1. People pack all sorts of things to eat in ziploc bags to eat elsewhere. We did the same thing with our breakfast bacon today, though we took no buses and used saran wrap instead.

2. 1998.

1. Sure, but is bacon in baggies a cultural thing I just don't know about? I've heard it mentioned about five times in recent memory, and that seems like a lot. It's probably a coincidence.

As far as I know, it's no more a cultural thing than anything else in baggies - carrots, Cheerios, trail mix, etc. I like to think it's kind of Midwestern, or maybe just Minnesotan.

2. Any specific reason for your choice of year?

I feel like 1998 was a saturation point for rap. Tupac and Biggie had just begun their posthumous careers, leaving gangsta rap effectively crippled, and while strong producers like Missy Elliott were working and both independant and mainstream rappers were making good tracks (moreso the independents, mochiron), it became the era of Puff Daddy and the ushering in of poor lyrics, expensive vanity sampling, and an obsession with money that's only now starting to wear away with the retirement of Jay-Z and rise of more Southern hip-hop/rap, Kanye West, and dancehall - a completely different ethos than is present on either coast, even now. (See: 50 Cent's mass marketing blitz versus David Banner doing his best to help post-Katrina efforts in Mississippi, for example). Hip-hop has been painfully un-edgy and uninteresting until the last couple of years, but the cliques (used here to mean loose groups of rappers, sometimes unified by the neighborhoods they came out of but generally grouped by record label, who guest on, produce or remix each other's tracks) coming out of Atlanta and Houston among others of late are genuinely exciting.

There are exceptions everywhere, but that's how I see it.

Thanks for the explanation :-)

I don't know much about rap or hip-hop in general (my first real experiences with them as musical styles were at Macalester). I grew up in Northern Wisconsin in a town of 3,185 people, and the vast majority (roughly 3,155 of them) were white. So when people listened to rap or hip-hop, they were usually white people trying to act black, because black was the "cool thing" from MTV that they wanted to be. And since these were not the kind of people I wanted to be, I didn't listen to the music, which you would have to drive out of town to buy anyway.

Park Falls is a lot bigger than Baldwin, then. Or at least it sounds like it. You've never said too much about your hometown. I take it there weren't any actual black people around as well.

It's cool, though. I never wanted to act black, either. (where black == ghetto hip-hop culture. When we visit Baldwin, I like to reflect that I am the blackest person around for miles. Heh heh.)

Most of the black children were adopted by white families; the only black family in town was only there for a few years, since their dad was a doctor who worked with my dad.

Clarifying that last bit, he wanted to move back to Chicago. Every doctor who has worked with my dad has not ultimately left Park Falls ;-)

That's good to know. :o)

i do not know the answer to #2, but i contend that skilled rap over the right kind of jazz can be sublime.

It's not that I don't like rap (I do - I even like certain kinds of country music) - it's that most rap tacked on to a movie with no other rap tracks seems like a desperate grab at "being hip".

I suppose the question is mostly rhetorical in nature.