After dinner, Tuesday night, while Erin was washing her half of the dishes, I heard a familiar gruff voice out the window, accompanied by its eternal beat. ‘That’s for me.’ I told Erin. ‘What’s for you?’ I gestured toward the window. She screwed up her face. ‘Malibu?’ I nodded. ‘So, what…? He’s serenading you?’

Not so much a serenade, as a highly personalised substitute for a doorbell. I don’t know whether Malibu knows which apartment I live in, yet (he’s never asked), but he knows my corner. Two Sundays ago, I heard him playing outside, and I dropped down to say Hello. Prior to that, our meeting up had always been dependent on my searching Haight Street for him. Now, Malibu regularly comes calling. Sometimes literally.

Wednesday, last week, I was sitting in the living room with housemate Jeff, both of us working on our laptops. The sounds of street poetry aren’t unusual for our rapidly-gentrifying-but-not-yet-white neighbourhood, especially as our street sees a lot of vehicular traffic. But… ‘Is someone shouting your name?’ I look out the window. ‘Bu dances — or does hand motions or something — while he recites or freestyles. Imagine a forty-year-old man reciting poetry along with his stereo, dancing under the awning of the bus stop, across the street from your apartment, shouting your name ever ten minutes. Those walls I somehow assumed I would keep between my lives? No. I sunk into my chair so as not to be visible through the window (I didn’t really want to create an even louder commotion in the neighbourhood), and crawled to the other room, where I grabbed my hat and jacket and headed out to meet ‘Bu.

Tuesday night, ‘Bu dropped by again, and didn’t get to the name-shouting part before I recognised his poems and headed out to meet him. He had seven blank CD’s to hand off to me. We agreed to meet again in an hour.

9:47, I took him by surprise, I guess. He was standing facing the garbage can on top of which his CD player was perched. The rhymes coming out were unfamiliar. ‘I didn’t know this thing could even play anything that wasn’t yours.’ He looked up surprised, and then grinned. Wouldn’t take the CD’s I extended, but greeted me forearm to forearm, first. ‘It can play other stuff. You just don’t usually catch me playing it. You need to listen to this, though.’ I did. ‘This is Anthony Fort”. He’s a good cat. San Francisco, born and raised.’ Anthony Fort”, also known as Rappin’ 4-Tay. We both nodded to the beat for a little bit, and then ‘Bu put on a freestyle track that he’d just recorded. I wish I could remember the lyrics. Like most freestyle I’ve heard, the topic varied from moment to moment and the theme could turn on a dime. What stood out to me, though, was ‘Bu’s insistence on the track that he was a poet, and not a rapper, and that he took the latter term as a slap in the face. He’s said that before on other tracks. His CD begins with a child’s voice asking ‘So Malibu, do they still think you’re a rapper?’

We talked about freestyle briefly. As I had guessed, all but two tracks on Malibu’s CD are freestyle. But here’s an indicator of how good he is ั one of the tracks I guessed was composed was actually impromptu. It was another that was the second composed track.

The Bay fog was beginning to condense into a hanging rain. Malibu inclined his head toward the bus stop awning. ‘Let me show you something.’ I followed him. ‘You ever heard of immortal technique?’ I shook my head. ‘You always hear me promoting my own music because that’s where I make my money. This cat came up to me one day and he said he wanted to buy my CD, but he wanted me to play his demo. And I was like “Well… I don’t really do that. I really only promote myself.’ And he said “Nigga, I’m gonna buy your CD. I just want you to play this demo once.” And he told me he especially wanted me to listen to the first track. That was immortal technique.’ It was then that I realised that Immortal Technique was a rapper, not an actual technique. ‘This is some crazy, next level, esoteric shit. When I heard this song, I was like, damn, I didn’t know everything he was talking about, but I was there. All of this stuff is researched.’ As the song began, Malibu cautioned ‘He cusses. I don’t cuss in my poems.’ We stood nodding to the song while would-be passengers joined us to wait for the late night 22. Zyklon B. Extermination of the Taัnos. Al-Aqsa. Nat Turner. Elijah Mohammed. Where Malibu’s poems are often intensely personal reflections on social ills, Immortal Technique was bouncing around history, hitting on the same problems. Quite a contrast.

Eventually, Malibu headed back down to Haight and Fillmore with his new CD’s, and I went to bed.

This entry was posted on Thursday, 30 June 2005 at 23:41 and is filed under San Francisco Streets. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.