I was gonna write this amazing Date Night-style recap of my experience with El secreto de sus ojos. It was gonna weave together the story of a bet I lost with the Liberian Girl as well as a conversation at a bar in SoHo with this painter about the fundamental differences between Michael Jackson and Prince. It was probably gonna have some other stuff in it, too. A brief rant about capital punishment. An ode to great steadicam work. And maybe even an interlude about the asexual, platonic love that men sometimes share with women. (By “sometimes,” I mean 1 in 100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000.)
But then Guru died following a brief battle with cancer.
Guru, for the uninitiated (and the potentially Communist), was a rapper. He worked with a guy named DJ Premier. They recorded together as Gang Starr. They made this song. And this song. And this one, too. They made many more songs, of course. But you may know them best for this one. It was a pretty popular party anthem some years back. In some circles, it still is.
I grew up on hip hop. Not the bad stuff. Well, some of the bad stuff. But mostly the good stuff. Like what Guru and Primo cooked up. I learned a lot from that kind of music. I still quote certain lines almost biblically. Some people draw from the book of Ephesians. I draw from You Know My Steez. We all gotta build a worldview somehow. And the how really shouldn’t be that important as long as the aim of the view is to understand the world empathically so a person can conduct oneself benevolently while living in it. The how, after all, is most commonly a means to an end. Your version of heaven might have a little, blonde-haired kid playing a harp while everyone wears flowy white robes and talks like Ned Flanders. Mine might have Tupac shooting pool with Ernest Hemingway and Che Guevara while Josephine Baker dances with Mikhail Baryshnikov to a Dilla mixtape as Redd Foxx smokes some BBQ. Paradise isn’t the same for everyone. But we’re all trying, more or less, to go to there however it is we imagine it to be.
Guru’s music meant something to me. And his passing moved me. It happened under very unusual circumstances, but it moved me in a way I wasn’t prepared for. Hip hop heads have been losing our icons since Kool Herc first plugged in on Sedgwick Ave. We’re used to death. But we’re not accustomed to cancer. That’s the privilege of the generations who came before us and who didn’t have to use the experience of crack as a default analogy for understanding the things that happen in this world. So, as I struggled with what to think, feel and say, I logged on to Twitter to sort it all out. My timeline was flooded with links and comments and all forms of shout out to the artist whose government name was Keith Elam. I read through a lot of ’em. Followed a bunch of the links. Listened to a number of Gang Starr songs. Then listened again. I typed a few pretentious characters and posted them because it seemed like the right thing to do.
Maybe it was. But it didn’t feel good. It felt like I was writing to serve some external purpose. To receive validation from my little corner of the Twitter-verse. I looked at what I posted. It was kinda garbage. But it was there. I could have deleted it. But I thought better of that. I recalled a scene from Rocky IV and opted to leave it live as a reminder for myself of what not to do. Here’s the scene I thought of:
If your Russian is rusty, Ivan Drago says “I fight for me! FOR ME!” at the 3:18 mark of that clip. As I was making the decision to leave the lackluster tweet about Guru alone, I contemplated Drago’s motivation and I recognized that his steez are basically my steez. I write for me. (Mostly, I do. Although I write for a woman every once in a while.) I write for me because I’m trying to make sense of the world as I encounter it. And I think, when they’re honest, that’s the steez of every writer. We’re all trying to figure things out. Sometimes, we figure them out in a way that ten other people can relate with. Sometimes, we figure things out in a way that tens of millions of people can relate with. But, when we pick up a pen or begin banging away on a keyboard, we’re writing for ourselves. We are our own primary audience and we’re trying to satisfy something internal. We’re all Ivan Drago.
At least, that’s what we ought to be. ‘Cause when someone hardwires us to some machine to be a hero for the whole nation…things don’t go so well for us. We devolve into pretense and we burp out cliched crap that’s supposed to be deep, but barely scratches the surface of our own somewhat unique struggles with this thing called life.
That’s certainly what happens to me. Audience is hella important. The pages in the book aren’t gonna turn themselves. But if it doesn’t read right to me first, then it’s probably not gonna make any sense to anyone else. That’s not exactly the same thing as The Ivan Drago School of Writing, but it is the best effort I can muster to use a movie blog to pay tribute to one half of Gang Starr.
(Yes, this was a highly convoluted exercise. But I only know how to make sense of the world via movies, music and basketball. So…be thankful I didn’t work some Stephen Curry reference into this thing. Now go drink a glass of lemonade, son. Or stunt like Bruce Willis. Either way … hold tight. A real review of El secreto de sus ojos is coming. Just as soon as I make sense of it all.)
