Low Culture Essay: A Tale of Two Normans – Wrongtom On Beats International's 'Dub Be Good To Me'

In this month's Low Culture Essay, Wrongtom weaves the life of his jazz pianist grandad into his encounter with Norman Cook & co's 1990 hit single, and explores how it changed his own musical trajectory

Perhaps it began in my grandparents’ living room in the spring of 1990. I watched, quizzically, as my cousin Nancy popped her Walkman headphones over my grandad’s thick ears, and clicked the clunky play button. He looked as puzzled as me, then lifted one of the fuzzy earphones and asked “what is this?” Nancy replied with unabashed enthusiasm, “it’s rap”.

I was up like a shot, grabbing the headphones to find out what rapping delights she’d bestowed upon my grandad, and just in time to catch a succession of disparate spoken words: “Tank… fly… boss… walk… jam… Nitty gritty.” I was listening to ‘Dub Be Good To Me’ by Beats International, which had been at number one in the charts for the past couple of weeks. I scoffed, like any teenage ratbag might, and as the voice in my ears launched into four bars of guttural murmurs, like a rhythmic placeholder for where the rest of a rap should be, I turned to my young cousin and countered, “this isn’t rap!”

It might sound petty, and even a little callous to call out a 13-year-old on the intricacies of what constitutes rap music, and I didn’t mean to take this out on my poor cousin, but I’d already endured years of people misunderstanding rap and hip hop, though, truth be told, I genuinely liked Beats International’s ‘Dub Be Good To Me’, which had been released in the January.