She showed up Friday afternoon. It was a cold day, that much I remember because of her large coat.
That was important because when she was wearing the coat, you couldn't tell that she was a freak.
He had been talking about her non-stop since we had moved in, and now she was here. She came from a far-away place — a school in the Midwest — so we didn't know what to expect, but it was fall of freshman year, still the honeymoon, so we were in making-good-first-impression mode. Apparently, she wasn't too worried about that.
Things loosened up as everyone congregated in our room before heading out for a night of fratting (things were different freshman year). We made small talk as we sipped and prepped. Someone's playlist — no doubt called something like "Party Playlist" or "party time" or "p4r7y!!!!!11!1" — was trying its best to boom from some tinny iPod speaker in a corner of the room. Visiting Girlfriend was not used to such tame get-togethers. This was clear because she was sipping a bit more than the rest.
And then the song came on. It was probably Flo Rida's "Low" (2007), although it could have been any song like that.
Her eyes widened and she looked around the room, a woman possessed. A huge grin spread across her face, and then she blurted out a question that I will never in my life forget:
"Y'all walldance here?"
You're not alone if you're confused, because no, we don't walldance here, so you probably don't know what it is. As far as Visiting Girlfriend's curiosity went, our stunned silence, painfully arching eyebrows and confused looks must have answered the question. So she got up and demonstrated.
I'm not sure how she was doing what she did. It made no sense. It was a poledance in two dimensions. She was freaking on that wall, hard. If I tried to do what she had done, it would have looked like I was experiencing a seizure, and someone would have called 911, and not because I was burning up the dance floor.
She was on the wall, dancing — no, writhing against it in time with the music. And she was doing it well.
We were shocked, to say the least. Visiting Girlfriend's walldance is still the stuff of legends among my friends. It makes sense, if you think about it: She enjoyed getting freaky but was a faithful girlfriend, and rather than grind up on some random guy, she found a way of getting her freak on alone. But sensible or not, it was insane to see.
Visting Girlfriend's walldance may have been bizarre, confusing and borderline inappropriate, but it was truthful and honest if it was anything. And it was a bold, creative outlet through which she expressed her emotions and feeling, and maybe the only way she knew how to do so.
I think that Visiting Girlfriend's walldance is a perfect metaphor for hip-hop.
Hip-hop is all about breaking boundaries and expressing things in new, unique ways. Many rappers express themselves exclusively through metaphors, saying the exact same things as their peers in completely different ways. If rappers were scared to stand out, they wouldn't be rappers, just as how if Visiting Girlfriend had been at all self-conscious (or clued in to Tufts social mores) and hadn't rubbed her fanny (both American and British) on my common room's wall, she would have fully faded from memory by now.
The next time you hear a song that just gets into your bones and makes you dance — not from some ironic impulse to spaz out to a song with a built-in dance (no Dougie-ing or Cranking Dat (Soulja Boy)), but a song that's so hot it makes girls go wild and frot inanimate objects in physically implausible ways — don't hesitate to back it all the way up to a wall and get down (and up and side to side).
Because that's hip-hop.
