September 2008
For years now, I have lamented my musical memory. I have a hard enough time keeping band names in my head but associating them to randomly playing songs? It is rarely a success. I blame my sisters. When I was younger, I constantly was asking, “who sings this song?” as they played their 1980s pop stations. As they rarely knew (possible evidence that our musical memories are a genetic flaw), their responses were usually irritated attempts to brush off further questioning. They wore me down with the overwhelming lack of information. The rest of my musical upbringing was my parents’ Christian radio stations, which brings very little to the table of music snobs.
As I made friends with more and more musicians, record collectors and walking encyclopedias of musical history, I concluded I couldn’t internalize music like they could. I thought I wasn’t judicious enough in my musical preferences until I theorized the opposite to be true. I am extremely picky. Hence most songs and artists just don’t pass my internal tests enough to stick in my head. However, when a song or an artist surpasses my internal blocking mechanisms, the successful song or artist becomes my only soundtrack until I officially overplay it or find a new obsession.
So it was with Scroobius Pip vs Dan le Sac. I have my friend Camille to thank for introducing me to the spoken word/hip-hop duo. I took the bait with “Letter From God,” and before I knew it, I was hooked.
In the course of my online meanderings, I happened to see Philadelphia amongst the tour dates. Philadelphia was about 4.5 hours away, and friends with spare couches and time awaited me there. The perfect friend for the journey was so clearly Camille, and she was as eager as I was to make it happen!
I had listened to the Scroobius Pip vs Dan Le Sac album so many times. The music was personal, insightful and smart. I wanted to show my appreciation for what the two gentlemen did artistically. For friends and loved ones, I typically show my appreciation with baked goods, so it seemed appropriate to do the same for this duo.
Camille and I loaded into her Camry on a sunny morning with two chocolate effigies along for the ride. We arrived in Philly, with cakes in tact, and convinced my friend and our gracious host Phil to come to the concert as well. When we made it to the venue, it was easy to pick out Scroobius Pip talking to people at the bar.
As he turned away from a table of fans, I got his attention. I offered the cakes, and Camille, “the Knitta Ninja,” offered her own gesture of appreciation- fingerless gloves with “Scroobois Pip” stitched across the fingers. We thanked the duo for their work, and they thanked us for ours. He and Dan Le Sac were both sincere and appreciative and proceeded to put on a fantastic show.
The manager liked the cakes and gloves so much that he gave us drink vouchers. With piss water or “well drinks” as the options, Camille and I decided to learn more about “well drinks.” We tried our very first gin and tonic. We were indeed very late bloomers in the G&T realm, but we will always remember the first time we tried that combination.
The following week, I went as far as to watch The Carson Daly Show, a half-hour of painful television I would typically avoid. The only reason I watched was the slight chance that my cakes were going to achieve their moment of fame.
After the show, Scroob had asked us to come outside for a moment. He was working his way across the US on his tour, and The Carson Daly Show awaited the duo on the West Coast. His assignment was to record the quirky things he encountered on tour, so we were the quirky Philadelphia installment. Unfortunately, his footage must have been bagged in the end because the show featured a skit of Scroob and Dan instead.
The painful awkwardness of Carson Daly aside, the entire experience was quite the grand baking adventure!
The Recipe?
In one of my irresponsible documentation moments, this is all I left for posterity…
I could have pieced it together in some semblance of “the creaming,” “the wet ingredients” and “the dry ingredients,” but I prefer to leave history as it is in this case: an incomplete scribble in between baking and sculpting.
