Hip Hop Is Coming Back With a Vengeance

I swear this baby is going to come out wearing gold chains and high-top Nike sneakers. Is she influencing my mind and tastes, or am I really changing?  
 
Instead of craving food in the past few months of my pregnancy, I've been craving music. But lately I've been craving hip hop music. Call it the pickles and ice cream of my pregnancy.  
 
I have always liked a little bit of hip hop, but never made it a priority to buy hip hop albums. I would listen to artists like Kanye West or Snoop Dogg occasionally but I always considered indie rock to be my main musical interest.  
 
This would not be the first time in my life that I have had a love affair with hip hop. When I was 16, I listened to my A Tribe Called Quest and Black Sheep albums every day. I hung out in friends’ basements and listened to Dr. Dre’s “The Chronic” and Snoop Dogg’s “Doggstyle.” I remember torturing my parents with my 3rd Bass tape on an eight-hour drive one summer to Richmond. By the end of the trip, my mom was quoting lines from the song "Eye Jammie," a skit about a kid in school who gets a hard piece of bread stuck in his eye while baking in home economics class ("Ohh, my eye/ I can feel the blood running down my eye/ Mr. Bressle, could you please get me a napkin for my eye!”).  
 
But my hip hop fun ended when my brother committed what I refer to now as the Great Hip Hop Squash Down of 1993. I came home from work one day only to find my hip hop CD's on my bedroom floor, smashed to pieces. When I asked my brother about it later, he said "that crap sucks. You shouldn't be listening to that!" My brother tried to act as if he was doing some noble deed, by saving me from mind-rotting music. But really, he just wanted to see me get upset. I didn’t buy another hip hop album until I was 23.

Now the hip hop is coming back with a vengeance. I bought tickets to see Jay-Z in State College a month ago. I didn’t fit in with the rest of the hip hop college crowd, but that didn’t stop me. I went to Target and bought the new Jay-Z  and Kid Cudi albums the day they were released.  

YouTube has become my foray into a portal of lost music from the past. I’ve watched countless Tupac Shakur videos, Ice Cube, Eminem, and Kid Cudi. I wait for my husband to go to work, and then I obsessively scan the Internet for videos. As soon as I hear him pull into the driveway, the YouTube surfing stops. It’s not that I’m trying to hide my music choice du jour from him, but I imagine he would think the incessant search for old hip hop videos is insane.  

My new hip hop albums co-exist on the book shelf with my Smiths, Pixies, and Pavement albums. My daughter thinks I’m becoming schizophrenic these days. We could be listening to Jay-Z one week and the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs the next. I just tell her it’s my pregnancy’s flavor of the month.