Dukes is a beatsmith, historian and mailman hailing from the south of The Netherlands. He knows more about politics than you and is as nuanced as a brick through you car’s front window. This is his exclusive column for TRU. (the opinions expressed by Dukes are solely those of Dukes and do not represent the TRU board of editors).
Rappers nowadays tend to have bullshit bonus dvd’s in which they show their hood and exploit the misery of everyday life there. Which I think is the best idea coming to hip-hop in a long time. A gem in this genre is Infamous Mobb’s Blood Thicker than Water dvd; the local homophobe hairdressers, people who lived in a playground for over two decades and “mad bullet holes” entertain me for over six years now on a regular basis. Since the biggest rappers of the last couple of years have been an obese ex-jail guard, a high school dropout who worked for Disney and some babbling idiot who wears women’s clothing and kisses with his boss I tend to have more fun watching the hood than listening to subpar music about the hood.
Recently I picked up the idea to shoot a similar video about my own little hood, or well, the street where I live [Ed. note: Technically this is close to, but not in the Duchy of Brabant, Dukes was in fact born in Brabant and lived there for most of his life though. He will rep it ‘til death]. Where I live is like a white trash crack version of the P.I.M.P. video with white crackwhores going cold turkey and Romanian pimps in second hand tracksuits trying to be Snoop and Fiddy. Our local Woodrow the Basehead is called the Special K man and his main hobbies are, well, Special K off course, and running up on female students trying to park their bike in the council designated basement where he tends to crash at night. Where I live suburbanites drive by in SUV’s with their children’s SpongeBob seats in the back and haggle with crackwhores (“nah I really think 10 euro is too much for anal”). And they always win. Where I live discussions over here at night tend to get pretty heated and nobody has ever gotten more reasonable or open to another person’s point of view when having to deal with withdrawal symptoms. I’ve learned more profanity in the first week I lived here and heard more ignorance than I did listening to hip-hop the last thirteen years. Where I live would be the place to go when you want to shoot a rock-opera about Sodom & Gomorrah updated to current times. Basically, it’s the type of neighborhood where nobody let’s their kids trick-or-treat and even if they did ask for something sweet they would be offered discount junkie pussy or some black tar heroin smuggled in by gypsy drug mules.
The city council declared our street to be the designated area for humping crackwhores and even some oldschool heroin whores when the park they used to do it at became too ghetto. The fact that the city’s biggest musician made a hit-song about that park probably didn’t help either. So me and my neighbours have to deal with it. Now I could get politically active and help out my community like Brabant’s own Malcolm X… but the reality is that with the crackwhores, pimps and dealers gone I couldn’t afford to stay so close to our beautiful medieval city center anyway. Besides, making sure some disenfranchised people lose their livelihood is something I don’t wanna have to deal with when facing Saint Peter. So fuck all that. Jay-Z said it best; can’t knock the hustle.
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