Food for Dinosaurs
by John Taraborelli

Well, the clock says it's time to close now

I guess I'd better go now

I'd really like to stay here all night...

Still one place to go

Still one place to go

Let me sleep all night in your soul kitchen

Warm my mind near your gentle stove

–The Doors, "Soul Kitchen"

Sometimes I worry that I'm getting old and cranky. At 27 I'm far from some wizened old codger whittling away the day in a rocking chair, but I'm talking about hip-hop here. Relatively young art that it is, hip-hop will make a man feel old before his time. Some of my all-time favorite hip-hop classics are now 20 years old - not bad for a supposed fad people once thought would come and go faster than disco. It's a culture born just over 30 years ago, and the fact that I've been around for most of it makes me a dinosaur in hip-hop years.

The thing is, I just don't understand these kids these days, what with the 50 Cent and the Soulja Boy and the T.I. and all that noise. As hip-hop has ascended to commercial and cultural dominance, more people than ever have had a hand in its destiny, and many of them don't share the same reference points as those of us who remember when "biting" (copying someone else's style) was frowned upon and not the Industry Standard. The consequence is that a cranky old coot like me barely recognizes the revolution that was once plastered all over his bedroom walls. Perhaps hip-hop has passed me by, because I just don't get Soulja Boy.

"They're killing us with this Soulja Boy shit," says Don King, artistic director of the Black Rep, and one half of the turntable duo responsible for Soul Kitchen, the Sunday night old school hip-hop party at Jerky's. Apparently I'm not the only disenfranchised citizen of something we used to lovingly call Hip-Hop Nation, nor am I the only man feeling weary beyond his years.

"I taught a class at Brown University called 'From Be-Bop to Hip-Hop: The Social Evolution of a Music,'" recalls King. "That's when I realized I was a dinosaur – and I'm thirty-seven."

Dinosaurs still need to eat, so King and fellow Black Rep DJ Mikedelick started Soul Kitchen, one of Providence's only sources for honest-to-goodness hip-hop vitamins and minerals. He tells me, "It's for those of us who feel like hip-hop went in another direction that we may not be able to really understand, that we may not necessarily feel."

"I feel bad about it," he elaborates, "I feel like I'm turning into our parents, but I can't listen to this shit. I can't follow it right now. So I'm not in a position to judge it in a critical way. Is lyricism even a component right now in this thing?"

Once upon a time, a man seeking his fortune in the rap game actually had to be able to rap at least somewhat competently. Furthermore, a premium was placed on performers who elevated the art with complex, soulful lyrics delivered with impeccable skill. In 1987, every hip-hop fan knew the words to Eric B and Rakim's "I Ain't No Joke": "Write a rhyme in graffiti in every show you see me in / Deep concentration cuz I'm no comedian / Jokers are wild if you wanna be tamed / I treat you like a child then you're gonna be named / Another enemy, not even a friend of me / 'Cause you'll get fried in the end if you pretend to be / Competing 'cause I just put your mind on pause / And I can beat you when you compare my rhyme wit yours." Twenty years later everybody is rapping along with Soulja Boy's "Crank That (Soulja Boy)": "Soulja Boy off in this ho / Watch me crank it / Watch me roll / Watch me crank dat Soulja Boy / Then Super Man dat ho." How is someone who grew up on the former supposed to relate to the latter?

"I'm not even buying albums," King comments. "What's the last album you bought?"

I'm not sure. Similarly, I struggle to name an artist from the new generation of hip-hop who truly moves me. While we discuss this, King grabs a napkin and begins jotting down names: Talib Kweli, Black Thought, Pharoahe Monch. These three MCs are 32, 35 and 40 respectively; Soulja Boy is 17. When I turn the question back around on King, even he seems surprised by the silence. We are old and out of touch with hip-hop - perhaps there's no way around it.

"Soul Kitchen," however, is a place for the old and cranky to relive the days when they were young and every new hip-hop record sounded like something fresh and exciting. It almost feels like a club - not in the sense of a nightclub, but a social club. Those of us at Jerky's on Sunday night aren't hard-partying kids looking to bump and grind to latest hits, we're grown folks who want to have a drink and listen to the music we fell in love with again. We are the Fans that Hip-Hop Left Behind, but at least there's still one place to go. As King puts it, "The foundation of the Soul Kitchen is playing soulful hip-hop. We're playing inspiring hip-hop."

Maybe I'm being a bit melodramatic and wistful, but anybody who came up in hip-hop's golden age knows what I'm talking about. We have a different set of reference points that are nearly impossible to recognize in what passes for hip-hop today. When I requested Grand Puba's "360˚," a relatively obscure party jam from 1992, there was no question that Mikedelick had it. Those are the subtle connections that make a hip-hop dinosaur like me feel like I have a home. So even if I'm am getting old and cranky at the tender age of 27, at least I'm not alone.

Soul Kitchen | Sunday nights at Jerky's | 71 Richmond St | www.myspace.com/jerkysbar