The Rap Scrapbook
I don’t recall seeing anyone do it or even remember why, but at 13, I decided to start scrapbooking. I think the spark came from the sudden pile of hip-hop magazines that began piling up in my room. I wanted to keep them all, but I knew that wasn’t feasible. Perhaps this was my way of having my cake and eating it too.
I’m thinking it was early 1998, and I was drowning in my blooming love for hip hop. I’ve always loved it my whole life, but it was different now. I was listening to the lyrics and developing an understanding of the art form and production, not just enjoying the records on the radio. I started reading hip-hop journalism more enthusiastically. I grabbed a vibe or source magazine here or there. But the October 97 issue of the Source, with Master P on the cover, started my need for a monthly fill of hip-hop scribes.
I don’t even remember why I bought it. I had no idea who Master P was! I was a Puff Daddy/Bad Boy stan. I wasn’t really familiar with rap beyond the radio and what I saw on BET/MTV. I was just with my dad at the Rite Aid on Monument Street. I had purchased many a GamePro or comic book there. But this day, I bought The Source.
That purchase of the Master P source coincided with my going to Canton Middle School—a much easier institution than Roland Park Middle, which meant this kid could soar academically without being punished. Since I was doing so well in school compared to my 6th- and 7th-grade campaigns, I wasn’t nearly as locked down and could grab a new issue of the source each month. I want to say that my mom got me a one-year subscription for Christmas that year.
Anyway, these issues were piling up, and I decided to cut them up. and paste them onto pages of construction paper. I still remember the first night (for some reason, I’m always able to highlight a moment I want to remember later, as it will be important in my future). I was sitting in my room, all alone, at my desk, with Jackie Brown on my TV (it was probably a bootleg version since it hadn’t been released yet, according to Wikipedia). I was just there, like an evil scientist, chopping up page after page and month after month, pasting them onto paper and inserting them into this large red three-ring binder. It was not the most refinined production but it meant everything to me at the moment. It was like I was building my own hip-hop magazine, using the best articles, photography, and ads from the source, and subsequently from Vibe and XXL.
Somewhere, I found the bravery to take the binder to school and share it with my other hip-hop-obsessed classmates. After falling back from sharing my creativity in previous years, this was a big step for me. To my surprise, I wasn’t laughed at. People actually liked it. No one thought I was weird. I mean, maybe, but Baltimore city kids do not hold their tongues or aren’t afraid to be cruel. I’m pretty sure I would’ve heard about it.
What started as a one-time thing became a daily and weekly dedication to cutting things of interest and adding them to the book. I wasn’t limited to just my rap mags. I would grab my mom’s old Ebony, Essence, Sister2Sister, and anything else she no longer read, and would grab imagery that appealed to me.
So it’s time for a time jump. Remember how I said I was thriving in school? Well, of course, that couldn’t last. I was the smart kid who couldn’t handle the rigor of the actual advanced classes because I was distracted by anything and everything. I didn’t want to sit and read and do the right thing. I could get high grades in regular situations, but when I was thrown into the super advanced places with other smart kids, that doubt would creep in, and I would just fall apart. Am I just making excuses? I don’t know. But it happened so many times that there has to be a reason. I’m at the top of the class in elementary school, but the move to Roland Park made me fall apart. It could’ve been cross-city travel. All of the textbooks. Hormones and wanting to be a cool dude with the girls. Who knows? So, of course, if you don’t understand/respect your history, you’re doomed to repeat it. Once again, top of the class at Canton Middle, so I go to Baltimore Polytechnic Institute. Surely none of my past problems would affect me here, right? Right? RIGHT?!
Well, to be fair to my 13-year-old self, I didn’t even want to go there. I’m not a math/science/engineering kid. I knew that then. My mother did not listen to me. So, of course, all of my Roland Park issues, on top of legitimately struggling with the work (like what even is drafting?!?), made me sink. So all the good things I was surrounded by in 8th grade melted away within 2 school years. My dad thought I needed to get rid of distractions, and I didn’t deserve to have nice things. My mom had redecorated my room around a 90s basketball theme, with my beloved Chicago Bulls. He tore all of those posters and photos down. At some point in this time period, he tossed my beloved scrapbook.
My mom was furious about the room. She invested a lot of time, energy, and money into it. I’m sure she was indifferent to the scrapbook and to my time, money, and energy. I took that book to school daily. I recall that at one point, some of my female classmates would make requests for photos of their favorite stars when I was doing my cutting/curating thing. Some of the guys did the same. I wasn’t charging. It was for the love of the game. It was my thing. Was it a distraction? Sure. It certainly wasn’t the reason I got a 40 in Chemistry, though. It wasn’t the reason I kept getting detention in Mr. Bleich’s class.
My 2” red 3-ring binder filled with ragged pasted collaged pages of hip hop magazines, past and present, became fodder for the garbage can. I’m sure I’ve suppressed the emotion so I could proceed with my life as a normal functioning human, but I’m pretty sure I was devastated. A school that I didn’t even want to go to cost me a chunk of my identity. I was no longer “the magazine guy”. I no longer had evidence of being a real hip-hop head. It was just gone because I was not good at calculus or drawing lines with a compass and T-square. And I didn’t realize it then, but I lost more than the binder. I lost the proof that I could make something people actually cared about. I was already being crushed by the curriculum, the travel, and the fact that I didn’t really want to be there. Now my identity was snatched away because I couldn’t handle Mr. Roach’s dry lectures.
No, I didn’t suddenly improve as a student. In fact, I transferred to my zone school, and like clockwork, I was back to the top of the class. The summer before senior year, my aunt showed me her senior year scrapbook, which she compiled from all kinds of things that occurred that year. News, Music, Movies, bus tickets, and social events. Everything. compiled in a single book representing a year of her life. the last year of her public education. Just like that, I was back in the game, being a cutting, cataloging madman again.
Maybe this scrapbook wasn’t just about my love for rap and an excuse to wield sharp objects. It was a space for me to create. Since school was my primary focus, my performance was directly connected to my extracurricular activities. At Canton, I was doing well, so I had the space. I started scrapbooking just because I wanted to. At Poly, sure, I was failing, but I brought this identity with me. It helped me fit in. It wasn’t just about the music, photos, and cool ads, but it was a place for me to show up when it felt like everything else was falling apart. When my dad tossed it, I just stopped making things. Not because I stopped loving hip-hop. Because I got the message, or rather his message. This side of creativity is distracting from the main goal (school), so you don’t deserve it. So I shrank and hid it once I arrived at Patterson. Having the excuse to create again as a senior helped reintroduce me to scrapbooking, but it wasn’t in the wild, radical way of the past. Gone were the maniacal cuts and pasting of collages of the past. It was cleaner. I used sheet protectors to save news articles and ads.
Perhaps it was because of the seriousness of that senior-year scrapbook’s content (9/11, Aaliyah’s death), but the love wasn’t really there. It felt more like me checking boxes for things I needed to remember from that school year. While I ravenously gathered materials to add to it, the hours I spent sitting at my bedroom desk putting things together were gone. Aside from having less time now that I had an after-school job, maybe I didn’t want to show me caring about something, so it could be used against me (which, now that I’m thinking about it, seemed to be a throughline with my parents over the years). There was a big difference between 8th grade and senior year. I didn’t bring it to school and share my collection with classmates. I was simply archiving my school year in a clean, neat fashion.
While I regained some of my need to create, the fierceness and eagerness to share had died a bit. Showing that I cared about something, being proud to share it, and letting it define me, followed by losing it, taught me that caring visibly is dangerous. That being known for something you made means someone can take it to hurt you. My entire demeanor became: “Yeah, go create, but don’t be too excited about it. If people like it, so what? It’s not that serious. Keep it down. Please, not too much attention. People don’t need to know that I actually like making things, regardless of how much effort I put into it." Now that I’m writing this, I’m realizing to this day, I’m still shrinking myself with all of the side stuff I create at work that’s clearly a homage to 13-year-old me, and I let him down every time I deflect the love I get for it.
