It doesn’t take an extensive background of knowledge in the history of cars or the complexities of mechanics to be able to appreciate a solid ride.  Sometimes a little bit of knowledge can go a long way, and too much about something can take the magic right out of it.  So it is easy to see why things that come naturally to some folks can be more essential and elemental.  But in the case with Funkmaster Flex, it’s a combination of street knowledge as well as extensive technical knowledge that makes him worth listening to.

This goes for the music as well as the cars.  There are equivalences between the two seemingly-disparate arenas that speak to origins of each.  Both car culture and hiphop culture are in the streets, the literal metaphor for the spaces where cultures and technologies meet and mash up to become something else, something altogether different and still consistent.  There is an integrity about a Jay-Z song just as there is an integrity about alloy wheels.  They seem to be entirely different things, where Jay-Z’s rhymes are vehicles for the song, and wheels are for carrying a vehicle, but they both have a core of self-expression that is entirely based on qualities and degrees of transcendence.

For Flex, musically speaking, it’s necessary to have the old and the new always close at hand simultaneously.  A local show with Wu Tang Clan can be an historic event, but a new, underground show by the reclusive kid up the block can also be as transformative, because hiphop is always moving in new directions, and always steps ahead of anyone’s capacity to perceive.  The new does rise on the shoulders of the giants who came before us, and it sometimes takes the energy and passion of the next generation to remind everyone about the roots that give birth to this, again, and again.  It is not, by chance, then, that he comes from the Bronx, widely celebrated (and often contested) as the birthplace of the music before the 70s even began.

The Bronx is also the place where culture expresses itself rhythmically in other ways, with tires rolling against the pavement, kumho tires proving themselves on these testing grounds after having passed the test of the track.  And perhaps it is a stretch to connect the two kinds of tracks in this way, but master djs are enormously dexterous and versatile, so that when there is a move from the air to the street, it is a reflection of an aesthetic, not a disjunction in meaning.  Culture moves constantly, and quickly, and it takes certain well-trained eyes and sensitive ears to capture the multiple tracks when they play at the same level.