Nostalgia for a Time Yet to Come

By Liz Przybylski (Liz.przybylski@ucr.edu)

Maybe you’ve had this experience, once or many times, when a song moves you into a different time. Compelling research already exists on music and memory, how it triggers recall much more profoundly than trying to remember without sensory details. I like to revisit the moment from the movie CoCo when the title character’s dementia clears and she can recall her father, thanks to the strummed guitar melody “Remember Me.” In my listening, I’m so struck by how a set of songs by T-Rhyme trigger my memories that I want to invite you into that series of synapses, because they don’t just make me remember the past, they make me nostalgic for the future.

Hear me out.

Memory is fickle. And I can only really hear through my own ears, though you and I and we can play with different ways to listen if we really reflect on how what we bring to listening influences what we hear, and open ourselves to hearing how other people listen to the same music.  In this post, I’ll work between my experiences as a listener and interviews I got to do with rapper T-Rhyme. By listening to both of our perspectives, I want you to get to feel my future nostalgia, and hear where it comes from.

Rewind

Even though I’ve placed my music purchases from Bandcamp in my larger digital music library on my laptop, sometimes I still like to go through the platform’s “my collection” page. I get a trace of the feeling that I used to get in the days when I would flip through my CD cases, the album artwork reminding me of when I bought a particular title and inviting me in for another listen. When I look at the digital image cover for T-Rhyme’s Diary of a Mad Red Woman, its tactility appeals to me, especially because of the distance a screen can create.  

The sketched eyes on the rhyme notebook stare right at me. Torn scraps of notebook paper show rhymes that were kept, or balled up and thrown away. Those tiny torn holes from spiral binding take me back to my own youth of writing and discarding, little flecks of paper ending up on the carpet or the classroom floor when I ripped out a page to start afresh. When I listen, T-Rhyme’s first track takes me back, too. “First Entry” sets up the album, and also invites me to ask, as the rapper does, “what is it you’d like to say to your inner child?” As I listen to the digital playback, the spoken voice urges, “just let it all out.”

This album from 2016 looks backward, and it does more than that: it connects those memories into the future tense. The rapper takes time to recount challenges she faced in her teens and twenties on the song “Start Over,” linking these experiences to feelings and subsequent actions. Then the storyteller’s lyrics share how she heard a voice asking, “Do you want a fresh start”?  Throughout the chorus, the rapper narrates a present that builds from the past and is moving into new music and a future of possibility, repeating, “Once was lost, but now I’m found /Pray to my creator, get me out this ground/ Cause I’m a start over, let the world go round/ Focus all my energy into fantastic sounds.” Like the lines that were kept in the spiral-bound journal, some words, feelings, and ideas, come along into the present and will stick around for the future.

As I keep listening, I pay attention to the rapper. Maybe it’s the notebook that focuses me more on her words then on the fitting beat, which on this song is produced by Mils. I open my ears to let in T-Rhyme’s story and follow her across the arc of this song, and the album. She raps, “Got so many layers, I peel them back slow.” What are those layers? What happens as they peel back? I hear them as layers of memory, stories upon stories, inviting the listener to pay attention to what each piece adds to the whole.

Memory

The music videos add still more layers for Diary of a Mad Red Woman. Here’s what I see: The strong black and white imagery of the album cover, with pops of red, continues through the video for the second song on the album. I watch the music video for “Kill H.E.R.” and feel memory flicking back and forth: a cityscape appears in black and white, as does the rapper herself, shifting rapidly between a realistic monochrome image and the eerie opposite coloration of a film negative. At each chorus T-Rhyme repeats, “If only I knew then just what I know now/ I swear I would never let the light burn out.”

Different times overlap through the song, which the music video helps to show through this play with color, black and white, and the fuzzy haze of memory. The rapper looks to her past and tell us she has learned something in the present, while another woman appears and disappears on the screen. If this is a younger version of the narrator’s self, she acts out the memories that have taught hard-won lessons, a presence who fades though her impact remains.

“Fade out the track, I rewrote her song,” T-Rhyme raps. And yes, music can do this. It can bring a story back over and over, or we can nudge the notes up or down, rewrite the beat, and it feels changed, it becomes different. This is what I love about a musical loop: it focuses my mind on the most minute of changes, or when the rhythms, pitches, timbres, and lyrics stay exactly the same, then I focus on feeling what alters in me with every repetition.  “Bloodshot eyes, hip hop is dead,” T-Rhyme raps, then the chorus returns, the same but not the same.

Poetry returns in the final verse, and both women meet. This time the chorus can say what the rapper knows now, that not only is hip hop not dead, but it saves stories, it saves lives.

Listening in Conversation

I was left with lingering questions about how these songs connect to memories, and think forward into lessons learned, so I talked with T-Rhyme about her creative process. She explained to me that for her, music can be a way to work through things, and invite listeners to connect in vulnerability. This is especially the case for “Kill H.E.R.,” which tells a story of how music saves its makers.

And the women who connect across time in the music video? Yes, the one acting opposite T-Rhyme stands in for her younger self, T-Rhyme explained, and is also the rapper Valkyrie putting her own spin on things through her presence, as she does in the cypher Tribe Called Queenz.

I spend a lot of time thinking about cyphers, listening or watching or experiencing, feeling ways that circles of rappers or breakers and audiences connect in and through them. I’ve listened to reflections on what made Tribe Called Queenz special. On one reel in my brain, I hear the rappers performing, and on another T-Rhyme’s narration of the process and sound. The reels come together like two film projectors aiming at a single screen.

For me, listening is never just about a single song or a single album. One brings to mind another, and I chain them together in my own playlist, connected through a shared artist or lyric or sample. The collaboration between Valkyrie and T-Rhyme on “Kill H.E.R.” makes me think of their work with Pooky G and Jaide on Tribe Called Queenz.

As T-Rhyme narrates it, Pooky G is “very much about street knowledge as well as one of the best at storytelling, and hard spitters that I know… She gives me Foxy Brown vibes, Lady of Rage vibes, she really has a super strong presence.”

When I listen to Pooky G in this video, her references to movies and music take me back to my own earlier years. I listen to her rap the lyrics “a league of their own” and unapologetically take up sonic space, just as she gets right up into the camera’s face and takes center screen. As her verse continues, she raps that she might be misunderstood. I hear this as “M!ssundaztood” like Pink, but like the rocker, it seems to me that Pooky G is taking her own creative control. These pop culture moments, a movie about women taking up space in the world of professional sports on their own terms, of a pop musician working to land her own alt-rock artistic voice at the dawn of the 21st century: these were moments of my childhood and adolescence where something better for girls seemed possible.

I hear that possibility in Jaide’s verse, too. From the start, Jaide kicks off her verse nodding to her collaborators, saying “let’s get it, ladies.”

Why don’t I listen to more rappers who speak to their experiences of motherhood, of being minimized as female parents, and of what they do to be taken seriously in this world? I listen to the music as Jaide raps, “I came into the game, gave ‘em something unexpected/ Thought I was gone ‘cause I gave birth, but I resurrected.” Her rap style is rapid fire. A quick reference to Al Capone shows her staying power, and she layers on meaning as she reminds listeners “I never dumb it down just to get more love.”

As a kid, I was hungry for smart, forward-thinking storytelling. The heroes I followed were girls who had been dismissed as inconsequential, too young or too poor or too female to have anything important to offer; how much more exciting, then, when they used their voices and their whole bodies to do their thing in spite of naysayers. Sometimes, the word “ladies” can feel dismissive, but here I perceive it hearkening to “Ladies First,” which I’ve heard Queen Latifah and Monie Love rap more times than I can count. Though I came to it after its original release, that line, “Stereotypes, they got to go,” was something I was rallying for. What would it have been like to follow Queen Latifah into that future, the one in which her teenage self takes the mic, and people love it, and there’s room for more and more musicians behind her? She raps, “I break into a lyrical freestyle/ Grab the mic, look into the crowd and see smiles/ Cause they see a woman standing up on her own two/ Sloppy slouching is something I won't do.” Ladies first indeed.

With her fellow rappers, the world Jaide speaks into existence here is one in which she easily rises above being hollered at in the club, where “The woman that you see/ Speaks intelligently/ With her own cash and her own car/ Earned independently.” And to take this just one step further, what if this self-made rapper never had to defend herself against unwanted attention when she went out at all? This is a future that I miss.

T-Rhyme listens for this lyricism in her own way. She explains of Jaide, “She's deep. She has really clever wordplay.” With praise for this rapper as well, T-Rhyme details, “Jaide’s cadence is crazy. The way that she's able to spit. And she has a really dope singing voice, too.”

On her verse, Valkyrie’s internal rhymes land like drum beats to my ears, “mimic,” “gimmick, “image,” “vivid.” When I listen again, I hear her rapped lyrics weave together images from a courtroom scene, “witness,” “case closed,” “locking up,” as well as an extended metaphor for killing it, lyrically and otherwise.

Across these lyrics, I hear Valkyire rap about a space where “the sickest women in this business” rhyme together, and people listen. Imagine that for musicians, and for audiences. This is a music scene I feel nostalgia for, one I would have been excited to grow into.

Nostalgia for the Future

T-Rhyme has effusively supportive words for each of these rappers, and spends much time praising Valkyire for her skills as a “really good storyteller. T-Rhyme applauds Valkyrie’s intelligence, calling her “genius when it comes to cracking jokes, or diss lines.” Listening back now, T-Rhyme reflects that Valkyrie gave a strong performance in this video, and “she's just been absolutely killing it ever since.”

I have to ask a couple times to get T-Rhyme to elaborate as much about her own rapping as she does about her collaborators’ styles. She does identify some of her own professional strengths, which I appreciate. She says, “I like to think that I'm clever too. I come up with some pretty good metaphors.”

When T-Rhyme says this, I agree and think of a line of hers from the song “Would You”: “Comprehend my metaphors/ Hip hop forever more/ Give me TLC/ I’m diggin’ on you like a record store.” And she does. She punches “De La Soul” to the same rhythm as “C’est la vie.” She shouts out the Wu Tang Clan and Mary J. Blige, and takes me back to the middle school notebook in my mind: “Keepin’ it true until the end of time/ I write your name before the plus and follow it with mine.”

Coming back to “Tribe Called Queenz,” I am struck by how the rappers support each other, walk together, back each other up, and end up together in the radio station studio, vibing as a group.

This could have been what I was looking forward to.

At the same time that I recall the tactility of music listening from my middle school and teenage years, that I feel the scratch of plastic CD cases on my fingers and hear the click of that case opening, I recall the pleasure of writing with a new brightly colored pen on a page of notebook paper, and I yearn for a future that wasn’t, or wasn’t yet.

Taken together, these songs open up a space of connection. The cypher offers a promise of sorority without malice, support for each other even when delivered with the sharp attitude of hip hop wit. These spaces are too few and too fleeting, at least in my life experience so far.

And on T-Rhyme’s Diary, I appreciate that the rapper tells her inner child what she needed to hear and perhaps didn’t at the time.

Over years, I’ve had countless conversations with friends and fellow musicians, where people have told me some version of the story that they are providing the environment for pop music learning they wish they had been able to have as students. I get that: we make what we wish we’d had, and hope that folks we offer it to now can find some value in it.

What would it have been like if more kids of my generation had been able to launch from notebooks of poems into a supportive cypher like Tribe Called Queenz and then from that cypher into a music industry that valued women as much those rappers valued each other?

What could it mean, as I stretch my memory back through the materiality of a musical adolescence, tapes lost, CDs scratched, Nike high tops worn out and notebooks relegated to the recycling bin, that the future my friends and I craved still has yet to arrive? And what work can we do to make that future we longed for then into something that might yet come to pass?