In Memory of Helen P.

I was at the Madcity Music Exchange in Madison, WI, about a week ago digging in the crates. I had come for something specific, but finding it gone from the shelf, I started flipping through the shoeboxes of R&B 45s at the back. The turnaround on 45s at Madcity is pretty slow, and after several boxes of the same Love Unlimited and 5th Dimension singles I was about to cut myself off when I saw a box of sleeveless 45s I didn't recognize. Usually I don't fuck with loose 45s because they've obviously been stacked in someone's garage for three decades and sound like shit. But when I started going through this box I was shocked to find several original pressings of Stax, Hot Wax, and Soul Train singles, tucked away like little weed nuggets in your pocket. They were in pretty bad shape, but at a buck each I snatched them up. What struck me when I got home is that most of them had the same name, "Helen P.", ball-pointed on to their labels. I started to think what type of person this decidedly un-funky name might have belonged to, and the journey that these records must have taken from the plant to my crate.

At some point they had been in mint condition, probably when Helen was in college in the late sixties. She'd probably taken good care of them; good taste is usually accompanied by an understanding of value. But, as all things do when they age, these records got began to wear down under un-replaced styli and other vinyl hazards.

But these records were pretty gnarly. The entire left channel was gone on many of them, and it was obvious that Helen's dancin' days had ended at some point (1982? 1986?), and her record collection had gone into storage. It was probably during this point that most of the real damage had occurred. Helen P.'s awesome collection of 60s and 70s funk and soul 45s had been laid to rest. Until recently, when apparently something separated Helen from her 45s. Thinking about the boxes of CDs and LPs that are still at my parents house after four years of college, which will probably remain there until they move out, I came to a conclusion as morbid as it was certain: Helen P. was dead. The last four or five years have seen a renaissance in digital music technology that is slowly killing the record collector. Twenty minutes on the internet can yield what a year of careful digging used to, and as a result we seem to be losing the personal connection with the music we choose to listen to. When your i-pod gets ganked or your computer crashes and you "lose all your music," its no big deal. Another few months of Limewire and you are back where you were, plus the new Kanye album or whatever. But a collection of vinyl is different. The image of a dedicated DJ slowly sinking under the weight of his own wax is one that has stayed with me, and as said DJ will surely tell you, the more cumbersome a collection of vinyl becomes the more difficult it is to prune it. And so I am certain that Helen P. died quietly and with dignity late in 2007, and her funk-less nieces and nephews dragged her old 45s to the Madcity Music Exchange.

I was looking at stuff through a microscope a few months ago when I came to a somewhat disturbing realization. There is hair on everything. Every penny, every Cheez-It, every 45 record has little pieces of hair and skin all over it. This is why your mother tells you not to put things in your mouth. The relevance of this little epiphany is that although I paid for those 45s and they are now in my home, Helen is worn deep into every groove. In fact, my crates of wax are a genetic index of everyone who as ever owned or listened to the records they contain. My wax, and by extension my beats, are a bottleneck through which the experience of hundreds of people is forced. This is, as far as I am concerned, as close to the heart of Hip Hop as I am going to get as a white man born in the mid-80s. Hip Hop music has never been an avenue for self-promotion so much as it has been a medium for self-realization, and realization of the self is the culmination of realization of the world around us. We as a culture have an obligation to reinterpret what our elders have left behind. The beat in them is gone, but their selves remain, ground into the grooves of wax.