Straight Outta Crawley: Memoirs of a Distinctly Average Human Being by Romesh Ranganathan

Author:Romesh Ranganathan [Ranganathan, Romesh]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780593078259
Publisher: Transworld
Published: 2018-10-03T22:00:00+00:00

8.

It’s Bigger than Hip Hop

I love hip hop so much. It’s helped form my identity, seen me through years of being down and out, and has meant that my dress sense is a bit middle-aged-dad-trying-to-be-cool. I first got into hip hop when I was a kid and have never stopped listening to it, despite my wife’s insistence that I should have grown out of it by now. My one sadness in my marriage is that I haven’t managed to convert Leesa to hip hop. She hates it. HATES IT. It would have been easier to convert her to Islam. Which I’m trying next as a test.fn1 Just this morning I was listening to Jurassic 5 in the kitchen while making breakfast. As soon as I stopped it, she threw her head back and said, ‘Thank God for that.’ That was Jurassic 5! Like, one of the most inoffensive rap groups around.

I wouldn’t mind so much if she had a taste in music. I’m not saying she has bad taste, just that she barely has an opinion on it. She likes music she vaguely remembers as the background noise to her doing something else. She never actively listens to it. Which means whenever she has control of the car stereo, we have indie music on because that’s what was playing at that party when she got off with some bloke round the back of the Scout hut.

Until recently, my greatest success was taking her to a Roots gig and her saying she enjoyed it, but she hasn’t sought out any more of their music. But then I made a breakthrough – not a great one, but a breakthrough nevertheless.

I’m an inconsiderate man. Not deliberately – I just don’t have a particularly high regard for birthdays and anniversaries. I wouldn’t care if everyone forgot my birthday, but I have to remember that not everybody else feels like that. This means that much of my life is spent apologizing to people for not remembering their latest milestone, and Leesa definitely bears the brunt of this. The advantage, for me at least, is that I have managed to lower her expectations to such a point that if she receives a card it’s an achievement.

This year for our anniversary I remembered that she had mentioned wanting to see the musical Hamilton, and I booked up surprise tickets. Next-level husbanding. I told her we were going out, didn’t tell her where, and when we arrived at the theatre she revealed she’d assumed it would be dinner and hadn’t eaten anything all day. Because I’m Romesh Ranganathan, and I don’t think things through properly.

I didn’t hold out much hope for Hamilton. I’d been told by loads of people I’d love it because it was a musical with a hip hop soundtrack. That should have been right up my street, but I had visions of some dreadful appropriation of hip hop that would mean me spending the evening with loads of people talking about how amazing something was that took a massive dump all over my favourite thing.

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