Biggie Hits the Comarca

“Jack, what does nigger mean?”

I recently gave two community members some music from my iTunes collection and have since had to define the N word and explain why AIDS was considered the “gay” disease in the 80´s.

Juicy

Adan is one of a few community members with a computer and he asked for some music. I carefully picked a few hundred from my roughly 8,000 song collection and at this point I think he´s only listened to Juicy by Notorious B.I.G. and Dear Mama by Tupac. (Btw, Adan is 30 years old, very mellow and not at all interested in the thug culture, there´s just something about those songs; also, he speaks fluent English). So naturally, he asked me about this word so often used by those two rappers.

A history lesson followed, along with a recommendation to simply drop the N word from his vocabulary. He found it funny that a word existed that white people can´t use.

Perhaps more difficult was explaining to him that Juicy is widely considered Biggie´s best song and there simply aren´t many other songs in its class. This is after showring him nearly every Biggie song I have and him saying, “No, more like Juicy.” There is nothing like it, so let´s move on.

But my smile still stays on

Reading Lady Gaga´s Wikipedia page was one of the best things I could have done before joining the Peace Corps. My friend and work counterpart Juan loves Lady Gaga and 80´s pop and we frequently talk Gaga. He´ll see somethign about her in the paper, share it with me, and I´ll respond with a Wikipedia fact about her. For example, did you know that her name was inspired by the song Radio Ga Ga by Queen? Neither did he. But he´d also never listened to Queen.

So I began with Another One Bites the Dust and built up to Bohemian Rhapsody (btw how the hell do I translate that title?). As we listened, I explained Queen´s unique rock/showtunes sound, their cultural significance in the 80´s and when we go to Show Must Go On, I told him all about Freddy Mercury.

Yes, Juan is gay. I knew this within five minutes of meeting him and it was recently confirmed when he came out to my site mate, Laura. He hasn´t come out to me, but I think he knows that I know. Hell, he introduced me to his boyfriend the other day. Anyway, this added an interesting dynamic to the conversation. Juan, already mesmerized by Mercury´s outstanding vocals, sucked up everything I said about him like an industrial vacuum cleaner. By the end of Show, Juan knew about AIDS in the 80´s and that Freddy was dying when he wrote the song. “I can feel his emotion” said Juan as Freddy forced out a powerful “Ooooooooon with the Shoooooooowww!!!”

And now, it snows

The next day, I brought the DVD Edward Scissorhands to a house with a TV (and about 50 people crammed around it each night to watch movies...people are so enamoured by the TV that they will stand across the street looking through the window; I tried this and realized you can only see, basically, that there´s a TV on but not make out anything that´s happening, yet people will stand there for the entire movie). No one mentioned the style or the heart-punching story, but they loved the shapely bushes. I guess that´s something.

Goal 1 of Peace Corps is to share cultures.

I brought Biggie, Freddy and young Johnny Depp to Soloy in two days. Booyah.