RIFF MARKET

Riff Market: Pre-Tax Weekend Edition

Download:: Raekwon's "Guilliotine (Swordz)"

When I bought my laptop--PowerBook G4 667Mhz/40GB used, craigslist, cash-only, dark alley, poor keyboard action--I knew upfront that the previous owner had "left a lot of shit on there" for me. His name was Charlon, neither short for Charles nor long for Arlo, an IT dude my age who lived deep in Brooklyn with a ladyfriend. Among the lot of shit he left for me were: DVD-pirating software, an older version of Microsoft Office registered to "Pope John Paul", his Netflix account, and two not-too-meticulously hidden folders of internet pornography. One folder was called "Secret Porn"; the other, not secret, was "Dick Porn."

Aside: I've looked into the distinction. Enjoying dick porn, I'm told, is a crucial point of no return. One day a 13- or 14- or 22-year-old boy gives up on the fantasy of naked women posing alone, and decides he would rather get the whole masturbation thing over with vicariously--watch another man's penis enter a lady's etc etc etc. The third party takes the burden off the imagination, all-pleasure no-pressure, and over time eventually becomes indispensable to the affair. But it's also a comfort thing. You need to warm up to dick porn, since frankly it is a weird mediator, and the physical disparity between the mediator and the mediated is, shall we say, almost always disheartening. Either way, it's still unclear to me why Charlon didn't think 44-year-old-teacher-takes-dick-up-ass22.mpeg was worth keeping a secret.

Charlon also left a considerable stash of music. This I had asked him to do, sort of. During those awkward moments of a craigslist transaction--the small-talking about each other's lives and trying to find more tangible connections and the off-hand "well stay in touch if anything happens, let me know if you have problems" which inevitably escalates to that weird moment where one party or the other says something like "Hey, well I got your number, let's get a beer sometime"--it had come out I write about music. Proud of his 17.63GB MP3 collection, Charlon asked me to peruse, as if me complimenting him for his complete Canibus discography would seal the transaction. "Oh man, you have every Canibus song ever made! This is incredible," I said, actually incredulous. Charlon smiled. "He's yours, man. He's all yours."

Since then--July--I've slowly been getting through Charlon's collection. He had a lot of Martin Luther King and Malcolm X speeches recorded in lossless audio format, super high-quality, way more than you'd need for a spoken word track. Maybe he was dropping "I Have A Dream" in the clubs, but I doubt it. Other sundries include Onyx's "Slam", Fu-Schnickens' "What's Up Doc?" featuring Shaquille O'Neal ("'cause I'm a be a Shaq knife, and cut you with precision"), and a playlist called "BEEF"--a gigabyte of rapper diss tracks and Hot 97 appearances, what had to be the most thorough audio account of the 50 Cent/Game debacle anyone had amassed.

So he's a rap guy. But weirdly, Charlon only had one song by the Wu-Tang Clan--one! It was "Guilliotine (Swordz)" from Raekwon's Only Built 4 Cuban Linx, except Raekwon was "Reakwon" and Linx was "Lynx", as in Atari's short-lived Gameboy killer. I like the song plenty; still I wonder why this is The One.

Two hypotheses. One: "Guillotine" had personal resonance for Charlon. For instance, there's that Ghostface line "my career is based on guns, throwin cats in wheelchairs," and what I do remember from the night Charlon and I met, his girlfriend was some manner of nurse. Just saying, it's more than likely she's thrown a cat in a wheelchair once or twice.

The other, and I'm not ready or willing to respond to this yet: Is "Guillotine" the definitive Wu-Tang track? Shaolin symbology, ethos, bustle and flow? If not this, something else?

Answer tomorrow.