A Begrudging Thank You Note to Mr. 305

The good thing about how delightfully chaotic my episode on DJ Khaled was is that I had to edit out the part where I mention that the first rap album I ever fell in love with was Pitbull’s M.I.A.M.I. (Money Is A Major Issue).

Despite my crusade to see the good in all the music we deem bad, I remain very, incredibly, deeply embarrassed by this fact. So much so, I don’t think I even realized it was true until I started doing this podcast. Memories of me dancing in my bedroom to extremely questionable tracks like “She’s Freaky” were effectively repressed. Oh, how I miss repressing them!

So don’t worry, this post isn’t going to be a stirring defense of the crunk-turned-party rapper’s debut album - in retrospect, it is a marginally adequate introduction to a rapper who would become prolific in making marginally adequate music. Rather, this is a defense of the role the album played in my life; a tribute to the music we found right before finding the music that actually molded us. Let’s call this a begrudging thank you note to Mr. 305.

Needless to say, it’s hard to explain how, out of all the ways a preteen from suburban New York could have been indoctrinated into hip-hop culture in 2004, Pitbull’s music was the one to do it for me (Kanye West’s College Dropout came out that same year). How did a poorly-mixed-and-written homage to Floridian street life, excessive partying, and hardcore sex resonate so deeply with someone who truly understood nothing about all three? This is especially hard to grasp once I account for the kind of rap music that I find most inspiring today; the line between M.I.A.M.I. and albums like Run The Jewels 3 and The Roots’ How I Got Over is long and knotted.

But, that line does exist. It has to, or how else did I get from there to here?

I’ve already written about how we tend to diminish the role certain songs play in the story of our lives. Part of why we do this is because we’re embarrassed by the quality of music itself, and that’s what I’ve spent most of my time talking and writing about. However, another factor worth examining is that line; the one that connects the music that inspires us to the music we had to listen to to get there. Retracing it can be a humiliating endeavor. I know I’m nauseated by the prospect of reconciling my past self to my present self, and if I just delete the songs from M.I.A.M.I. off of my literal and proverbial hard drive, then I don’t have to go through the effort of confronting every cringe-worthy phase I went through since I first listened to it; that line fades away, and I can maintain the illusion that I’ve always been this cool. 

But I can’t do that and host this kind of content without being labeled a total hypocrite. So if I don’t want to dry-heave whenever I think about how much I listened to “We Don’t Care Bout Ya”, I need to start by untangling that line.

However, no matter where that process takes me, one major question presents itself:

If Point A is Pitbull, and Point B is “good” taste in rap music, doesn’t Pitbull then deserve some credit? 

This is a question that’s come up a couple of times on The Skip Button. My conversation about Nickelback led to my friends and I discussing “butt rock”, a label the band shares with other widely-ridiculed post-grunge groups such as Creed, Hinder, and Puddle of Mudd. After holding myself back from leaping to the defense of Hinder’s “Lips of an Angel”, I asked my friends if, at the very least, butt rock bands can be credited with introducing people to more “credible” grunge groups like Nirvana or Alice in Chains. I got a resounding “no”. “There’s just not an argument for that,” my friend, Matt said. Having no real evidence (or discussion-leading skills), I left it at that.

That is, until I got to work on the Mumford & Sons episode. Getting to the bottom of why their folk-pop sound elicited so much criticism in part meant understanding the role they played in the larger folk scene. I talked to bastions of traditional folk music like Jake Blount, who was quick and clear with his criticisms of Mumford & Sons and their “exploitative and colonistic” approach to the genre. However, when I asked him if he thought they did the world of folk music any good, he said “Unequivocally yes… There’s a lot of people my age who play old-time music and who are really good players who came to it because they heard Mumford & Sons or The Lumineers or some other folk-pop band that happened in that early 2010’s boom… I found my way to it from The Civil Wars… Folk-pop can lead you down the rabbit hole and bring you to something older than that, and I think just creating a mainstream market for the type of thing we do is important.”

If there’s a line between Mumford & Sons and Jake Blount, surely there’s a line between Nickelback and Nirvana.

Having spent so much time denying Pitbull’s impact on me, I get why my friends were so quick to shut this theory down. Giving this kind of credit to these bands can go against every fiber of our being. For one, it means undoing years of work we put into establishing their suckiness as a universal truth. As it stands now, our society is hanging on by a thread. What if that thread is “Fuck Nickelback”? Can we really afford to break that reality? 

On top of that, though, is the fear that by crediting Nickelback for leading us to “Smells Like Teen Spirit”, we are admitting that at one point in our lives… we listened to Nickelback. Horrifying, I know.

But if I can do it, so can you. So here it goes:

Thank you, Pitbull.

Not for M.I.A.M.I. - a set of music whose usefulness to me dwindles with every passing moment - but for introducing me to rap albums; for being the first artist I ever pretended to not be listening to when my parents barged into the room; for leading me to Twista, who in turn led me to Kanye West, and so on and so forth. I may not have learned anything from you, but I have learned so much from the culture you introduced me to; a culture that has made me a more grounded and empathetic person; a culture that has shaped both me and the fabric of my society for the better, even if that has absolutely nothing to do with you.

I don’t have to like you, Pitbull, but I do have to like myself, and unfortunately, you’re a part of that. 

Sincerely,

Ben