Compress or Be Compressed

A 40-year-old dad justifies his rap videos.

I just squeezed our past 2.5 months in Cape Town into a 3-minute rap video:

Breakdancing boys, Klaudia, Hussar Grill meals, Saunders sunsets, chameleon hunting, cheetah petting, ice cream taste testing, lots of biking, hiking, and running around.

To quote the chorus of our new banger, Cape Town’s “so damn far, so damn good.” And there’s too damn much to squeeze in. I tried my best.

Pop Goes the Memories

I became a rap video producer in 2017, when my brother, our partners, and I surprised my mom with The Khop Kun Krap Birthday Rap:

It was just meant to be a fun(ny) gift and a project to keep us busy between cocktails, curry, and coconut beach bocce competitions. Oh, and an outlet for my repressed rapper fantasies.But when I watch the video now, nine years later, I get more.

A picture’s worth a thousand words, so 30 frames per second for three minutes packs, lemme see, 5.4 million! Watching it is like opening up one of those mattresses that gets delivered in a tiny box.

The tight packaging gets more potent over time. Watch it in 2018? Haha, what a dumb video. Watch it in 2026? Wow, we were so young… oh yeah that market… oh yeah that snorkeling trip… oh yeah that country club… oh yeah… oh yeah. Damn.

I wonder what it’ll feel like to rewatch in 2036.

Packed Punches Beat Bottomless Pits

The packed punch hit extra hard this past October. Maybe it’s having kids, whose development makes the passage of time way more visceral. It was wild to watch my third rap video, Sooke Ones, Part II, of a 2023 family retreat with Kim’s family, and realize how much our boys had changed.

I wished I had more time capsules like this. Of my brother, my cousin, and my “Power Brothers” Southeast Asia adventures in 2008. Of my 2013 worldwide “pretirement” tour. Of our 10-week lockdown in Plettenberg Bay, South Africa. Of our adventures last year through Australia, Argentina, Brazil, and Costa Rica.

Instead of videos that compress these chapters, I have a bottomless Google Drive that gives me nearly as much dread as nostalgia whenever I decide to wade through its overwhelming piles of photos. Google/Apple/Facebook and my brain try to compress those memories into ad-hoc slideshows. “Chris, here’s a slideshow from 2016!” It’s better than nothing. But it’s not the same.

So my rap video production ramped up. Blachuts to the Roots for the trip to Poland for my dad’s 70th. Buenos Dias, Barcelona for our 34 days there last fall. The Cape Town ’26 vid. And more to come.

Squeeze Those Brain Muscles

Compressing is about more than storing memories. As I try to tell myself whenever I get a crappy gift, it’s the thought that counts.

To squeeze 2.5 months in Cape Town into a 3-minute rap video, you gotta put major effort into thinking about what really matters:

• What were the real highlights of our time that can’t be cut?

• What makes Cape Town so magical that we’ve literally traveled to the other side of the world seven out of the past eight years for more?

• What will my future self want to see?

These are hard questions to answer concisely, let alone correctly. No doubt, I get some wrong. So what? Better to make choices than to make none at all. To compress is to prioritize. Every rep sharpens my perspective. Somewhat paradoxically, compressing also broadens it.

What Else Deserves Your Compression?

Rap videos to record life chapters are just one example of owning your compression.

My work decoding an individual’s wiring and repackaging it into an archetype is another. Similarly impossibly hard, never entirely accurate. But without it, your brain compresses self-perception into identities anyway. Might as well own it.

Writing too. I struggled to compress my thoughts into a portable package you might actually use. This forced me to figure out what I was actually trying to say. What really matters. Like any compression, not perfect, not entirely accurate, but better than the alternative.

Keep doing exciting things,

Chris