The Longest Shortest Time

Rap That Won’t Corrupt Your Kid

There are lots of times when I’m working on one of these playlists, and I excitedly tell my husband about a song I’m considering, and he looks at me skeptically and says, Yeah, but isn’t that one dirty? And then I go and cross it off the list.

One night we were going through this routine, and Jonathan said, Hey, what does Mickey Hess do?

Good question, I said.

Mickey, you see, is our friend. And dad to a 5-year-old girl named Coco. And also a hip-hop scholar. Mickey has written tomes on hip-hop: there’s Hip Hop in America, Is Hip Hop Dead?, Icons of Hop Hop (a two-volume encyclopedia), and the forthcoming biography of Ol’ Dirty Bastard called The Dirty Version. Mickey’s life is immersed in hip-hop. As a result, he and his wife have spent years and years listening to rap together. And just because they had a kid didn’t mean they were going to stop. We all know that hip-hop without the explicit rating isn’t really hip-hop. So Mickey hasn’t exactly censored what he plays for Coco—but he has tried to make his listening habits around her more kid-friendly.

So, for the first time in Longest Shortest history, I give you a parental advisory: You may want to listen to this one without the kids first. Or, at least, be prepared to shout MOTHER! over the motherfuckers. But, dare I say, if you’ve got a pre-verbal little baby on your hands and you need some entertainment, this playlist may just fit the bill.

Below, Mickey takes us through Coco’s evolving hip-hop education over the last five years, and his inevitable inner conflict over it all. —HF

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1. The Magic Number De La Soul
Seemed an innocuous point of departure for my journey of listening to rap music with an innocent and impressionable child in the car. A fitting tribute to the power of our little three-person family. There was no cursing, no sexism, no homophobia. Unlike most of the CDs from my youth, there is no Parental Advisory sticker on this one. We listened to it over and over.

2. Can U Keep a Secret De La Soul
Another track from De La’s debut album 3 Feet High and Rising. Prince Paul, who produced that album, tells me he set out to structure it like a children’s record. Aha, I said, that makes so much sense. My daughter has been chanting, Prince Paul needs a haircut, since she was two years old.

3. 212 Azealia Banks
The filthiest song on this list. Should my two-year-old daughter hear so many rhymes about cunnilingus? Is it maybe somehow empowering? It is potentially more damaging than watching women pantomime orgasms on shampoo commercials? These are the questions I asked myself.

4. Hilfe, Ich Werde Bedroht DCVDNS
After the Azealia Banks debacle, as my daughter reached the age of three and became more cognizant, I found myself censoring some of my favorite songs by turning down the volume on the car stereo to cut out every motherfucker and bitch. After nearly ruining my car stereo this way, I came up with the ingenious plan to play only non-English rap. Of course, I thought, German.

5. Lance Butters vs. T-Jey Lance Butters
Another song from my German rap phase. Lance Butters is a white German kid who raps wearing an Iron Man mask. We’ve listened to this song so much that when my daughter saw a little boy dressed as Iron Man for Halloween she shouted, Daddy, it’s Lance Butters! We’ve listened to this song so much that she’s maybe learned German. Maybe my plan backfired. Maybe she can curse like a German sailor.

6. Rich Rapper Wise Intelligent
Having given up on my experiment in foreign-language hip-hop, I turned to the militant, conscious rap of Trenton, New Jersey’s Wise Intelligent. No cunnilingus rhymes here, but what does my daughter make of his discussion of the prison-industrial complex? What does she make, on our way to her Presbyterian preschool, of a line like, White Jesus on your chain can’t save you?

7. Whistle Dixie Psycho White
Then maybe I jerked the wheel too far in the other direction. We listened to some white rap—military drumming from Travis Barker, speed rap from Yelawolf, and a chorus that is whistled, not sung. Looking in the rearview mirror, I watched my four-year-old daughter dance to Psycho White and I realized that maybe two tattooed and shaven-headed white guys kind of celebrating the South was not the best hip-hop education I could give her.

8. Stick ‘Em Fat Boys
What kind of hip-hop music needs no censoring? The kind without words, of course. In a moment of inspiration I took it back to the old school for this song comprised solely of beatboxing and bragging about beatboxing. Before my daughter learned the Pledge of Allegiance at school, she heard the Fat Boys open this song with a beatbox rendition of “My Country ‘Tis of Thee.” And there we were, full circle, back to the halcyon days of rap music before the Parents Music Resource Center held Senate hearings and put Parental Advisory stickers on albums. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again—our nation’s children should know the Fat Boys, rap’s most patriotic beatboxers. My daughter, now almost five, has attempted some beatboxing herself. Her favorite routine has her imitating the Fat Boys but inserting, for her own amusement, the word dammit, which was not present in the original. —MH

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Got an idea for a Playlist for Parents? Tell us.