Listening to aggressive hip-hop as a shy suburban kid

Photo by Howard Shu

My first liked songs ever on Spotify are straight out of a nightmare for hip-hop fans, including myself now.

I sit in the back corner of the student center after school with earbuds in and physics homework sprawled out in front of me. Writing hunched over — I’m the only person at my table — one probably would have expected me to be listening to LoFi, white noise or possibly even nothing. 

Instead, Playboi Carti’s “Stop Breathing” blasts through my earbuds — the booming beat and brash lyrics are stereotypically as far as a piece of music can stray from my generally reserved personality, but it has made its way into my favorites.

While not all the songs in my playlist are as aggressive as that, almost everything is hip-hop and labeled as explicit by Spotify. My 2021 Spotify Wrapped said my top music moods were hype and bold, with my top three genres being melodic rap, pop rap and Chicago rap. 

My personality is just a bit off from that: I mostly stay within a small friend group, I do not party and I play golf, arguably the least aggressive and most suburban of any sport. I drive to school every day blasting drill rap in the car, a stark contrast to the studious senior who minutes later sits quietly in the back of AP Government or AP Physics taking notes.

I have met no one — my friends included — who initially expected my playlist to be so menacing. When other hip-hop enthusiasts scroll through my playlist, they switch back and forth between nodding in approval and cringing intensely.

It is a 575-song cesspool with some conscious rap songs thrown together and other completely meaningless ones, which just sound good in an absolutely incohesive manner. One moment I could feel deep emotion during an introspective and heartfelt song, but the next moment could consist of me mindlessly bopping my head to a painfully generic song.

Why is my music taste so disparate from my personality? I have no clue. I don’t know why I itch for intense, loud and vulgar music, when I clearly don’t have that same inclination in real life. 

I started listening to more rap instead of pop when I first got Spotify in middle school because I thought it was the cool thing to do, but to my surprise, I actually enjoyed it. For the record, I was not as cool as I thought in middle school. I was unironically turning up to “God Church” by Ricegum and “I’m Upset” by Drake. 

But amid all this chaos, there is one song from that time I will forever be proud of: “Man’s Not Hot” by Big Shaq — my first ever liked song.

I initially liked rap just because of its sound and did not really listen to lyrics, but over the years, I have actually come to appreciate it as a form of art through which artists can send important messages or evoke powerful emotions. For example, the lines “Like a liar’s pants I’m on fire,” “Say that you a lesbian, girl, me too,” “You always asking for Buddha, you a Budapest” and “You know I like to dictate things, Kim Jong” are absolute masterpieces in my playlist. 

These types of lines, along with some quite literally unintelligible — I mean genius — songs like “Bih Yah” by Mario Judah elevate me to an extremely high level of wokeness, so high that I basically ascend to heaven.

As I said, my taste in music makes no sense. Maybe I like rap because it provides more food for thought than other genres. Maybe it’s just simply a result of simply liking its sound. Or maybe my preference is best explained by this line from Tyler, the Creator’s “Corso”: “I don’t even like using the word ‘b—h’ / It just sounded cool.” 

Yeah, that’s probably it.