All the important decisions were made for him back in 1793 when the Louvre opened its gilded doors and said, Enculez le chic, fuck cool. At the end of the eighteenth century, neoclassicism was pop culture. Goya was a graffiti artist. Lithography was computer graphics. Mozart rocked the house sporting a Suzy-Q hair perm that’d make any time-traveling L.A. gangster rapper worth his curling iron and shower cap ask where he could cop one of them wigs, sans the powder? When Zerezo transformed the bolero, a Spanish folk dance, into French ballet, he might as well have been Crazy Legs or Rock Steady teaching break dancing to the urban doyennes, their hair in buns and their other buns in the air.
… and roller-skate, roller-skate. . and demi-plié, demi-plié.
I’ve never seen the Mona Lisa, and from what I hear it’s over-rated. But what isn’t? Da Vinci got lucky. Every genius does, especially the prolific ones. I feel the same way about Leonardo as I do about Tupac and Edgar Allan Poe. Two composers whose baggy-eyed, drug-induced prolificacy, in much the same way the millionth monkey on the millionth typewriter types Shakespeare, resulted in a few random pieces of brilliance among reams of rhyming, repetitious, woe-is-me claptrap. “The Raven,” “How Do U Want It?” “The Tell-Tale Heart,” “Dear Mama,” “California Love,”—each is a masterpiece, but when’s the last time a prep school taskmaster called upon a cardigan sweater for a recitation of “Tamerlane,” “To F — s S. O—–d” or “The Conqueror Worm”? And on that most sacred of holidays, Tupac’s birthday, every urban-contemporary radio station in the world knows not to play “Honk If U Luv Honkies,” “Thugs, Slugs and Butt Plugs,” and “Real Niggaz Get Manicures.” To me the Mona Lisa is little more than a Renaissance Playboy centerfold. Blemishes and Mediterranean hirsuteness airbrushed out, she has been retouched to the point of meaningless perfection. However, I understand the painting’s value: the allure of a piece of art that not everyone adores, but that no one hates. My record collection lacked a Mona Lisa, an apolitical, simple yet subtly complex piece of music that no one could dismiss. A beat that when you hear it at a party makes you think you’re special even though you’re dressed, speaking, drinking, dancing, and thinking exactly like everyone else. This beat that spoke directly to you and no one else. Telling you in no uncertain terms that you’re alive.
I didn’t know it then, but I was starting out on the quest for quintessential dopeness that would eventually lead me to Berlin.
Buddha had his first revelation under the bodhi tree. I had mine under the influence of Vicodin, Seconal, and what a cat named Twitchy told me were the last two quaaludes south of San Luis Obispo. Here in this DJ booth my body may shrivel up; my skin, my bones, my flesh may dissolve; but my body will not move from this booth until I have attained Enlightenment, so difficult to obtain over the course ofmany caipirinhas.
It was a fundraiser, a marathon rave where I played sixteen hours straight, spinning a depressant electronic-dance-music sutra comprising two hundred records so similar in melody and bpm they might as well have been issued on one manhole-sized platter. I was still unenlightened and I was down to my last record, a techno single that had somehow snuck into my crate the way a crop-devouring beetle slips into the country in a sack of coffee beans. Techno is the only musical genre I find completely incomprehensible. I won’t say it’s noise. Noise at least has a source. I played the record; the incessant drumbeat tomtommed throughout the club. My raga turned into a powwow. Hordes of shirtless strobe-lit frat boys bejeweled in glowing necklaces and bracelets zigzagged from medicine man to medicine man, war-whooping their cares away, while sweaty coeds danced in tiny Ojibwa circles.
Enlightened by the realization that playing records at weddings and raves wasn’t the way to enlightenment, I’d reached the end of my meditative period. When DJ Blaze, my best friend and fellow member of the Beard Scratcher record collective, arrived with the crate of records I needed, he was two hours late. His eyes were glazed and reddened from indica bud. My indica bud.
“You sure you wanted this crate?” I nodded and motioned for him to hand me a record, any record. “These white boys going to lynch your ass. Not for reckless eyeballing, but for reckless rap.” He handed me the next record in the crate, one that, despite our collective’s vow to share all resources, was one I didn’t want him to know I had. I placed it on the deck and cued it up. Back then playing New York hip-hop in an Inland Empire dance club jam-packed with white kids expecting industrial and synthpop was akin to Hernán Cortés landing on the beaches of Hispaniola. Each booming bass note was a starboard cannon blast fired over the heads of primitives and into the rain forest. “I hereby claim your heathen souls in the name of the South Bronx, the South South Bronx!” A shrapnel shower of tree bark, scratching, and slant rhyme rained down on the natives. No one danced. No one told me to stop, either.
Blaze craned his neck to look at the spinning record. The label had been peeled off but he thought maybe he could glean some information from the serial number scratched into the run-off or the width of the grooved portion. I can say what it was now, Stezo’s “It’s My Turn.”
Funk not only moves, it can remove…it’ll clear your chakras; I’ll give it that. But it isn’t enlightenment. None of it is. Jazz, classical, blues, dancehall, bhangra — it’s all scattered chapters of the sonic Bhagavad Gita.
Blaze and I drove home windows down, cool air and cool FM jazz blasting in our faces. Clifford Brown swung through “Cherokee” and I thought of all things Indian: Buddha’s pilgrimage, Jim Thorpe, Satyajit Ray, peyote, Tonto, lamb korma, extinction, overpopulation, cricket, Bob “Rapid Robert” Feller, and antique 350cc motorcycles.
Once back in my bedroom, I sought to dampen the techno echoes still reverberating in my head. To do this I consulted my Buddhas, both the oxidized green brass figurine that sat serenely inside my gohonzon and the moist, spinach-green buddha-bless sealed inside a sandwich baggie and buried at the bottom of my underwear drawer. That wasn’t the night I decided to come to Germany, but the longest journey starts with a single toke.
The weed was good. A kind blend of medicinal from the alternative clinic and the remnants of the hydroponic I mooched off Alice in Chains. I sparked the joint and made the mandatory pothead vow: “From now on, man, everything’s going to be different. Soon as I graduate from SMCC with an associate degree in library science, shit’s going to be on. The world will be my card index.”
The pot kicked in harder. Marijuana doesn’t erase my auditory flashbacks but mitigates them in much the same manner that Fats Waller’s left hand and infectious asides keep one from paying attention to the inane lyrics of those Tin Pan Alley ditties he was forced to sing.
That night, in addition to the techno, I was being tormented by my worst sonic memory. The sound of a brutal injury my endorphins prevented me from feeling but not from hearing. I’m eight. Playing Nerf hoop. Going one-on-one against the dog. I have a lane for the dunk but never get airborne. There’s only the crack of my tibia snapping in half like a giant pair of takeout chopsticks, followed by the Velcro rip of one side of the broken bone tearing away from the muscle and shooting up my leg, knocking off my kneecap with a sixty-decibel pop that sounded like a schoolboy stepping on a empty milk carton. The dog. The dog is whining, yelping, and frantically scrambling, trying to get out from under my broken body.