What Does PSK Mean In Schooly D's Song?

Schooly D is known as one of the first people to make rap music that could be classified as gangsta rap. Another name that comes to mind is the name of Just-Ice who also fits the early gangsta bill. The song PSK, What Does That Mean? is an out and out hip hop classic and should be known anyone that claims to love the music.



So PSK stands for The Parkside Killers which was a real outfit that ran in Philly based out of a neighborhood of the same name. Just think of the landscape of rap music if Schooly D didn't help set off the genre that groups like NWA took the baton and ran with.

Writing and Music

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Music often has a fractal structure like writing and nature. Rudy Rucker compares a novel to a score composed by an orchestra of characters. I think of a looper laying down all his tracks before he begins his song. Rucker also mentions the soloist whether it is the sax or the guitar. I think of the freestyle emcee. In a rock and roll badass kind of way Rucker speaks of the power chords as god chords, and advises us of the themes of his beloved sic fi genre. The writer builds up the concepts, juggling the action, pressing it forward, the ideas moving. The musician uses time, rhythm, repetition, patterns, and alternation. The musician becomes a radio antenna accepting the energy as fuel to help create their song.

Fractals start small and keep building in complexity infinitely. New ideas keep breaking off and expanding, all the while echoing back to the source of it's original trajectory. They say the eyes are the window of the soul, so then the doors of the mind hold hidden worlds, and the world is likened to a building. On the roof we see the infinite realm of possibility and in the basement we respect the underbelly. All the while we are advised to remember the hierarchy, the outside, the inside, and the secret.

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