Full Circle
Feeling the chill

RHINO RECORDS, the K-Tel of discriminating music aficionados, has just released a slew of anthologies revisiting hip-hop in the early '90s. Included in this summer lineup are first-ever "best of" comps for De La Soul (Timeless: The Singles Collection) and Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth (The Best of Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth: Good Life). Couple these with A Tribe Called Quest's new Hits, Rarities and Remixes (Jive), and it's like a full-blown retrospective of the era somewhere post-Public Enemy but pre-Puffy. It suddenly hit me that I'm witnessing the emerging soundtrack for my aging, thirtysomething generation. Call it The Big Chillin'.

At age 30 it's humbling (read: frightening) to realize that I'm now expected to yearn for the music of "my youth," but apparently, Rhino and Jive think it's time. With Hits and Good Life, newbies get all-purpose anthologies, but older fans are tempted with obscure, soundtrack songs (i.e., Pete Rock and C.L.'s excellent "One in a Million") and unreleased tracks (like Tribe's Low End Theory orphan, "Mr. Incognito"). De La's Timeless offers no new songs, but by chronologically sequencing the group's 16 singles from 1988 to 2001, it suggests the definitive air of The Beatles 1 or Elvis: 30 #1 Hits.

Just as our parents rushed to buy those records, these new comps target my generation: Nixon-Ford-era babies who went from Jordache to Jordans to Jettas and traded in their Technics for an iPod. The timing couldn't be better. The new school aesthetic, blending street intellect with wry humor, hepcat cool, and soulful romanticism, has always been an alternative, then and now, for wanna-be rap cognoscenti too shy for Big Daddy Kane's and Jay-Z's ego, too intimidated by NWA's and 50 Cent's gangsterism, and too self-conscious to dance to Hammer and Nelly.

In that respect the new school vaguely resembles what '60s Motown meant to The Big Chill's navel-gazing yuppies in the early '80s: integrated access to black cool by a liberal, educated middle class (mostly non-African American) without the racialized, politicized messiness of either black power (then) or Afrocentricism (now). The new school intermeshed with the ideals of my collegiate youth in its utopian vision of one world, one love, one nation under an MPC groove. De La's lovingly lustful "Buddy" was our date song, Tribe's swinging, swank "Award Tour" our party anthem, Pete Rock and C.L.'s sublime "They Reminisce over You (T.R.O.Y)" the eulogy we all wanted at our end of days.

This began to disappear right around the time Dr. Dre and Snoop rose from the ashes of Los Angeles and Mobb Deep began chronicling the New York crack wars. Brand Nubian traded in kente cloth for bubblegoose. Digable Planets drifted out of orbit. The Pharcyde fell out. Some of us treated hip-hop like a bad breakup, found love again with Tricky and Beck. Many retreated underground and championed Dilated Peoples and Slum Village. The rest rode out the times in varying degrees, digging Eminem, hating Ja Rule, tolerating DMX.

Groups like De La, Pete Rock and C.L., and Tribe clearly deserve to be chronicled – no debate there. It's just that it feels simultaneously too soon and too late. Too soon because none of us thirtysomethings wants to admit that hip-hop has aged enough to warrant being archived. Too late because we've already said our painful good-byes to this era and don't want to look like nostalgia-ridden fuddy-duds, muttering about "back in the day" like a skipping record. We'll probably secretly put Timeless in our changer but then switch to Get Rich or Die Tryin' when others are within earshot. Being tragically hip ain't easy, y'all.