Back in the day I was the kid that would stick by the stereo and sit and listen to music. If I liked a song I would find a tape to record it on so I could play it back to back. I had my local radio station’s phone number saved just so I could call in and request a song and I’d wait there for 30 minutes to an hour just to listen to that one song. Imagine that, right? Waiting 30 to 60 minutes for a song that only lasted three minutes in most cases. In the second grade, I would call 98.5 just to request, “Angel” by Shaggy every night at 7pm. All in the hopes of having my crush hear it and know I was thinking of her. She never knew that I was requesting it, nor did I say I was dedicating it to her. I always assumed that music was so strong that if she was listening at that exact time, I would go into school the next day and she’d say, “thanks for requesting that song for me” and then we’d get married and have kids and all that jazz. The whole shebang. I would shower every night at 8pm with the smaller boombox just to hear the top eight at eight. I would challenge myself just to try and memorize and there were times I would call just to see if I would be the lucky winner of whatever I couldn’t go to. The rest of elementary school was a strange transition, I started liking hip-hop because of a new crush that was all in love with Nelly. So, I did the right thing and started learning all the lyrics without Google, just by repetition. Fourth grade was also the first year I had my parents buy me my first pair of white Air Force Ones. This was when I realized that there was different genres of music and not all kinds of music was very “cool” for kids. Hip-hop became my only type of music for a little bit and I became obsessed. Tupac, Biggie, Nas, Bone Thugz, and I especially liked Will Smith when he was the Fresh Prince. I got lost in the rabbit hole of trying to figure out all the old school rap and hip-hop that was influencing the new school at the time. Keep in mind, this was all happening before and during middle school.

My elementary school and middle school could not have been much different from each other. I had a zone variance the year before I went to my middle school, and I was being separated from most of my classmates when we finished 5th grade. While this was probably a good thing for me at the time, I was not a big fan. I went from a super diverse elementary school where most of my best friends were black and poor white kids, to a middle school that had white kids with big houses and all that. Middle school is what I like to call, “the lost years” because as everyone else had some Green Day album cover in their binder, I was in band class and discovered more jazz and classical music. So now, my playlist consisted of Bach, NWA, and Louis Armstrong. I refused to listen to Green Day until I was a Junior in high school, because those kids that listened to Green Day were all douches anyway and I didn’t want to fit in with them.

High school is when it all started to come together and my Limewire times really excelled. I was super good at searching songs and downloading the right one to avoid all the viruses. I would stay at home and only download music at all times. I discovered urban latin music, like Reggaeton and all that. I went to my first party where I met my first girlfriend and we danced Reggaeton all night, I even complimented her saying that she smelled nice even though that was flat out lie because everyone in that house was sweating and smelled like wet dog. While I did start listening to all sorts of music (even country) in high school, hip-hop made a huge jump for me. I started listening to J. Cole, Wale, Kid Cudi, Kendrick, Nipsey, and Drake before they got huge. I loved all of their music. When I say that I framed my entire life from them, I mean it. Wale always talked about heartbreak, and I felt that probably more than I should have. J. Cole talked about The Come Up and The Warm Up and after listening to his stuff I was easily convinced that my time was coming and that everyone else was sleeping on me. Kid Cudi wrapped up shaping me because he helped me relate to nobody understanding me and being “a man on the moon”.

Just by looking back on this, I realize that music was a bigger impact on me than anything else was. I think I always felt judged by liking sad music more than I like happy music, but looking back at it now, I think that sad music always spoke more truth to me than happy music. Sometimes, it made me realize that even if I thought I had it bad, it could always be worse. While this whole pandemic is going wild, I continue to have faith because new music is still being released that I like and that just reminds me that everything will be alright.

-CG