I Vow (To Bump and Grind)

Gangsta’ rap at the modern wedding.

By Conor Friedersdorf, August 21, 2008

My best friend’s wedding was memorable for its sounds: the timbre of the groom’s voice as he spoke his vows; the Hallelujahs that echoed through the church; the Frank Sinatra songs that played in the limousine en route to the reception. To preserve the day for the blind men of posterity, I’d capture the clank of champagne glasses over chicken dinners and the belly laughs that followed the toasts.

But I’d muffle one moment. I’m neither a prude nor a proponent of airbrushed memories, but I’m firmly decided that the modern wedding is no place for gangsta’ rap.

The dozen nuptials I’ve attended in the last couple years lead me to believe the genre is increasingly popular at receptions. Here’s how it happened at my best friend’s wedding: the DJ spun traditional fare until an old favorite, The Limbo Rock, lured even the little kids and left-footed adults onto the dance floor. The line for the limbo stick stretched longer than the song would, so the deejay scanned his collection. What would come next?

Time ticking away, he settled on Lil John’s “Get Low”—you know, for its thematic resonance. It’s a tune whose lyrics I didn’t even realize I knew until the intro played, the twenty-somethings in the wedding party made mortified eye contact with one another, and the chorus began:

To the window, to the wall, (to dat wall)
To the sweat drop down my b**** (MY B****)
To all these b****** crawl (crawl)

The bride, all dressed in white, turned bright red.

In fairness to the deejay, he wasn’t playing anything we hadn’t heard hundreds of times before. My peers started listening to gangsta’ rap back in 1992, when Dr. Dre released The Chronic. A classmate at Our Lady Queen of Angels elementary school kept the CD, emblazoned with what I now know is a marijuana leaf, concealed in her backpack. We hid Snoop Doggy Dogg’s “Doggystyle” from our parents, danced to Naughty by Nature at our high school prom and owned 2Pac and Eminem albums by the time we graduated from college.

Even if we’d heeded our elders, it’s unlikely we would’ve escaped certain songs. The music of one’s youth just can’t be avoided. During an earlier era in Harlem, a young person who went dancing couldn’t help but know the lindy hop. A less fortunate generation had disco. In my generation, we are conditioned to expect some sort of gangsta’ rap anywhere there is dancing: even at the Irish pub in a New England college town; even at a house party where the host prefers rock and roll.

Once you factor in the people who actually prefer the genre, it almost seems natural that my generation’s wedding receptions include the same songs we listen to socially. My parents instructed the band at their wedding to play Chicago and The Rolling Stones. Why shouldn’t my friends request that their deejay spin 50-Cent?

The problem is that lyrics we never gave much thought to “in da club” are rather uncomfortable when 80-year-old grandmothers and 8-year-old cousins are listening along. The phenomenon isn’t entirely new. Older generations always look askance at the musical taste of their descendants. My grandparents disdained my mom’s Woodstock bootleg. But hearing gangsta’ rap at weddings is causing people of my generation to re-examine the genre.

It feels out of character to be musically prudish. Our parents unselfconsciously played “Under My Thumb” and “Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds” during family car trips—we turned out fine! Even gangsta’ rap albums we sneaked in our youth hardly caused us to roll down the street “smoking indo, sippin’ on gin and juice.”

Yet we feel uneasy putting our iPods on shuffle if anyone under 15 is around. What explains this attitude shift? Were the prudes right? Is gangsta’ rap uniquely degraded?