Despite graduating from college in South Carolina in 2001, I was still New York hip-hop to my core. We were entering a new millennium and as much as I tried to hold on to the ever-shrinking notion that my favorite New York hip-hop artists would always exclusively dominate the industry, the facts told a different story. The landscape of hip-hop was changing. New York was moving further away from the days of Nas being the gold standard of hip-hop and the “shiny suit” era was coming to an end.
The “shiny suit” era, whose style should largely be credited to stylist June Ambrose, was more than about clothes. Sure, June styled artists like Puffy and Mase in over-the-top baggy shiny suits, but this era was also about the utter opulence of the time. Artists had large video budgets, and nobody shied away from using them.
I remember the “Hypnotize” video with Puff and Biggie. By the way, nobody who understands the struggle of daytime minutes on your cell phone plan calls him Diddy. I digress...the video, ironically, looked like a small-scale Bad Boys movie, but instead of Will Smith and Martin Lawrence driving sports cars in Versace, we had Puff and Biggie on yachts, helicopters, and of course driving a Porsche backward. It was that level of extra.
For me, this is when hip-hop became less about creating mini vignettes and more about solidifying that broke dudes from the hood could become stars. Bonified Cristal poppin’ stars. Thinking back, I can’t remember what a single woman in that video looked like. I’m sure they were present, but they weren’t on my radar. I was attracted to the idea hip-hop was selling. Hussle hard, secure the bag, and your broke ass can also go from the hood to helicopters. Biggie was so pre-gentrified Brooklyn and Puff dripped that “I hustle hard energy.” It was an energy I was attracted to, and it just felt like “home.”
No matter where I’ve lived or visited, I always looked for “home” in the people I’ve met. For the first couple of years in undergrad, I looked for “home” in my friends. I looked for and connected with almost all the students who lived north of Virginia. Of course, there were practical reasons, like riding home together for the holidays. On those seldom occasions when I took the greyhound from South Carolina to New York, it was helpful to have a fellow northerner share that hellish 15-hour ride with me. Sometimes I would hop in the car with friends driving to D.C and then take Amtrak for the remainder of the trip. I was so broke in college that if somebody would have offered me a ride home on a skateboard for $10.00 cheaper than the bus, I might have taken it. Yet, beyond the limits of my slim ass budget, I looked for “home” because it was comforting.
By my Senior year, very few things gave me joy like dancing at some hole-in-the-wall club in Sumter, South Carolina, and the DJ playing M.O. P. or Jay-Z. Long before Jay gave us mature tracks like 4:44, he was spitting out back-to-back party anthems that would take me from bopping my head and waiting for the Qs to stop strolling, to front and center with my Bronx-native homegirl Kita. Soon as the beat dropped, we would rush the floor with a Mad Dog 20/20 concoction in our plastic red cups.
Before attending an HBCU in the South, I was indifferent when I made a new friend from the Bronx. But in that tiny club, inside of the small city of Sumter, when they played our songs, Kita became my world. We danced like we were back home in Club Cheater. We rapped every word as loud as we could, laughed, and let the Mad Dog whisper that it didn’t matter that it was Thursday night and we had class the next day. I sucked up every moment because I knew they would be short-lived. We weren’t going to get many New York songs in a southern club in 2001.
As soon as the song ended, the DJ slowed it down and played OutKast’s “So Fresh and So Clean.” That was the Alpha’s cue to hit a classic party walk, and my only chance to snatch a seat. The entire club was on the small dance floor, but to pretend like the Atlanta-based group was only resonating in this crowded club in South Carolina would be an outright lie. The truth is whether I wanted it to or not, hip-hop was changing.
