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As I mentioned before, I went to see the Cool Kids last week.  And it was really the first time where, at 33 years old, I actually felt old for a bit.

I got into the Cool Kids from music blogs and their Myspace page, and once they got that Rhapsody commercial I knew I had to act fast and see them before they blew up and their shows got huge and impersonal.  I’m big into catching acts before they get too big, because otherwise their shows become bigger, more expensive and more impersonal and are never quite as good again.

So we show up to Studio B in Brooklyn and I’m shocked at how young the crowd looks.  The show is 18 and older.  We get those wristbands that mark us as 21 and over.  As we’re on line my boy Grip talks about seeing Rakim recently.  The little young white girls behind us on line are increasingly leaning into our conversation in quiet awe and trying to hear the conversation.  They talk to each other (a little too loudly) about how much they know about rap, an obvious ploy to impress with cred.  I started talking about a Nice and Smooth show I saw recently, and how I saw them before 18 years ago.  Then these white girls come up again and seem to really be trying to impress us with their hip-hop knowledge.  They looked so young and hipsterish that it really caught me off guard that they’d be so into 80s hip-hop rather than Fall Out Boy.  That’s when I realized that the hip-hop I grew up with is to today’s hipsters what late ’70s New York punk was to them in 2001: a long gone golden era of creativity that they mostly missed out on the first time and want to research obsessively and recreate today.

I started checking out the rest of the line and there were all these young looking hipsters wearing fat gold ropes, baggy acid wash jeans, leather bombers, and Yo MTV Raps! shirts.  These kids had to be 5 years old or younger when this stuff was out the first time, yet the astounding thing was how accurate the outfits were.  One thing about retro movements is that they try to dress in an old style, but it ends up being filtered through modern fashion sensibility.  For example when the electroclash movement was big a few years back, it looked more like a parody of new wave fashion than an authentic recreation.  Or when you see a modern movie that’s supposed to flash back to the 80s, but the track suits and shorts are being worn baggy the way we’d wear them today rather than outrageously tight and borderline homoerotic like they used to be worn back then?  Same goes for modern movies set in the 70s.  Actors only go so far, but don’t go all out for fear of being embarassed, so they have a big collar and some bellbottoms, but shy away from the truly garish and ugly fashion insanity that dominated the era.  So the accuracy of the retro stylings these kids had really impressed me.

I saw some coverage of the concert on Spin.com but was disappointed with the people in the crowd they chose to photograph and interview.  They chose the few people who were dressed like run of the mill hipsters rather than photograph and interview the more interesting the kids with the throwback wardrobes.  The pictures on Spin.com in no way accurately capture how much of the crowd looked.

These kids had the late 80s/early 90s fashion down pat.  Never have I so regretted not being out with a camera.  If I took a photo of some of these kids and showed them to people who were into hip-hop in 1988, they’d have thought they were authentically old pictures.  It looked like a party scene from New Jack City or Fresh Prince of Bel-Air, except no one would shoot you in the face for stepping on their sneakers like they would back then.  And you could go out with less than 20 people while wearing jewelry and feel safe.  It was like a very sanitized late 80s hip-hop scene, with a lot more white people. 

There was a group of black girls who looked like they were 14 or something, dressed like they stepped straight out of Spike Lee’s School Daze or A Different World:

One girl even had a short blazer with an angular cut, shoulder pads and the Kwame polka dots all over it.  There’s no way she could have found that in a story today.  I think it had to belong to her mom or something.  Some of her homegirls had the old Salt n Pepa hair bangs and the whole nine:

Then we saw some 40 year old project broads who had the Salt n Pepa look from below on the left with the yellow background.  These chicks, unlike the young girls who just seemed retro, just looked like old and beat up relics from the era that never changed since 1986 and were just waiting for the fashions to come full circle.

I’ve been noticing this trend when I went to recent concerts of Nice and Smooth and Brand Nubian, but this brought the point home for sure: for the first time in my life, something I was there for the first time around is now a retro movement.  I’m like that aging punk who shows up at the Television or Blondie reunion concerts or a Green Day show and brags to the young hipsters about how he saw all the seminal punk acts back in their heyday at CBGB’s back when it was “real.”

Then I had a neurotic internal mini-crisis all in the span of like 30 fucking seconds.  My first emotion was a good one.  It was a strange kind of ego boost to see the music and fashion of my past being celebrated by a new generation, especially after being punished by really bad Southern crunk rap and Soulja Boy for the past few years.  Then I felt a little weird by the relative lack of black people in the crowd.  It was mostly white kids and other types, with a few minorities sprinkled here and there.  I wondered whether classic hip-hop was going to become like be-bop jazz or classic blues, where only a bunch of white intellectuals and a few black elitists are keeping it alive on the fringe, while the majority of young black kids couldn’t care less of the role it played in black history?  Then I thought, is that really so bad?  I mean, isn’t it the fact that blacks in my youth didn’t care that much about jazz and blues the reason we were able to create hip-hop culture in the first place?  Then I realized that I’ve become what I used to hate about my parents. I’m the older guy that bitches about new stuff all day and complains to anyone who will listen about how much better it was in my day. Or worse yet, what if I become the hip-hop equivalent of the old-school hippie or punk that tries to infiltrate a new hippie or punk retro scene in order to relive his past? We had some of those old-school hippies at my undergrad State University of Buffalo, and even the neohippies thought they were lame. At that point MIA’s “XR2″ came on and thankfully I got sidetracked by that sick beat.  I mean, damn! is that beat sick, check it:

From that point on I just enjoyed myself and had a blast. The opening acts killed it, the Cool Kids killed it, it was all good. They even had a song called “88″ celebrating the year 1988. It was a killer track, and it was fun to watch all these kids where were barely born then really get into it. It was a great, great show. And it’s important to understand, the Cool Kids may pay a lot of homage to 1988 and years of hip-hop past, but they’re also very unique, modern and innovative at the same time and not just some type of retro act. It is very reminescent of hip-hop past, but at the same type it’s very much a brand new and innovative sound.

Over the weekend, I was thinking back to the show and thinking about nature of nostalgia and the pros and cons of reminescing. On one side of the argument is this Charles F. Kettering quote:

“You can’t have a better tomorrow if you are thinking about yesterday all the time.”

And to an extent is true. If you wallow in nostalgia to much, it’s almost like admitting that all the best things that were to happen in your life have already happened. It’s almost a depressing commentary on your present and your future. If you were truly generating a bunch of new, fun memories, would you still have as much time to wallow in the past? And what about the people who are nostalgic about a past they never even lived the first time around? When your nostalgic over someone else’s past? What does that say about them?

There’s also this quote from Doug Larson:

“Nostalgia is a file that removes the rough edges from the good old days.”

This is especially true. People talk about 1988 hip-hop as this golden era of peace and positivity, when it was “all love” and it was all about the art. Now while I agree that the music was incredible, and it was a golden age in that era, there’s a reason why the music was so overwhelmingly positive: Niggas was fucking crazy! Seriously, people were fucking insane. It was the height of the crack era, the hoods look like a bomb zone, it was like a Mad Max type of lawlessness except with puffy goose down jackets and flat top haircuts. Looking fly was a serious health hazard. People used to get beat up and shot for Air Jordans, herringbone chains, Triple Fat Goose jackets, 8-ball jackets, Starter jackets, Girbaud jeans, walkmans, Bally shoes. I held off on looking too fly until my senior year of high school, just to survive.

The threat of getting jumped was a daily reality. You know how bad it was? I had a friend Dave who was a little nerdy. He used to get mugged every day outside of the corner store called The Super T after buying candy (who knows why dude just didn’t stop hanging outside of there, but to each his own). Dave one day comes up with a solution. He was going to go out with no money in his pocket except exact change to buy candy. He goes to the Super T, buys his candy and on the way out gets beat up and mugged by the older kids as usual. The guys get away with his wallet and at some point check it for cash and realize there’s nothing in it. Dave gets the last laugh, right? Wrong! The guys, all indignant and shit, come back and found Dave, still in front of the Super T (Dave wasn’t too bright, as you’ve probably figured out by now) and beat him up again, this time for the audacity of not having money for them to steal! I repeat: Niggas was fucking crazy!

Which all brings me to my next point: hip-hop was so positive back then because brothas needed no provocation at all for violence. The last thing you wanted was to encourage people to be violent at hip-hop shows back then! The music wasn’t peaceful and positive back then due to the hip-hop scene being so nonviolent, it was peaceful and positive for precisely the opposite reason! Fights were always breaking out, in the crowd stick up kids were out to tax* and people were getting shot.

Crime now is nothing like back then. Malcolm Gladwell’s book The Tipping Point discusses in depth how bad crime in NY and all big cities was back then and how much crime has dropped since. It’s remarkably safe. The gentrification we have in hoods nowadays could never have been accomplished in the crack era of late 80s/early 90s New York. I see kids in black high school wearing incredibly pricy clothes without any fear. We used to have to round up a crew of 20 kids to hang out with if we dared to wear something pricey. And that’s exactly why I think hip-hop’s negative subject matter nowadays is actually deceiving: I think it’s a sign of how much more peaceful everything is now, and not the opposite. 50 Cent and Mobb Deep can talk about shooting people all day and the whole crowd is filled with everything from investment bankers to white college coeds to law-abiding black kids who are there to just party and have fun and not cause any trouble. My boy Horny Jav AKA Joovie and I were reminescing about how many times growing up we got jumped, almost got jumped, got into fights, etc. How we used to go Home Base, the only hip-hop club in town for a while in the 90s, and every time you went you knew you were risking your life. Joovie even had to run away one night while getting shot at and still came back the following week like it was nothing. That’s how common violence was, you actually became that numb and unfazed by it. One night at Home Base the performing act, Fat Joe and his old crew DITC, got into a brawl…with the bouncers and the managers of the establishment, the ones who hired them!! It really was crazy.

Once you understand what the environment was like back then, you can understand why hip-hop artists tended to focus so much on positivity and having fun and nonviolence. The last thing they needed was to put more violence in people’s heads!

Don’t get me wrong, though, I’m not badmouthing nostalgia. I think it’s a great thing. It helps us remember the good while downplaying the bad. And I think it’s not right to think of nostalgia as a sign that the best times of your life have passed. If anything, I think it’s an appreciation that you had a life filled with great times at all. Picture being one of those people who looks back on life and feels they have nothing good to look back on at all? How much more depressing must that be? In fact, studies show that people who are naturally nostalgic have high self-esteem and are less prone to depression:

Despite nostalgia’s bittersweet rap and the oft-heard advice to live in the moment, studies suggest that the occasional detour down memory lane can give your spirits a significant lift.

Thinking of good memories for just 20 minutes a day can make people more cheerful than they were the week before, and happier than if they think of their current lives, report researchers from Loyola University….

“Reminiscence can motivate you,” says Bryant. More important, it can give you “a sense of being rooted, a sense of meaning and purpose—instead of being blown around by the whims of everyday life.”

Researchers at the University of Southampton in the U.K. have also found nostalgia to be a potent mood booster. Since memories often star important people in our lives, they may give us a comforting sense of belonging. According to studies by psychologist Tim Wildschut and colleagues, people who write about a nostalgic event are more cheerful after the exercise compared with people who write about an everyday experience. The studies also show that people who write about good memories report higher self-esteem and feel more positively about friendships and close relationships.

Anyway, be sure to catch the Cool Kids live if you ever get a chance. Enjoy the weekend people.

(2 votes, average: 5 out of 5)

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