Snap Crackle Hip Hop – or how the rocker boy went rap for a night

After an 8 hour marathon drive from San Francisco to Eugene (only made possible by my recent discovery of sugar-free Red Bull) I arrived to my tousled apartment at around 4:30 to find a message from my manager at work. She wanted to see me as soon as I got in so I hurried over expecting at worse a write up for some inane mistake like putting too much mocha powder in a hot chocolate. Instead, I got a pink slip after braving the mind-numbing horrors of interstate 5.
Completely crushed by my first firing I called Claudia looking for some sense of human existence to take my mind off the gnawing self-doubt that was running up and down my spine like a case of shivers after a swim in a cold glacial lake. She invited me to the hip-hop show, and it was only because of my desperate countenance that I decided to attend. The show was not what I expected.
We drank tequila sunrises that I had bottled in some Snapple containers, and after a few mediocre acts, and quite a bit of tequila my disdain for the genre was quite dissolved. A young guy took the stage and after performing some intense, but fairly run of the mill hip-hop, the mood of his act shifted dramatically. His DJ took a breather while he poured emotion into what could be easily construed as an extremely terse bit of beat poetry. The moment was full of charged electrons and suddenly I felt very much connected to what people saw in hip-hop or beat poetry or whatever it was that left the crowd in a hushed and stunned silence. It wasn’t any freestyle parlor-trick, or anything bling-bling; it was pure, simple, raw and beautifully delicate.