The whole if you were there, you get it, if you weren’t you don’t thing has a vague Colbert “truthiness” to it, but it’s a rather porous argument in the whole.

What’s funny is that the whole inside or outside the culture debate in relation to NYC vs other places is replayed in microcosms with NYC itself. I’ve lived all my life in Queens, but the more urban part. Around my early twenties I started hanging more with a crew of dudes from the more suburban parts of Queens. Some of them claimed to be hip hop heads, and my immediate reaction was like, “you can’t be hip hop living in a one family, detached colonial.” But, it turns out a bunch of those dudes were real hip hop heads, real knowledgeable hip hop fans who got the whole culture, even if they didn’t participate in every aspect of it. And, a whole bunch of the dudes from my hood listened to hip hop and enjoyed it, but it was the soundtrack of the neighborhood, so a lot of it was circumstantial.

This argument is all relative, and that’s where its fallacy lies. Sunnyside was the outside, compared to Queensbridge, but was the inside compared to Forrest Hills, which was the inside compared to anything outside the five boroughs.

At the end of the day, you have to acknowledge that the bar people like those who frequent this site set is beyond “being down with the culture, or understanding it.” It’s being fanatical, being encyclopedic. That’s a passion that’s beyond circumstance—you may be Catholic because your parents are, but that doesn’t mean you’re gonna become a priest. In fact, one might argue that dudes who were really, truly about this culture and cultivated that love in a remote area deserve major props because they really had to work, dig, and troop to stay up on their shit, and to understand it all. That’s a level of motivation they had to achieve on their own, not on some inertia shit, or because there was a level of cultural capital they needed to acquire just to get laid or whatever.

Also, the whole NYC-centric slang/references argument is rather weak. If motherfuckers can become Shakespearean scholars, or translate Aramaic, I think some kid from Connecticut can figure out that Latin Quarter isn’t something traded on the Currency Exchange. Playing corners, really? There aren’t elevators in Seattle? Doing a bid? You think the Beatnuts coined prison–related slang? That’s either brashly myopic or startlingly naïve.

All that said, there is something to the “you had to live it to appreciate it” argument. I see all these tennybopper “sneakerheads” and “’Lo-heads.” And my initial reaction is often, “if you don’t remember kids getting stuck up for Jordans, you don’t appreciate the culture of sneakers,” and “if didn’t live through the heyday of the ‘Lo-Lives’ you don’t know shit about Polo.”

But, we aren’t talking about the average poseur. The question is whether you CAN be a real hip hop head while growing up on the outside. And the answer is, of course you can. Granted, most of the heads who think they are, really aren’t. But most of the dudes who were “on the inside” were/are frontin’ too, if we’re gonna be honest about it.

No dis to New York, but I don’t get why some NYers tend to think their city is some far-off obscure and distant alternate universe where nobody outside of it can comprehend anything that goes on there. I’ve lived in B-More my whole life, and I still know what a bid, an assbet, a buck-50, 7:30, and all that shit is… it’s not that difficult to figure out.