So I’m taking it easy, thoroughly enjoying my pre-dinner
snack of orange pineapple juice and a Ziploc bag full of jelly
beans, when my playlist jumps to A Tribe Called Quest’s
“If the Papes Come.” As is always the case with Tribe,
I immediately feel a good deal cooler than I have any right to. I
may already be a bit behind on my schoolwork, but with the sudden
spike in blood sugar and overall groove level, I’d say
I’m doing okay.
And then, right smack in the middle of his verse, front-man
Q-Tip rhymes, “Legally I’ll sip when I turn 21.”
I almost choke on the grapefruit-flavored confection I’ve
been carefully savoring. Sometimes these songs are so timeless you
forget that actual people had to get together and record them. A
minute later, All Music reminds me that, yes, he was 19 when the
song was released, fresh out of high school along with the rest of
his fellow Tribesmen. Not only that, but Tip and company had been
sipping legally for only a few months when the ground breaking,
classic LP “The Low End Theory” dropped in September of
1991.
Nothing kills your sense of self-worth like comparing yourself
to great people when they were your age. And it’s a
ridiculously unfair exercise, but still. At my age, someone was
once putting the finishing touches on one of the most sophisticated
and assured reinventions of pop music in recent history. I’m
a third-year English student who’s still hung up on Disney
movies and precedes any answer to a career-oriented question with
an automatic deep breath and a nervous laugh.
Other works of mature, focused popular music have been created
by artists no older than your average UCLA undergraduate student.
Van Morrison could have been a senior when he recorded
“Astral Weeks.” Same with Stevie Wonder and
“Talking Book;” not only that, he was 12 when he
recorded “Fingertips.” Hip-hop heads like to point out
Nas was barely 20 when “Illmatic” was released, but
that one doesn’t bother me so much because over the years
I’ve become convinced that he was simply channeling some sort
of higher being. No mortal could flow like that.
It’s not that I have delusions of grandeur or anything.
But you can hear on these records the extent to which their
creators had everything figured out, and that’s something of
which to be envious. So I take a sick comfort in watching the poor
souls that the music industry chews up and spits out these days at
a young age ““ the Jesse McCartneys, Ashlees and J-Kwons of
the world. Sure, they may manage to stick around, have hordes of
adoring fans, and some good bank rolling in, but they’ve
already more or less prostituted themselves to a fickle society
obsessed with youth. That’s not much of a life (at least
that’s what I tell myself). I figure it’s better to be
in the limbo I am now than get started on the wrong track too
early.
So the next time I see LeBron James hanging half a hundred on
some of the best basketball players in the world, I’m not
sweating it. We’re not all born with wondrous God-given
talents. I still have over a year to enjoy being a college student,
and everything that entails: reality TV, an unreasonable number of
road trips, late-night conversations about nothing in particular.
Plus, I got a bag of jelly beans with my name on it. You really
couldn’t ask for much more.
E-mail Lee at alee2@media.ucla.edu.