Excerpts from This Morning's Alphabits: Reno Ate My Music

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I believe it is Hurricane Chris that has a single gracing our airwaves where he desperately requests for someone to give him the Clap…*shrug*…and somewhere in the song he actually utters the lyrics, “Row row row your boat gently down the stream.” Afterward, he goes on to state something about people in the club can’t do something like he and his crew. I’m sure he’s referring to the obscene amounts of monkeys… ahem… money he has. Maybe it’s just a sign of old age but I don’t understand these kids, nowadays.

(Digression: Although Open Mike is an old high-school friend of mine, our incessant referencing to monkeys is strictly coincidental, albeit insightful into the absurdity of the popular music in heavy rotation.)

But despite my evident distaste for monkified music, I was still recently stereotyped and assaulted by the city of Reno, Nevada. You read correctly. I was not assaulted IN Reno, I was assaulted BY Reno. I was traveling to this sad little gaming town on business and was at several points in time on my laptop trying work from my room in Circus Circus Resort and Casino. Now, Reno being the super upstanding city it is, did not provide a physical ethernet/DSL line into the hotel room and therefore I had to use the wireless connection. This was extremely slow and unreliable. Simply saving an Excel document literally took 15 to 20 minutes, so it was hopeless trying to get any significant amount of work done. In my frustration, I closed out all of the programs I had open on my laptop. This included iTunes, as I was listening to Little Brother’s Get Back album (grandtacular, I might add) while trying to work. Well, as you may know, iTunes saves your library as soon as you close out of it, which should only take seconds. In Reno it took 10 minutes.

Determined not to be defeated by a city whose center is casinos, pawn shops, seedy motels and a bar named Fat Daddy’s (I’ve heard has the biggest boob wall in the county… I’m extremely serious), I clicked on my laptop the following morning trying to complete the smallest of tasks before having to go to my conference. Needless to say, Reno, apparently thinking that I adore Hurricane Chris’s wit and dote on the lyricism of our beloved Soujla Boy (that was intentional too, refer to previous post), completely wiped my entire iTunes music library and subsequent playlists away. I guess Reno thought it was eradicating my weak-ass-rapper-software, thereby making the hip-hop world more potent. Reno was mistaken. This is my pledge to Reno, Nevada: I do not nor have I ever endorsed the crude simianship prevalent in hip-hop today. I was an innocent victim of your vigilante action. Let others not be affected as I was, I beg of you!

I was since able to retrieve some of the music but some valuable stuff was lost. I’ll just have to hope my friend still has the DVD that has the 200 or so original tracks sampled by Kanye, Timbaland, J Dilla, Tribe, Rakim, Common, Primo, Pete Rock, Beatnuts, Alchemists, Black Milk, The Roots, Madlib, Slum Village, 9th and countless others.

(sigh)

In the meantime, let me get that clap…

Be good.