pussy-strut asked: as a clevelander, do you have feelings about bone thugz n harmony?
Uh, I have nothing but feelings about Bone Thugs. I was in elementary school when E. 1999 Eternal came out and it was what everyone’s older siblings listened to & you couldn’t turn on the radio without hearing “1st of tha Month” & even now when it’s summer and people are out in the streets and shops leave their doors open you still hear people listening to that record because it still sounds like Cleveland. I was a young teenager the first time a friend of mine died of non-natural causes and “The Crossroads” was played at his funeral.
It’s hard for me to say what I mean — sometimes something is too close to you, you know? I remember guys I went to school with giving each other Bone Thugs nicknames (arguing about who got to be Bizzy Bone like how some girls argued over who got to be Baby Spice) & I still remember Bone Thugs performing on the VMAs and how it was like the coolest thing any of my friends and I had ever seen & one of the first times any of us had seen Cleveland represented on TV in a non-sports, non-Drew Carey Show kind of way.
But I would be naive if I didn’t acknowledge that there’s weirdness around the fact that Cleveland is an intensely segregated city & Bone Thugs-N-Harmony were rapping about this specific experience of living in Glenville in the early nineties & the realities they faced as young black men living in poverty… & all of the sudden white kids (& obviously I was complicit in this) were latching onto them as a “Cleveland thing” when most of us didn’t even live in Cleveland-proper (I grew up 15 minutes east of Glenville in a suburb.) Even now, I work in Cleveland & drive through Glenville every day, but I still live in the same neighborhood I grew up in which is more Pere Ubu than Bone Thugs. I hate to throw in some caveat about growing up poor, because my economic reality (while not awesome) was still worlds away from the economic realities that informed the Bone Thugs oeuvre. Anyway, way to take a million years to say, “Yes, as a Clevelander I have feelings about Bone Thugs-N-Harmony.” OK, I am just going to hit publish before I embarrass myself any more than I already have.
