True, but in return for her smiling at my memes and nodding politely at my rambling about my various Stars, both Wars and Trek, I stop what I’m doing to watch her capybara TikToks and try to remember what she tells me about the history of Hiphop beefs and how to guess the geographic origin of rappers.
This is what marriage is, and it works. 😂
Yeah and sometimes it just rubs off on each other, like I was never the gardening guy but her enthusiasm about it was infectious and now I find myself getting excited about how many tomatoes a single plant can grow or what beautiful colors the tiny corn poppies can produce.
And the other way around - a friend gave me a ‘Quark’ shirt for my birthday and my girlfriend said ‘ugh ferengies are so ugly, couldn’t he have given you a Spock shirt, I like him more’ and I was soooo proud of her.
You just learn to enjoy their excitement about their boring shit until you start to share the excitement and you start to enjoy the thing too.
Well, first of all, I’m actively bad at it, because I mostly listen to liberal white men trying to reclaim country (and country-adjacent) music from the Nashville machine, but it comes down to hiphop being a fairly regional artform in a lot of ways.
Artists anywhere can adopt any style of course, but the local scenes can vary quite a bit, so what bubbles up commercially from a given region tends to match what they’re known for. Subject matter, slang, tempo, sampling & instrumentation, even accents can give you clues. Sometimes it’s fairly easy, like “Chopped and screwed” just screams Houston, with the vocals slowed down to the point where the pitch is noticeably affected. Atlanta rap, especially from the early two thousands, often has a bit more a party vibe and gained popularity as a bit of a reaction to the grimness of some east coast and west coast gangster rap from the preceding era. If somebody talks about “ghost ride the whip” that means there’s a reasonably good chance they’re from the San Francisco Bay area, where that’s a part of the local culture. There’s a million different things like that.
I’ve never quite become a fan like she is, but I can appreciate hiphop and rap as broad-ranging and important artform these days in a way I did not as a kid. It’s been kind of a master class in expanding my horizons.
Some are easier than others…