Last weekend I sat at a local park with a friend, enjoying the gorgeous fall weather while watching our sons skateboard around. We relaxed with the sun on our faces and lazily talked about nothing and everything. There was a young neighborhood kid there, who, at about fourteen was older than our boys. You couldn't help noticing him as he was wearing a real urban get-up. His loose-fitting jeans fell around his hips, his quick hands constantly pulling them back up over his plaid boxers to rest temporarily on his narrow waist. His over-sized t-shirt boasted a logo of one of the more popular sportswear companies, and his well-worn baseball cap was perched sideways on his head. When he spoke, his hands crossed, the fingers stiff in the typical Hip Hop fashion, and every other word out of his mouth was an obscenity. I watched him, mesmerized by his well-crafted urban act, as my friend—a fellow expatriate New Yorker--scoffed, "Where the hell does he think he is, Brooklyn? Doesn't he realize how silly that act looks in rural Vermont?" She went on to make fun of his sinking pants as we steered our ten-year-old boys out of earshot of the foul language, but I was fascinated by him. He threw me back fifteen years to when my nephew Josiah was the same age.
Josiah went through this rap music fascination before it had hit Vermont. There Josey was, walking through Morrisville, Vermont, with the crotch of his jeans down to his knees, his baseball cap backwards, and Snoop Doggy Dog blaring in his Walkman. Though she didn't quite get it, my sister Ellen tolerated the clothes part of the fad (though she made sure he had decent boxers since they were constantly hanging out the back of his pants). And as Josiah was from a family of color (my sister was actually born in Puerto Rico), it was nice to see him listen to the music of an under-represented people. But one day, after reading the lyrics to one of his CDs, Ellen mentioned to me that she was concerned about the way women were represented in the songs. As I agreed strongly with her and as the cool, younger aunt, I decided to sit Josey down and talk to him about this issue.
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