We Made a Rap Song (And It’s Way Better Than It Has Any Right To Be)
Jake’s grandma got him that cheap M-Audio midi keyboard for Christmas back in December, and it’s just been sitting by the couch in our living room ever since, collecting Cheeto dust and the occasional stray sock. It smells like her lavender hand cream—she kept it in her linen closet before she wrapped it up, so even three months later you catch that scent if you lean over to press a key. It’s got a tiny scratch on the left corner from when Jake tripped over the cat carrying it in the door. We’d walk past it every day, nudge it out of the way to get to the fridge, and never once thought to actually use it.
Last Saturday our hike got canceled last minute because of that random flash flood warning that turned out to be nothing but three hours of light rain, so we were stuck inside eating cold leftover al pastor tacos that’d been in the fridge since Tuesday, flipping through YouTube when we stumbled on that old Nardwuar interview with Method Man. We got stupidly hyped up off nothing, yelling along to the clips of old Wu-Tang tracks, and Jake just looks up from his taco and goes “we should make a rap song.”
Full transparency: neither of us has any business doing this. I quit trumpet after my sophomore year of high school because I kept flubbing the solo in the Christmas concert. Jake’s only musical experience is screaming along to Taylor Swift in the car on road trips. We both knew it was gonna be a dumb joke, right? We’d write dumb lyrics, send it to the group chat, forget about it by Monday. But then we opened that free beat-making app Jake downloaded when he first got the keyboard, and started messing around.
First the beat sounded like a garbage truck backing into a drum set. We stacked like five different drum loops and a synth that sounded like a fire alarm, and had to strip almost all of it out. By the end we just had this lazy, thumping bass line and a tiny cowbell click that ended up sounding exactly like our leaky bathroom faucet, the one that drips all night and our landlord still hasn’t fixed after three requests. That’s when the lyrics started writing themselves, actually.
I tried first to write cool stuff, like I was actually gonna be a rapper. Had a whole verse about driving down the Pacific Coast Highway with the windows down, picking up girls, buying fancy beer. It sounded like a bad Subaru commercial, I hated it. So I just started writing the stuff that was actually bouncing around my head that week. The landlord ignoring our text about the faucet. The bodega down the street raising the price of cold brew from $2.75 to $3.25, which doesn’t sound like a lot but when you’re buying one every work day that’s an extra $10 a month I could’ve spent on actual food. That guy two floors down who keeps stealing our Amazon packages, left me a passive aggressive note in the lobby that said “sorry wrong address” after I called him out, like that makes it okay.
Jake added a verse out of nowhere about how his ex still follows him on Instagram and he overthinks every story he posts, waits an hour after posting to make sure she didn’t like it before he can relax. I didn’t even know he still cared about that, honestly. We didn’t plan any of it, it just spilled out.
Recording was even more chaotic. We didn’t have a real mic, so we used my old iPhone 8, the one with the spiderweb crack across the screen that I still haven’t replaced because I’m cheap. Propped it up on a stack of old Domino’s pizza boxes next to the keyboard, wiped the pocket lint off the mic as best we could. Halfway through my first verse, the neighbor’s golden retriever started barking his head off because the mailman came, and it’s loud enough to hear right over the beat. We were gonna re-record, but it actually fit perfectly, right on the downbeat. So we left it in. If you listen super close, you can still hear the faucet dripping in the background of the whole track. We thought about editing that out too, but what’s the point? It’s our song, it’s supposed to sound like our apartment.
We worked up the nerve to play it for our friends at game night this past weekend. We’d both listened to it a hundred times while we made dinner all week, low-key proud even though we kept saying it was just a joke. We had three vodka seltzers each to work up the courage, then Jake hit play. The room went dead quiet halfway through, and Mia snort-laughed into her plate of nachos, and I wanted to crawl under the coffee table and hide. When it ended, there was this ten second lull, and then Ty, the quiet guy who works at the bookstore and never says anything unless you ask him a direct question, goes “wait, play that iced coffee verse again.” He said he’d walked past that same bodega that morning, saw the new price, and just turned around and walked home because he couldn’t justify spending the extra money. “That’s actually good,” he said.
We put it up on SoundCloud a couple days ago, just for the hell of it. It’s got 12 plays so far, and ten of those are me and Jake replaying it when we’re drunk after work. It’s not gonna get us signed, it’s not gonna go viral, I don’t even know if it’s actually good by any normal person’s standards. But it’s ours. I’ll be sitting in boring meetings at work, and that stupid bass line will pop into my head, and I’ll have to bite my lip to keep from smiling.
It’s not the big, impressive thing people post about on Instagram. It’s just two idiots with a free keyboard and too much time on their hands made something that actually feels like what it’s like to be us, living in this crummy little apartment right now. Jake just texted me five minutes ago, said he wants to add a new verse about the raccoon that keeps getting into our trash every night. I think we’re gonna work on that after I get off work today. No big plan, no goal. Just messing around. It’s still the coolest thing I’ve made in years. (Word count: 1182)
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