I feel like I must start this dispatch with a confession: I have never seen Snowfall. That’s not to say that I didn’t try to watch it—I did. I cannot tell you how many times I tried to watch the first season, but it never clicked for me, which was troubling. It was a show about drugs (I love those—shows about drugs, not the drugs themselves), set in Los Angeles (I love L.A. just like Tupac did, more on this later), and was about the 1980s, which tracks with my childhood. By all accounts, Snowfall should have been a must-watch for me from day one, but it wasn’t, and I’ve struggled with that for years.
Mostly, I struggled because it felt like everyone else seemed to love it. Despite knowing plenty about Franklin Saint and Jerome and Leon and Wanda (and on and on) purely from the conversations I’d seen on social media, Snowfall was a social media darling. It wasn’t Atlanta or Insecure, but it was beloved by many. So, admittedly, when The Drop: A Snowfall Saga was announced, I wasn’t exactly enthralled until I read the description: a story about hip-hop in Los Angeles in the early ’90s. Scrr scrr.
Let’s take a quick detour so that I can tell you a little about me and my upbringing. I have long felt like I should have been from L.A. It is one of my favorite cities. I first set foot in the City of Angels in my early 20s in the early aughts, but I was familiar with the culture and the sound because my 1980s and 1990s listening experiences were largely centered around L.A. While New York City dominated the hip-hop conversations for most of the genre’s early years, my ears were fixated on the West Coast. N.W.A. was my first favorite rap group. DJ Quik has long been one of my favorite artists ever. I listen to Ice Cube’s Death Certificate when I shovel East Coast snow because of how much I hate its powdery, white oppressiveness. Hi-C? Check. MC Eiht? Yep. Above the Law? Of course. Yo-Yo? You can’t play with mine. Snoop, Lil’ Half Dead, RBX and on and on. If there was music coming from the West in the ’90s, I was all in.
