Do you know?

 As a small child she listened only to oldies and soft rock, because it was what her mother liked and she controlled the car radio. Every morning as Yasmin’s mother drove her to school, they’d listen to the smooth jams of Billy Joel or Paul Simon, or other mornings they’d dance funkily in their seats to The Supremes, or croon along with Otis Redding. As far as Yasmin was concerned, The Beatles were the hippest band out there. How sad she was to learn that John Lennon was long dead. A death the world had already mourned was hers to experience stingingly fresh and new. Ever after, all Beatles songs reminded her that there would be no more Beatles songs. And the realization of that, in turn, led her to the conclusion that if the Beatles could be doomed to that fate, any other musician could be doomed to it as well. So she stopped dancing, stop crooning, stopped jamming, unwilling to invest the emotions of her tiny child heart any longer. 

Music becomes such a fickle thing for her. Few notes every really stick. But when they do, they cling to the ceiling of her skull, so that any entering thought has to make its way past them first. When she is older, her parents attempt gently forcing her to learn various instruments, though these are all failed experiments. For Yasmin, the problem is how the notes look on the page: like frozen tadpoles unable to reach their destination. 

“It just seems like they should be moving. They should look more alive.”

Truthfully, she knows that is her responsibility, to give them life, but she doesn’t know how to. So she quits every instrument forced upon her, and her parents eventually stop trying. “Well, there’s still the other one, sort of,” they shout to each other over the cacophony of drums being played by Yasmin’s brother in the basement.

Yasmin grows up maintaining a musical unawareness. Friends giggle as she sways back and forth with a beer in hand, and expresses amazement when a song she likes comes over the speaker, turning to one of her buddies to ask, “Do you know who this is?”

“LCD Soundsystem.”

Or,

“Radiohead.”

Or,

“Alabama Shakes.”

Or,

“Prince. For fuck’s sake, Yasmin: You don’t know Prince?”

And Yasmin shrugs her shoulders, swaying. 

Until one day she hears a song—a rap song. Rap: with her limited musical knowledge, she’d never listened to much of it, but suddenly she can’t understand why that is. The words, weaving in and out of each other, braiding lyrical poetry, are now starting to weave in and out of her ears. And so she turns to her friends and asks,

“Do you know?”

“Do you know?”

“Do you know?”

No one knows.

Desperately she tries to Shazam it, but this results in a dead end. The notes, more and more of them, are sticking to the inside of her head, filling it. And so in a final measure she begins to record. Standing next to a speaker, she holds her phone and arm up high and keeps them there until the song ends. Back at home, she sits late into the night hunched over her computer, looking ardently into the archives of the Internet, asking one thing: 

“Do you know?”

Rappers I Know T-shirt; Boohoo satin sweats; Zara loafers and jacket; RIK x Peabe Rap Squat pins.