I’m saying that folk music is actually rap music, or that rap music is just a kind of folk music.

It doesn’t matter, really. Because songs like Cypress Hill’s “Pigs” can sound like an old sea chantey, or a talking blues, or a social protest song. I’ve tried “Pigs” as all those kinds of songs, but the recording you can download today is a lullaby. Since the lyrics (“This pig harassed the whole neighborhood…”) are actually a play off an old English nursery rhyme, I’m just putting Cypress Hill’s gangster rap back into it’s original folk context. And I hope it’s no less terrifying and haunting than all folk music.

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