Yo Yo Yo

I actually heard somebody answer the phone by saying Yo yo yo a little while ago. A priceless moment. I would have laughed till I peed myself if he hadn't looked so scarey.

He was one of those blokes who dressed as if he'd just stepped out of a hip hop (do they still call it hip hop?) video. Cap and oversized lurid-coloured clothes. I bet he tried to roll his shoulders and bounce at the hip when he walked too. I don't know, I didn't hang around; I had to go somewhere with my derision so he didn't notice it and stab me.

Those blokes, of course, are more palatable than their more common, cheapskate equivalent, those pale, underfed, spotty-faced kids who wear white baseball caps and crappy jogging bottoms from Primark. All they seem to do is sit on walls with their mouths open shouting monosyllables at each other and trying to frighten old people.

But they appear to listen to the same sort of music half the time, albeit with a little brainless bang-bang-thump-thump electronic dance music (for the want of a better description) thrown in.

Somebody played for me one of the sainted hip hop records the whole world seems to be copping its lifestyle from this afternoon. It was stupid. It was boring. It was predictable. The same loping, bass-heavy cruising-in-my-big-car beat we've been hearing for thirty years. The same half-sung, half-spoken witless lyrics about guns and bitches (or whatever it was). The person who played it for me obviously thought it was cool or funny, or something. But I stopped needing infantile rebellion against social norms before I left secondary school. By then I was ready to look at what the real enemy was in contemporary life.

It seems from the vantage point of my advanced years that a whole generation of people is modelling itself on the economic victims of an institutionally racist society and trying to talk itself into the ghetto just because its parents don't think it's smart to say fuck at the breakfast table.