Paris - The Devil Made Me Do It
As a 13 year old suburban kid carpooled to a prep school on Detroit’s west side in 1990, I was a YO! MTV raps watching, Starter jacket wearing white kid enamored with black culture. On one school-sanctioned Cedar Point trip I heard beats blaring from a classmate’s headphones. I didn’t know him, but I asked to check out his tape anyway. He looked at his friends and laughed, and handed me the tape. This was my introduction to Paris.
Over the next hour I listened intently to the kind of rap that I didn’t hear on the "urban" radio stations or see on Fab 5 Freddy’s weekend show. At the time this was raw shit. What struck me first was the production. In between the standard, though well crafted, sample-based trax were cuts composed of hard beats over dark synth lines, with some rock guitars thrown in underneath on occasion. Paris’ cool clear confidence as a rapper as he dropped Black Panther/Nation of Islam politics made it easy to understand at first listen what he was talking about. It didn’t take long to understand why those kids got a laugh out of me asking to listen to this extremely pro-black music. Initially a bit embarrassed in my skin, I was soon feeling gratious for the opportunity to get something a little deeper than the NWA that some of the other white kids were hip to.
I listenened to the album from beginning to end, occasionally rewinding my walkman for a second listen to the backward drum loop and evil funk bassline of "The Devil Made Me Do It," the smoothed out Sade sample based "Mellow Madness," and the DJ vanity track "I Call Him Mad." Inspired, I returned the tape and bought my own copy the next day.
In following listens over the following months, I got a firmer grip of the politics of the record. As an introduction to the philosophy of black militance, it gave me a new framework for interpreting the things I saw as a 13 year old whose time was divided beween the black city and the white suburbs.
Two years later I started my first real job. I remember the first day at work at that regional big box/grocery store which was soon to hold its grand opening. Two faces stood out among the group of us in our orientation. The first was a beautiful brunette who I immediately had adolescent designs on. The other was the guy whom I percieved to be my main competion in this pursuit. Shortly we were all friends.
Jason was a product of an interracial marriage and the only guy at work who I could talk music with. In one such discussion, the Paris record came up, and I loaned him my copy. A few days later Jason showed up to work with bad news. His Dad, who was black, had seen my CD in Jason’s room and succeeded in short order in crushing it with the heel of his shoe. Being married to a white woman, I suppose I could understand his objection. After all, Paris’ attitude towards whites is, shall we say, unforgiving, and I’m pretty sure that the Nation of Islam’s stance on interracial unions isn’t all that different than the KKK’s. But the strength of Jason’s Dad’s display of disapproval was shocking and taught me something about race and the way people think about it in this country. The wounds of racism are still being inflicted and I suppose seeing some Black Panther propaganda in his son’s room was a stinging salt for a Dad who couldn’t forget it.
This was 13 years ago now, and Jason and I have lost touch. (though I’m still friends with the brunette), but I finally repurchased the album (gotta go to amazon, you won’t easily find this in stores these days) I’m struck by how much it influenced my political development. At 13 and just learning to see the world through my own eyes, this stuff went straight to my head, and today I’m as progressive a guy as you’re likely to meet in a given day, and I feel all the better for it. But what’s really amazing to me as I look back is that it was the sound (which still stands up today, by the way) that drew me in, and eventually opened my mind to some radical new ideas that may have a lot to do with the way I think about the world today.
BEATS OPEN MINDS.
