It was Jane who killed Ghostface Killah’s Supreme Clientele, not me. It’s still one of my favorite albums of all time, but I can’t listen to it without feeling the unique texture of a plastic cutting board against my forehead and smelling carrot juice and garlic. And not only do I not particularly enjoy carrots and garlic, but their epicurean nuances do not play well with the particular brand of pain that Ghost brings on his definitive album.

Jane didn’t like rap. She didn’t really like me that much, either, but she put on a little song and dance that might’ve suggested that she did. Rap saw no such routine. Categorical dismissal, the worst kind. Indeed, Jane was terrifically good looking, but mostly she was full of the worst kinds of things. She always found out some way to take the knees out from under my giants so that I was left looking for Meg Ryan on New Year’s Eve, or worse, Gheorghe Muresan. That means that she would always tell me that my tastes were wrong, and my heroes were mythologized for no reason.

I was working an office job just after I graduated college, and I got through the day by listening to rap. Supreme Clientele was the album that got the most play, hands down. I played it constantly, trying to parse out its essence, while Jane, who was a comparative literature grad student, would tell me that I was an idiot because not only was there no such thing as essence, but that even if there was, its very definition would prevent me from finding it. Wow, that’s sweet, Jane, I would say. And even though I was most desirous of an implement with which to bludgeon her when she went into her “I’m smarter than you and that makes you less of a man” mode, I was and still am at heart a peaceful man. A peaceful man who loves rap.

One day Jane told me that rap was a bastardized form of poetry, which was the only real thing people could do and not be part of some “late-industrialized cultural hegemony” or something. Still, I kept trying to get her to like the album. “There’s so much going on here, Jane, really. I think you would find the richness of the lyrics if you would just give it a chance.”

“Fine, We’ll listen to that album once all the way through, and I’ll give it a chance.”

So that’s what we did. I started cutting some carrots and garlic, because it was dinner time, and besides, Supreme Clientele goes very well with a fine meal. But Jane was a vegetarian, and really, Supreme needs some serious vittles. It’s predatory. Tofu is simply not appropriate, and that’s what was currently going in the pan.

Jane just sat on one of the bar stools we had in our kitchen and looked confident. That what she did most of the time. Look confident, like she would have no problem grabbing a pair of garden shears and doing some damage to my manhood. I guess that image comes to mind because there was a lot of metaphorical slicing-off of my genitals in our relationship.

As the album played, I chopped veggies and bobbed my head. I guess the reason I love Supreme Clientele so much is that all the bizarre stuff going on in the lyrics—and man, you can get lost in there—is veiled by Ghost’s hyped-up delivery; it’s as if these words pack a message coded in enigma. A message that contains avoidance instructions for incipient doom.

Scotty watty cop it to me, big microphone hippie / Hit Poughkeepsie crispy chicken verbs throw up a stone richie

Ultimately, I never really tried to capture the specific enigma machine that would decode the rhymes. It’s probably on some sunken WWII submarine. That job is better left to Jane’s fellow Comp Lit grad students, a couple of whom, like me, can dig Supreme Clientele and who, unlike me, enjoy scuba diving for naval artifacts. I just relished how the puzzle itself, rather than the answer to it, laced the propulsion of the beats. And I thought this kind of half-baked music crit was right up Jane’s alley. How it didn’t really matter if Ghost made any sense, that the non sequiturs have a certain energy in the way they exploded upon release from the tightly wound production—but she was having none of it. In retrospect I realize that I might as well have been throwing cotton balls at the Washington Monument.

Jane had this habit of committing small acts of frivolous violence upon people to punctuate arguments. Usually it was just a little slap on the shoulder or a pencil to the crown. This time, however, she was a bit more ambitious.

The last song, which has all those samples from the “Ironman” cartoon, ended and she got up from the stool. She looked incredibly good, and this is one of the problems here, I always noticed when she looked good. I had finished chopping about half-way though the album, and I was standing, arms and legs crossed, leaning against the counter, enjoying myself. She walked over beside me and kissed me nicely. Then she paused, lingered a second as we looked into each other’s eyes. Finally, she reached down for the cutting board and whacked me in the forehead with it. “Cultural motherfucking hegemony,” she said, ignoring my outcry of pain. She hit me hard. It left a mark.

We broke up a few days later, mostly because of me, rather than Supreme Clientele. I knew Ghost would not approve of a break-up on his account. But she killed that album. Carrots and garlic just do not do it justice.