We Made a Rap Song Last Weekend and It’s Actually Kind of Good
Last Saturday was supposed to be trivia night at the bar down the street. We’d been prepping for a week, had our team name picked out (Soggy Carpet, don’t ask) and I’d brushed up on all my 2000s pop culture facts just for the occasion. Then the storm hit, the text went out that trivia was canceled, and we were stuck inside with nothing but a half-empty bottle of vodka and six hard seltzers Javi picked up from the gas station that morning. Javi’s my roommate, and he’d just brought home that beat-up midi controller he bought off Facebook Marketplace the night before. Forty bucks, from a sophomore at the state college who needed gas money to get home for his mom’s birthday. It had a big coffee stain on the left side, and the guy forgot to take out the old batteries so it kept turning off randomly for the first hour.
Javi plopped it on the coffee table, opened his laptop, and said we should make a rap song. I told him that was the dumbest idea he’d had all month, and that’s saying something because last month he tried to deep fry a turkey in our tiny apartment kitchen and set off the smoke alarm three times. But I was bored, and the rain was hitting the windows so hard you could barely hear the TV, so I said fine, whatever. We’ve talked about doing stupid creative stuff for ages, right? We were gonna start a podcast about terrible 90s action movies, bought a domain and everything, and then never recorded a single episode. I don’t even remember what the domain was, honestly. It’s probably expired by now. This was different, no planning, no pressure to make it good for anyone. Just… dumb, on the spot.
Javi’s only ever played trumpet in high school, and I haven’t tried to rhyme anything since I wrote a dumb verse for my friend’s 21st birthday party back in college that everyone booed at. But he messed around for 45 minutes, deleted the beat twice, accidentally saved over half a verse when he misclicked, and finally landed on this bouncy, kind of janky thing that sounds like it’d be background music for a 2012 Vine of a dog riding a skateboard. I liked it immediately. Then we started spitballing lyrics, and I don’t even know how we landed on all the stupid small stuff, but that’s what stuck. First verse is mostly about the CVS on the corner, the one that only has self checkout now and the machine yells at you at the top of its lungs if you so much as breathe on the bagging area before it scans your item. Last week I got yelled at three times in five minutes, and the attendant just stood by the door cackling and wouldn’t help me. That went in. Then we added the squirrel that keeps stealing all the sunflower seeds I put out for the cardinals on the fire escape, and our landlord who’s been saying he’ll fix the leaky bathroom faucet for three months and still hasn’t showed up.
First time I tried to record, I was overthinking it, trying to sound all cool and deep like the rappers I listen to on my commute, and I ended up sounding like a walking cringe compilation. Javi laughed so hard he snort-laughed his seltzer out his nose onto his laptop keyboard. I was so embarrassed I almost quit. But then I just tried it again, in my normal voice, not trying to sound like anyone but me. Stumbled over half the lines the first few takes. We were recording on Javi’s old gaming mic, the one he got for Christmas two years ago when he got really into Fortnite and then quit after a month. The quality’s garbage, you can hear the rain hitting the window in the background if you listen close. Halfway through recording the second verse, my next-door neighbor banged on the wall so hard our shelf of old mugs shook. I’d been yelling the hook “that self checkout hates my guts” at the top of my lungs at 11pm, so fair play. We just turned the mic down a little and kept going.
We finished at 2:30 in the morning. We’d eaten all the leftover pepperoni pizza that’d been in the fridge for three days, the grease was all congealed on the box, but it was still good. We sat on the couch and played it three times in a row, and both of us just looked at each other and said, “Wait, this actually slaps.” It’s not perfect, obviously. There’s a part in the second verse where I stumble over “landlord” and it’s a little off-beat, and we left it in because we were too tired to re-record. I’m glad we did, it’s my favorite part now. We sent it to our group chat with our college friends, and most people left it on read. One guy replied “lol this bangs” and that was the end of the conversation. We didn’t put it on Spotify, didn’t post it on TikTok, didn’t do anything with it besides save it to our phones.
I’ve been listening to it on my commute to work all this week. I don’t tell anyone what it is when I’m wearing my headphones, I just play it when I’m stuck in traffic on the highway, and it makes me smile every single time. It’s not amazing by any normal standard, I guess. If you showed it to an actual rapper they’d probably laugh it out the room. But it’s our amazing rap song. I’ve been so stuck lately, y’know? Everything I do feels like it has to count for something. I work 40 hours a week, I go to the gym just to check it off my list, I post a photo on Instagram once a month just to make it look like I’m doing fine, I even read those self-improvement books that say you have to be productive every second of the day. I can’t remember the last time I did something just because it was fun, something that didn’t have an end goal or a payoff or anyone to impress.
The forecast says it’s supposed to rain again next Saturday. Javi has a date tomorrow night, so we haven’t talked about making a second one much. I wouldn’t be surprised if we forget all about the rap song idea and just order takeout and watch a bad vampire movie instead. That’s fine. Even if we never make another one, this one’s still here. It’s ours. It’s totally amazing, no matter what anyone else says. (Word count: 1182)
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