Let your baseball cap go, son.

Ok, so this exists:

Here are the lyrics in static form, in case the video is/was going too fast for you. I snagged them from sing365.com and adjusted the punctuation.

Uhn, smack, there goes my baseball cap.
I’m on the floor,
I think I took a bruse to my jaw.
Jumped me from behind at least three, maybe four.
I never see my hat no more.

Oh, smash (smack). There goes my baseball cap.
It’s gone, gone, gone, gone,
I can’t get it back.
Oh, smash (smack), there goes my baseball cap,
It’s gone, gone, gone, gone,
I can’t get it back.

Fourteen years old and hard to the core,
I’m walking home making plans for war.
My hands was cut, my uncle says, “What’s up?
Let me guess, your clothes are in a mess, you’re in distress,
Sit down, take five, and let me look at your knees.
You’re still alive son, please take it easy.
Sometimes you have to let the world know you ain’t bluffing,
But enough is enough, don’t loose your life over nothing.
Scuffling in the street is no way to die,
And I don’t want to have to meet your mama’s eye.
So try and listen hard before you fall into the trap
Of making war over a baseball cap.”

Let’s take a moment to reflect here. Was there a time in America when “making war over a baseball cap” was so commonplace that it was a known “trap”?

Thinking back to the 1990s, I remember this hilariously earnest moment in cinema:

I remember that my mother never wanted me to have one of those nearly ubiquitous Starter parkas because she swore that I would get shot for it. (I eventually got a Green Bay Packers pullover; it was black with green and “gold” bands on the upper arm. I never got shot–nor even blind-sidedly knocked to the ground by an undetermined number of dudes–for it. Still, the fear of bodily harm coming to me because of an article of clothing was very real to my mother at the time.)

I remember this Batman comic, which I owned and adored during the same time as I coveted said Starter parka. It depicts teenagers capping each other for everything from briefcases of cocaine to a squabble over a high school locker.

And apparently, shit like that is still happening, to some extent, though it doesn’t appear to be the sort of back-alley, cold-blooded, gang initiation thing that it once was (or was depicted as in sensationalist cracker media).

So, maybe the allure of baseball cap wars was/is an actual thing.

If so, more people could use uncles like the one that saved a 14-year-old Faithless (in case you have already forgotten, Faithless is the rapper who’s rapping about baseball caps and the wars that stem from them) from becoming just another casualty of that war:

Oh, smash (smack). There goes my baseball cap.
It’s gone, gone, gone, gone,
I can’t get it back.
Oh, smash (smack), there goes my baseball cap,
It’s gone, gone, gone, gone,
I can’t get it back.

I sat back, had a think,
My uncle poured a drink.
I had a little cry, my eye started to blink
‘Cause what occurred from his word to me
Sounds absurd, but I
Heard the love in his voice for me.

Maybe that’s the problem: in a world wherein it’s absurd to love family members, or to realize that family members love you, why not start a “war” over a baseball cap?

But thank god for this absurdity of familial love:

I made a choice, It was like, Snap,
What’s a cap when I got something real like that?
I can measure it, treasure it, and at my leisure
Sit down with those who mean the most to me.
The baseball cap was a ghost, this is real to me.
“You got steel, son,” my uncle’s talkin’.
“Takes a champion to walk and keep walking.
Drink your drink, and let the words sink in.
Say goodnight to your mom and think again.”

He poured his very underage nephew a drink. Cool.

So I took my 14 years up to bed,
Everything he said taking root in my head
I shed all my tears, and let my 14 years
Relax…

I wonder how old the speaker is.

Oh, smash (smack). There goes my baseball cap.
It’s gone, gone, gone, gone,
I can’t get it back.
Oh, smash (smack), there goes my baseball cap,
It’s gone, gone, gone, gone,
I can’t get it back.

I don’t know how sincere this song is. If it’s sincere in it’s message, who knows if it’s borne of real experience, or it’s just some lame-o thinking “Once, these bullies, they stole my hat,” and then, “People used to kill people for hats and things!” and finally, “Oh! I would sound so thug if I pretended like I was going to kill the three, maybe four jerks that made my jaw ache until m’uncle gave me some kool-aid poured me a drink and told me I was brave and implicated that he loved me.”

Yet, I have given it the serious treatment of a mediocre mind, and reduced it to this bit of wisdom, which isn’t wisdom at all, really, unless wisdom is a redundancy or a waste of time, which the stuff that passes for wisdom usually is, and this particular “wisdom” didn’t take any deducing either, honestly, because it blatantly says in the lyrics that a baseball cap, even one as baller as the new Miami Marlins hat, is not worth dying or killing for.

This NotGraphs Actual Thing has barely been about baseball at all.