New Fangled Old Stuff With Grandpa Lou: 9/11 The Day The Party Died

I didn’t always used to be a dirty hobo. Ten years ago, I had a job as an obituary writer for the local paper, spending my days talking to funeral directors and grieving families. I was what they used to call “upwardly mobile” in that I had started as an entry level classified ad-taker and had hopes to move from obits to the police beat to movie reviews to an op-ed position, not knowing that no-one at that company gave a shit about obit writers, which is why we were part of the classified ad division to begin with.  I got to work at 8 the morning of September 11, and on the way in, I was listening to a mixtape I had made with songs from at least five years prior (because even then, they didn’t make music like they used to). It had music from Wyclef Jean, Keith Sweat, Run DMC, A Tribe Called Quest—songs that made me wanna bop my head and drive with the windows down. I had joined a rap group the year prior, and they were all about some lyrically lyrical rap that I didn’t mind listening to but wasn’t necessarily checking for.

That morning, I heard about a plane crash from the Chatty Cathys who sat near me (besides me and about 4 other guys, nearly the entire department was middle-aged housewives working part time for grocery money), and as the news kept coming in I found myself anxious and clammy, unable to work and barely able to surf the web. Keep in mind, this was one of the largest newspapers in the country with an incredibly fast broadband connection—especially for the era—and the news sites (which if I recall correctly were pretty damn limited) were giving us error messages because apparently, everyone on earth wanted to know what the hell was going on at exactly the same time.

There were reports of multiple planes, if you’ll remember, not just the four, but maybe eight or even a dozen, all flying around up there all across the country looking for a building to crash into. Being in the middle of suburban Chicago meant that few of us had any connection to the attacks per se, beside the human connection of feeling terrible about people going in to work that morning wondering what they were gonna eat for dinner that night and then having to decide whether or not to jump out of a window or just burn to death like a schmuck (for the record, I’d have jumped with very little hesitation). When a coworker explained that her son worked at the Pentagon, several of the women I worked with lost their shit and started crying and shrieking, but this lady kept a stern resolve and told everyone to shut the Fuck up and wait for news. When her son called her that afternoon, we all breathed a sigh of relief. The news came in spurts, from our limited web access and someone’s AM radio. One of the women lived a block away so she drove home and brought in an old TV with the bunny ears to pick up a local news station.

I still had to actually do work that day, so I put in my daily calls to the different funeral homes and one of the guys I talked to told me that things were gonna get crazy soon, as his colleagues had already made the decision to drive toward New York and help out any way they could. How did they plan to help? Apparently, in mass disasters such as this one, the US Army uses a refrigerator boat as a makeshift morgue, and funeral directors from all across the country were on their way to work in shifts. The unease in my stomach kept rising.

I left work and when I turned my car on, DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince’s “Summertime” came on from my mixtape, and with my heart racing, the last thing I wanted to do was to turn on the news. I reached into my gigantic book of CDs (what 90s/early 2000s car didn’t have a CD book riding shotgun?) and pulled out one of those rappity rap albums that a friend had recommended to me. Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein, an album that I bought from Hip Hop Infinity and immediately dismissed as too fucking harsh at the beginning of summer had become—from the first horn hits of Iron Galaxy, those dirty snares, grimy samples, and disgusting raps—my new bible. I felt a change in my gut; the anxiety was still there, but I didn’t necessarily want it to leave.

I didn’t go straight home that night. I decided instead to drive around a bit, to let that album seep into me, a musical heroin that pacified me and left me hungry for another hit. I scoured the web for more music, and ended up with the entire Definitive Jux catalog. I didn’t want to listen to fun time happy rap records anymore. Within a month, by the time Sage Francis’ Makeshift Patriot came out, I was enamored with this “thinking man’s rap,” and nothing could shake it. Sage of course, in his verbose way, explained everything I had been feeling that September, and I needed everyone to hear it. Most of the people I knew didn’t particularly care to hear the raps of a journalism major, shooting off his mouth about geopolitics. The cool ones though, the smart ones, were hooked by the second verse.

I never really got back into party raps. I was too affected by something that happened thousands of miles away from me, and thanks to Def Jux, that last vestige of dope New York rap, for the next few years, I always felt like I was in the thick of it. I became a news junkie in the years that followed—in the era of Dubya & Cheney I had an urge to stay on top of everything those bastards were up to and felt thoroughly hopeless the more I learned. There are no voices in popular music like they had in the Vietnam era, presumably because the corporate parents of the top radio markets would be too skittish to let you know that the party stopped a long time ago. In the end, the musicians didn’t change much then, but they did give a voice to a cause, and I’m still thankful that, when I dug deep enough, I found those voices under all the rubble.

P.S. Next week I’ll be back to making with the jokey jokes, I promise.