The next time you’re in a crowd and some MC asks if you like real hip-hop, say "no." In the first place, claiming his shit is authentic by asking a rhetorical question is like collateralizing his debt with coupons. Waiters don’t ask “Do you like good food?” Comics don’t ask “Anyone in the audience like to laugh?" Medical ventilator technicians don’t ask “Y’all like breathing?” Besides, “Do you like real hip-hop?” is a trick question. If you answer “yes” because you reflect on it and remember the rage in your heart against sucka MCs, you’ll be simultaneously tricked into affirming that the guy on the mic is the real thing. In this situation, “yes” means either “I like real hip-hop, and therefore I like this,” or “if this is real hip hop, I’ve been missing out!” Any flat-out boast would be far less insulting to the audience than this bogus question.Who the fuck likes real hip-hop anyway? The freshest MC who ever spat only made one album: 1989’s long out-of-print Large and in Charge. When he wasn’t hosting his terrible TV show, Arsenio Hall rhymed from the depths of a wardrobe department fat suit under the name Chunky A, short for Chunkton Arthur Hall. I don’t know what qualities you like in your real hip-hop, but if they include positive consciousness, social awareness, and uplifting beats, Chunky A’s your man. “Knowledge is our friend, drugs and violence are the enemy[.] Racial harmony is long overdue,” Chunky writes in the liner notes. To promote these values, Chunky draws attention to universal problems, such as stank breath ("Stank Breath") and the laziness of women (“Ho Is Lazy,” to the tune of Fine Young Cannibals’s “She Drives Me Crazy”). The “poet” and “teacher” also pays tribute to universal desires, such as fucking (“OWWWW!” and “Dipstick”). He may be large, but he’s definitely in charge: “I’m gonna make your body talk / While I hit your switch / Make you scream, ‘Chunky, I’m yo’ bitch,’” Chunky brags.But it’s not all “cake on yo’ body.” On the final track, “Dope, The Big Lie,” Chunky takes on substance abuse, citing the deaths of John Belushi, Len Bias, and Janis Joplin as reasons why you shouldn’t slam dance with Mr. Brownstone or even with Mr. Greenjeans. Chunky’s poetry shines on this track. “God would have given me wings / If he wanted me high,” he raps, punning with gentle irony on the hot wings that have made him so fat. And those nine-year-olds “on the playground dusted”—are they “dusted” as in shot to death, or do they just like to get wet? Chunky doesn’t provide any easy answers. Thinking globally, the MC turns his withering gaze on the tragic excesses of the contemporary Madchester phenomenon: “Extasy [sic] / Acid / PCP / Crack / Can leave you cold and breathless / Laying on yo’ back.” But only a nodding junkie could make it to the end of this interminable track, where Ice-T, Paula Abdul, KRS One, Wil Wheaton, and Arsenio (as himself) each contribute a cameo “Just Say No” verse, banishing intoxicants by sheer force of talent. Clear thinking and sober judgment: that’s what those late-70s Bronx house parties were really about.MOE BISHOP
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