This couldn't have made much of an impression on my younger son, who would have probably been about seven at the time, but now this is a thing he can do and wants to do also.
It was just this week that he showed us his mastery of the lyrics, but the story of "Lose Yourself" goes a few weeks back.
When he was first in the rough draft stages of reciting the lyrics, he was showing me what he could do and I noticed he was repeating the line "Whoa, there goes gravity" instead of coming back with the line "Whoa, there goes Rabbit he." I think he probably couldn't conceive of the fact that the rhyme came before the sentence ended in a complete thought, and also, he had no reason, not having any reference from the movie 8 Mile, to think that the character's name would be Rabbit.
It was one of those "conflicts" between a parent and child where the child has enough confidence in what they know that they entirely discount the possibility that their parent might be right -- but of course I was right. He soon incorporated the correct lyrics, and like an idiot I secretly feel proud about having pointed him toward them -- about being right. Yes, frail human being that I am, I must take satisfaction from knowing something that a ten-year-old did not.
Anyway, the other lyric I felt we weren't sure about, and maybe I was just substituting in a phrase that would go along with the rhyming scheme, was "his mom's spaghetti." That is actually the correct lyric, though I think it's just "mom's spaghetti." That being the thing that Rabbit had already vomited on his sweater in his nerves about the upcoming rap battle, "already" being the rhyme with "spaghetti."
To me, it was funnier if this was just a random comment among everything else: "his mom's spaghetti." And in my way of thinking about it, it was not a regurgitated spaghetti dinner he was describing, but the fact that his mother is a creature made of spaghetti. In order words, "his mom's spaghetti" could be translated as "his mom is spaghetti."
It just makes me laugh to think of this spaghetti monster mother doing all the things a mother would usually do, only she is made of a moving clump of slighting red-stained Italian pasta, with meatballs appearing in strategic locations to give her identifiable features.
The reason I'm telling you this today is that last night I caught up on CineNerdle, the game vaguely inspired in some way by Wordle, though it's only really related to Wordle in the most strained game of telephone you could ever imagine. I think it's just that every game that tries to be popular now wants to have a "dle" ending so that you will think it is in some way associated with Wordle.
Anyway, this game involves picking out the names of five movies in a 16-square grid based on words that give you clues to what movie it is, especially when paired with three other words in the grid. I get waaaay behind on CineNerdle during baseball season, which I guess is useful because it gives me more archived games to play during the offseason.
As luck would have it, last night I played this game:
For the record, the other answers were Straight Outta Compton, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, Wallace & Gromit: The Curse of the Were-Rabbit and Mother!, but it's the green column you're focusing on today.
Until we had had this dissection of the lyrics with my son a few weeks ago, I wouldn't have even considered "mom" and "spaghetti" to be key clues for the movie 8 Mile. And given that it had been a couple weeks since I'd played any of the archive CineNerdle games waiting for me, this was just pure coincidence -- not that it wouldn't also have been coincidence if this were today's game.
The other thing I think is funny is that this CineNerdle puzzle underscores my possible reading of the lyric, that Marshall Mathers' mother is a benevolent spaghetti monster.
Oh but the coincidences do not end there.
The very same night, when taking my older son back from his one-on-one basketball coaching -- which his little brother also attended because my wife was out at an industry drinks -- we got into a discussion of older rap, my older son being a rap fan.
He said he didn't know Ice Cube but had heard he was lame.
Au contraire, mon frere. Or, mon fils.
Rushing to Ice Cube's defense, as we pulled into our driveway, I called up NWA's "Straight Outta Compton" on Spotify.
Now, from various posts I've written on this blog, you know that I don't like to intentionally expose my children to excess profanity, especially since one of them is only ten. But I figured, if even my younger son is starting to think of "Lose Yourself" as a foundational text, he is certainly tangentially exposed to other things that are not as clean as that is. The older one is deep into songs with profanity already, and I don't really believe I have a meaningful role of standing in between them and this stuff for much longer.
So I played about 30 seconds of "Straight Out of Compton," which you know has the word "motherfucker" and the n-word within that first 30 seconds. The street cred of Ice Cube demanded it.
It allowed me to briefly recount the story of narrowly preventing my grandparents -- my highly traditional, highly conservative, very old grandparents -- from being exposed to this song back in college.
They were on campus for their only campus visit of my college career during my freshman year, and we were walking back to my dorm room from dinner. For some reason I had the sixth sense that I needed to go ahead of them and my parents to make sure that there weren't shenanigans going on in my room with my other two roommates, not knowing what those shenanigans might be. (But the possibilities were endless, as these guys were drunken reprobates, in addition to being good guys.)
My advanced scout mission revealed that the title track to the NWA album Straight Outta Compton was playing at full blast, and would likely give both of my grandparents heart attacks in about 30 seconds if it weren't shut off. Which it was.
(Side note: I do owe a lot to this one roommate, Craig, in terms of my musical tastes. He was the first guy who ever exposed me to Nine Inch Nails, which to this day is my favorite band. I certainly would have been exposed to Nine Inch Nails at some point anyway, but who knows if I would have adopted them in the same way if he didn't have Pretty Hate Machine, which I could play whenever I wanted.)
So yes, it was funny also that Straight Outta Compton, the movie based on this group and that album, also came up in the random CineNerdle I happened to play last night.
I did wonder if maybe we could show my kids 8 Mile. I remember it is laden with f-bombs, but that might be about the only thing that's really preventing a child from watching it, since I think the violence is more implied than anything. Plus there is one more reason this movie is significant for me personally, which is that I am childhood friends with Evan Jones, who plays Cheddar Bob in the movie. We haven't kept in touch but I saw him as recently as 20 years ago -- I think just after 8 Mile came out, actually.
If I can play "Straight Outta Compton" for my kids -- even 30 seconds of it -- I can probably show them 8 Mile.
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