Gutbusta Rhymes
Sydney Morning Herald
Friday January 4, 2008
Aaron Timms is glad hip-hop provides jobs for overweight men.
WITH my porcelain skin, fine features and acute emotional sensitivity, I might not be the best person to describe myself accurately. Nor may I seem a likely hip-hop fan. But when a friend offers me a ticket to see De La Soul, my response is immediate. "Fo shizzle," I say, a few times, with decreasing speed, before clarifying some minutes later with the words, "Thank you, that would be lovely." I'm pimping hard but not so hard that I've lost my sense of common courtesy.I arrive at Luna Park in a pink-and-white striped Lacoste T-shirt my mum used to wear in the '80s, which captures nicely the spirit of extreme privilege from which I have been able to enjoy much of the music of the American ghetto over the years. As the three members of De La Soul - one of them thin and the other two considerably overweight - take to the stage and begin shouting a set that, from what I can tell, consists almost exclusively of songs about bird flu, the realisation hits me: hip-hop is the greatest force for employment among musically talented fat people the world has seen. In no other era of history could a fat man earn a living by doing no more than wearing baggy shorts, a heavy gold chain and a white T-shirt underneath a basketball singlet and jumping up and down on the spot shouting, "I want to hear you say, 'Leeeee oohhhhh aaa naa teeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee maairhh naaaaannnjjjjtft!'" And there is a simple explanation for this: in no other era of history has a fat man tried to earn a living wearing a white T-shirt underneath a basketball singlet and shouting, "I want to hear you say, Leeeee oohhhhh aaa naa eeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee maairhh naaaaannnjjjjtft!" This may appear fatal to my hypothesis but knowing the Renaissance, the Counter-Reformation, the Age of Enlightenment and the 19th-century Concert of Europe as I do (to HSC 2-unit standard), I feel confident in saying that if you transplanted a fat guy in a huge Charlotte Hornets singlet into any one of those eras, he wouldn't have amounted to much.The two fat guys and the one thin guy keep jumping around the stage, exhorting the crowd to "feel the hip-hop" by comparing Sydney unfavourably to Perth, where they performed last. "Perth is where the real hip-hop is," they say, apparently without irony, before launching into another song about bird flu whose main lyric is, as far as I can tell, "I've got potholes in my loins." There are a few more songs about various pandemics of the Asia-Pacific region, then the trio leave.I took the following five things from De La Soul's performance: hip-hop has done for fat men what early '80s guitar rock did for thin men; 99 per cent of hip-hop lyrics could be about bird flu; Perth is the spiritual homeland of hip-hop; somewhere in the world, someone has potholes in their loins; somewhere in the world, someone has loins made out of bitumen.aaron.timms@gmail.com
© 2008 Sydney Morning Herald