“The Devil Went Down to Georgia” was a Country hit, but Rap Song

The devil went down to Georgia, he was lookin’ for a soul to steal.. he was in a bind, ’cause he was way behind, he was lookin’ to make a deal

I’m a fan of many different music genres. My early years growing up on the south side of Chicago were spent listening to local R&B station WGCI, where I was exposed to songs by Stevie Wonder, Harold Melvin and the Blue Notes, Sly and the Family Stone, Funkadelic, and etc. At the same time, my older brother would sometimes listen to adult-contemporary station (back then) WLS in Chicago, which not only played music, but they played good music- I heard songs like Brother Louie by the Stories and Bad Bad Leroy Brown by Jim Croce; like me, Leroy Brown was from the south side of Chicago- how could I not relate? There was also the somewhat haunting Cats in The Cradle by Harry Chapin.

Right around the beginning of middle school, my mother had the good sense to finish her PhD, and she did so at the University of Iowa. Moving from the south side of Chicago to (at the time) white-bread Iowa City was a major cultural shock to 11-year-old me. The rules were different, and quite comically I went from being called “high yellow” and a “honkey” by my classmates to being called the n-word by classmates. I laugh at it all in retrospect because I ended up learning to give the middle finger to anyone who tried to project stereotypical expectations upon me, when you feel that everyone has rejected you for things you had no control over, you’d better learn…