I tried getting my husband to go with me, but wild horses wouldn’t have dragged him so I forced a friend’s son to come instead. I’m talking about going to see Tyler, The Creator at the O2. That’s Tyler, The Creator, the magnificent hip hop artist who was banned from the UK in 2015 by then Home Secretary Theresa May on the grounds of supporting homophobia and acts of terrorism.
What, you’ve never heard of him? Well, that’s clearly because you are not as down with the kids as me. I may be a middle-class boomer from Chiswick but I’m also a raging hip hop fan and I know my stuff. Hip hop, drill, rap, trap: you name it, I love it – the more guns, the more swear words, the more misogyny the better. You call Hamilton rap? Oh, please. (Or as they say on my favourite ever TV series, Top Boy: ‘Say less.’)
If you regard yourself as eccentric then the chances are you are not, but this is how I think of my love of hip hop: an idiosyncrasy, a quirk, an achingly cool quality that gives me an edge over my friends and hopefully makes my children proud to be related to me, too.
What a fall to earth, then, when I arrived at the O2 on Monday to see Tyler on his UK tour. Having braced myself to fight through the hoodied, metal grilled hordes, I promptly discovered how gallingly well my friend’s son and I actually blended in. Swathes upon swathes of excited, white middle-class teens and their mums. Lots of mums. Nattering to each other about bad A-level choices and where to find the rosé. As my friend’s son, who is in his late thirties, commented, I might have been the brownest person there (I’m half Indian). He was being arch, obviously – there were plenty of black people in the audience, but as Tyler himself cooly noted, they were conspicuously in the minority among the ‘sea of Caucasians’ he looked out at from the stage. The sea of Caucasians who knew every word of every song and stood up singing them throughout.
I had the time of my life. Tyler really does put on the most extraordinary show, with the campy Fay Wray hairdo and the Hannibal Lecter mask and the crazy Colonel Gaddafi outfit with the skew-whiff scrambled eggs on the shoulders, not to mention all those heartbreaking minor chords to offset the hardcore beats.
Having braced myself to fight through the hoodied hordes, I just found lots of mums nattering to each other about bad A-level choices and where to find the rosé
But what slightly took the edge out of hearing some of my personal favourites like ‘IFHY’ (yes, it stands for ‘I Fucking Hate You’) was realising how mainstream Tyler had obviously become. This is obviously a blind spot for me. I forget that perhaps I’m not so idiosyncratic after all and mainstream pop doesn’t mean what it meant when I was growing up in the 1970s: Mud and Leo Sayer and that godawful Abba and so forth. Nowadays mainstream means Tyler with the swears bleeped out if it is played on national radio.
My other mistake is thinking that my children would be impressed by my edgy taste. Not one comment from any of them on the brilliant videos I kept posting throughout the night on the family WhatApp thread. Curious, since my younger son is the one who introduced me to him in the first place.
Obviously I’m incapable of learning my lesson. It was the same back in 2014 when a new band emerged (made up of boys from Latymer) called Jungle. Do you remember their hit song ‘Busy Earnin’’? That was the anthem of the summer. Their problem, their big problem, was that all the mums loved them too. It became the song the Whispering Angel classes danced round their kitchen islands to, including, I’m ashamed to say, me.
The death knell of mum. Once she loves your music, that’s the clarion call to stop listening to it. Maybe I should direct my attentions elsewhere. What’s really down with the kids now is food. That’s what it feels like on Instagram anyway. Sorry Tyler, but what’s edgy now might be the perfect Japanese sando. I pray you don’t know what that means. I certainly didn’t til today.
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