This site is a collection of essays, personal reflections, pictures, and links (please join me in refusing to term this a ‘lifestyle blog’), examining the idea of ‘flavor’.

Not food and drink ‘flavor’, though there is plenty of that. But ‘flavor’ in reference to fashionable, stylish, inherently interesting things. But not just fashion. Nor simply style. Fashion is what people wear. Style is how they wear it. Both are easily acquired, especially in the internet age, where information about what to wear, how to wear it, and more importantly how and where to get it, flows more easily than ever. Flavor is something like each, but well beyond both.

Flavor is, like soul, inherent. It is that often hard-to-pin-down bit of self-expression, whether through uniqueness, or bravery, or confidence, that makes people who have it stand out from people who are merely stylish, or who know what to wear and when. It is what allows some people to be able to “pull X off” while others have to ask if they can. (NB: Generally speaking, if you have to ask, you can’t.)

The name, FLAVORMOST, is taken from a PE lyric, off of It Takes a Nation of Millions… This album is one of three, alongside Kool G Rap & DJ Polo’s Road to the Riches and Eric B & Rakim’s Follow the Leader, which I identify as having truly cemented what became my lifelong love affair with hip-hop, which continues, despite the best efforts of today’s crop of utterly weak artists, to influence my own personal style and idea of what ‘flavor’ is, to this day. A three-part first kiss which left its mark on my soul, indelibly, forever.

The subtitle is a play off of the subsequent portion of the same lyric (“put it on your toast”), and speaks to the idea of how, unlike style, flavor can’t be faked. Fashion will be bought, style will be taught. Flavor won’t; you either got it or you don’t. If you try to fake it, it will show.

To me, flavor is one of a handful of qualities, along with empathy and wit, I admire most in others. It is that next level understanding of what works and what doesn’t. A slight tilt of the hat, a well-placed vintage accessory that nobody else is likely to own, things you wouldn’t ever have thought to put together but somehow work. Sneakers so impossible to find that heads come up to you on the subway to ask if they really exist. It is not being afraid to stand out, to out-dress the room in an interesting yet subtle way, but not looking like you are taking great pains to do so. Or are terribly concerned if anyone else even notices. Effortless dopeness. In its simplest terms: style + taste + soul.

And to that degree, a lot of what I consider flavor is about nostalgia: connecting the present with the past. This is what I love most about what I consider the best of hip-hop: making old soul, funk, and jazz music new and exciting and original again. Ephemera from my youth, old school music, literature, and art, sports memorabilia – all of which takes me back to this formative time and place. Vintage stuff. Things I think have inherent value but for some hard-to-place reason, maybe only to me.

So I do my best to identify what I think is flavor, and why I think that is, often in, yes, rather overwrought prose. Or sometimes just shit I happen to be into for one reason or another.

Enjoy. Or don’t. I’m good either way.