Put It On, Big L, Put It On

And now for something completely different

When I was 18 years old, I marched into Old London Road, a tattoo shop in Kingston. I’ll leave you to guess where. I had been there just 6 months prior, the week I turned 18, to get a tiny little olive, very cutesy, very demure wreath on the back of my neck. And because I was 18, and about to embark on a long career of post adolescence people pleasing, when the guest tattoo artist who offered to do this piece said it was simply too small, and that I should go big and bold with my first ever tattoo, I said sure!!! (the naivety I had back then, to just let any of the artists put this thing on my body, without even seeing their work or style, it sends shivers up my spine, right to where the tattoo lives actually).

6 months later, my plan wasn’t much better. I was 18 in 2010, an era painted by post-ironic Vice worship, and I was probably consuming enough Terry Richardson “subversive” content (read: exploitative pornography masquerading as art) that I thought what I was asking for was the perfect intersection between sexy and cool. And, because it was 2010 and my frontal lobe had not in fact developed, I thought that I should immortalise the song I was listening to non-stop at the time.

And that’s how I got M.V.P., an ode to New York Rapper “Big L” tattooed on the inside of my lip.

I won’t bore you with why, and whether I still like it, and whether I was an idiot for believing the tattoo artist who said it would fade in 5 years (a temporary tattoo! The first of it’s kind!), like I believed the tattoo artist who said I should get a 3x3” tattoo on my NECK as my first tattoo, and why I was listening to tattoo artists so much at the time. But the tattoo has stayed, and the stories have remained entertaining, and my love for Big L has waxed and then, like all my fervent obsessions, waned.

Until, 15 years later, which I guess brings us to now. The fact it’s been 15 years since I turned 18 is the sort of sour and cruel maths that I’ll laugh at in just another 15 years, but my life, unsurprisingly, is very different now. I have a job which I love and challenges me and I challenge back. I spend mornings running from the gym to the coffee shop to the 9am meeting like one of those high-powered business women with made up jobs and problems in the movies you are meant to pity but I always thought looked cool. My latent dyspraxia as a child had me struggle deeply with buttering toast. My parents would get frustrated with my lack of dexterity. “When you grow up, and you have breakfast meetings, everyone is going to look at you if you can’t butter toast”. I think of them every time I sit in a breakfast meetings, panicking someone will know my secret, that yes now I can butter toast, but I once could not. (Side note, what weird culture modelling was going on that in 1998 I knew I would be someone who regularly attended breakfast meetings? Yes, Freud, my mother had a big deal job, what OF IT!)

Breakfast meetings aside, my modern life does have its unique sets of challenges. Ones I couldn’t predict before Google even existed. They don’t necessarily keep my up at night per se, but sometimes the problems that need solving, or the general overactive brain, means that no amount of New York Times crosswords will let me drift. And the broken nights sleep (at home but it’s not home, at school but it’s not school, who is that person in the corner, why do I always get into car crashes when I’m dreaming?) means the next day, I need some pep in my step.

That morning was this morning. A wake up call from a crow outside my bedroom window, cackling with abandon. A looming deadline. A presentation I needed to run through. I had no choice. Wake up, get to work, seize the day. And I found myself flicking through my playlists to try and find the right song to get the people (me) going.

And there he was. Big L. 90s hip hop legend. Shining at me. Asking me, literally, to Put It On. I pressed play, and walked down the leafy streets of West Norwood, as I cobbled together the weird rhyming schemes cemented in my brain, probably due to overexposure when that frontal lobe was developing. I drink Moet not Becks Beer, I stay dressed in slick gear, peace to my homies in the gangsta lean I’ll see you when I get there. No baring on my life. Embarrassing how much it makes me smile, actually. Make all the jokes, I’ve made them already. You can’t kill me I was born dead.

This isn’t what I normally write on here. I normally write at length, in need of an edit, about culture and what I’ve noticed and how that applies to who I am and what I do and what the people who by and large are subscribed to this do. But I guess, in that moment this morning, I put on that song and I remembered all of that. Every word of the above. The walking into the tattoo shop aged 18 and seriously leaning into my newly found concept of free will. Remembering holding the clunky cutlery in my hand fantasising about growing up to be a little corporate piglet. Oink. And then all the other thoughts I didn’t quite get to, the complicated relationship I had with the skin I lived in which made me want to put stuff on it and through it the moment I legally could, and before that (all those piercings! Tongue! Nose! My own gun to badly staple entire ears! I recently went to get a proper piercing from a proper piercer and she shrieked and the melee of misshapen holes on my very developed EAR LOBES.). The self consciousness of loving hip hop as a very middle class, VERY white teenager from southwest London, and how I’m sure people laughed at me for it, but how obviously every single man that also matched that description I know had a free pass and it was only embarrassing because it was ME, a silly little girl. How hard I worked to get to where I am and what I do, and how I will never think I’ve worked hard enough until I’m dead, probably. How I’m writing all my neuroses on main.

And that’s that on the power of audio effectiveness. Read more about it in the system 1 TikTok report. Did I land the plane?

SIM CITY: Tales from the Algorithm is a Substack all about the internet, social media, and the cultural anthropology of the digital world. Subscribe for more 😇