katherine st asaph

A different kind of hip-hop epiphany: Going to a small liberal-arts college and being confronted for the first time with the rap snob. I had avoided the guy who couldn’t conceive of genuinely appreciating Three Six Mafia for many years, and now, here he was in my backseat on the way to some, like, Deerhoof show or something. Another music-snob bummer: An awkward date during which I went to a record store and my companion totally chortled at my purchases. They were Giorgio Moroder’s From Here To Eternity and Gigolo Tony’s Cold As Ice.

“When I began blogging in 2007, I became, by virtue of being an extremely annoying presence in comments frays, and by posting screeds on my blogspot, part of a group of rap dorks who were railing against the rock-rag obsession with backpack rap, and seriously arguing for the importance of “ignorant” Southern hip-hop. In those rants, I was banging on some brash, canon-deconstructing drum, but I think I was mostly just working through the two incredibly minor embarrassments described above.