Читать книгу A Guest in the House of Hip-Hop - Mickey Hess - Страница 13

Four

HIP-HOP COMES TO CAMPUS

MF Grimm arrived at campus in the back seat of a taxi cab, having taken a 300-dollar ride from New York City to my campus more than halfway across New Jersey. “Professor Hess!” he said. “It made my mom’s day to hear that I’m speaking at a college. So, this is embarrassing, but I don’t have any cash. Can you cover the cab fare? I promise I’ll pay you back.” Grimm had waived his meager speaking fee. The creative-writing club paid for his flight from Los Angeles, and the American Studies program put him up in a hotel, but I paid the ornery cab driver with cash from my own pocket. What are you doing? I asked myself. This man is a stranger who lives on the other side of the country. You will never see this money again. I was ashamed of myself for thinking that way, for worrying Grimm would steal my three hundred dollars even as I worried I’d stolen much more from him. I thought of his song “Taken,” where he borrows Rakim’s old line “Ladies and gentlemen, you’re about to see/a pastime hobby about to be … taken to the maximum” but changes that last part to “taken away from us.” I worried I’d taken hip-hop out of its proper context and that teaching hip-hop to college students was just yet another way to remove it from where it began.

Grimm captivated my students with a talk that ranged from his experiences riding on top of Mr. Snuffleupagus as a child actor on Sesame Street to recording MF DOOM’s album Operation: Doomsday next door to a meth lab. He autographed some books, then I volunteered to personally drive him to the very clean and affordable New Jersey Transit train that would take him back to New York. I waved goodbye, then I opened my new copy of Grimm’s memoir, Sentences, to read the inscription: “To Dr. Hess—Thanks for keeping hip-hop alive.” I couldn’t pat myself on the back for it—even Vanilla Ice had his black supporters—but I found it encouraging that a rapper saw the value in a college course on rap. A week later, Grimm called to ask for my address so he could mail me my three hundred dollars.