You have no power to grant me credibility on this issue, any more than I have the power to grant it to myself.

Well, you’re clearly looking to have a “chilling” effect on discourse: holding your cards as a youthful ‘United Nations’ politician and member of the ‘labor aristocracy’ close to the vest was a good way to do that. Clearly you have some kind of credibility, and it would be lovely if you would explain to us in great detail why exactly the conclusion I found ‘primitively compelling’ is wrong (maybe you could put in a good word for me at Fairway, too). Otherwise, it looks like you are a person with interesting experiences who is one-sidedly prosecuting an anti-intellectual agenda.

John Holbo was smart enough to shut the fuck up. You should follow his lead and do the same.

Yeah you are. You’re not really invited to talk like that, like you might be if you had caught the Paid in Full reference and if white privilege didn’t work quite as well for you as it obviously does. However, even if you met those qualifications there would be no shame in not talking like a street criminal if you haven’t been forced into that life.

For the record the latinization of Bushwick is decades old.

That’s good to know, although not really incompatible with what I said: this guy is failing to see that not accepting change could have happened at an earlier point in time, creating an environment where he wasn’t welcome (and I do know those neighborhoods). Every stop is being pulled out here so that we don’t have to agree on what is obviously the case, that the song is a fitting tribute to a fine organization.

For the record the latinization of Bushwick is decades old.

Grow up and stop being a phony. “Bushwick Bill” here is confusing the issues of trust-fund gentrification and the slightly earlier Latinization of that part of Brooklyn, so he can take a stand against wimpy white guys in lieu of the big brown ones. I happen to think the Dap-Tone people’s reference to Make the Road is pretty cool and politically astute: I suspect the Make the Road people don’t mind too much, and know all kinds of “hustles” that don’t involve 401(k)s inside and out. All of this is totally patent to anyone who knows from activism, as opposed to being a ‘hard-headed’ trainspotter who jest cain’t get over the loonies really exploring the practical political options of the present, rather than Sittin’ Back And Counting Their Money A La A Rap Star ‘Cause They’re Good Like That.

Why don’t you ask people who live in these neighborhoods and have all their lives, how they feel about the people moving in and forcing them out? Instead of talking about the working class, of any race, why not talk to them? That’s obviously something you haven’t done much of in your life.
Better yet, take some advice from me and styles p.
Try working a real job for a while. Learn a hustle, learn a trade. Spend 3 years in the fields, or the streets. And if you want to proclaim solidarity with the workers of the world by riding in the freight elevator remember that by doing that you’re just forcing people to wait for you to get out so they can get back to work.
And if you want to have a discussion of history and nostalgia begin start here. There are plenty of people as enthusiastic as you, and as unwilling to ask themselves just what it is they’re enthusiastic about.

It’s American history, and I guess I’m going to have to get stupid with it (and the history of other places, I guess, if you could remember Eric Hobsbawm’s jazz criticism, which you can’t since you are “fronting” on at least this score). The “White Negro” is a left-wing figure going back decades, and there’s precious little about contemporary hipster culture that limits it to that shade: the “real” people who are busy limiting the degrees of freedom of young people without significant cultural or economic capital and can’t see “Latin” themes right there on the page, or hear them in the groove, are the real dubious friends of the continental left. As for how the gun and the knife is, I’ll take your word for it.

though neither really compare to the best of the stuff to come out of the late 60s and 70s

and if you have listened to all of that, you are just as well served by reissues from numero group and other labels putting out some of the more overlooked stuff of the time.

I also fail to see how Bushwick remaining an alcázar etnico in the style of the now-famous Bloomfield would have been better from a leftist point of view; I’m not too “New York”, but I remember certain goings-on in some place called “Howard Beach” about twenty years ago. That’s what I was talking about by bringing up Make the Road, which is an organization independent of white people grooving to tunes on the Internet. If they are revivalists, they are revivalists of a ‘90s American (!) project far to the left of the products of for-real imperialism and monarchy who are going to school us all for being “center-right” in spite of ourselves and our sitting the experience of fascism out.

As for Dap-Tone, it hurts a little to listen to the music because I have to remember it is not 1972 and I am not a groovy white revolutionary down, at least as regards the aesthetics of urbanism, with “The Movement”. However, consider this: perhaps it is more or less an open secret that “contemporary” black musical forms like hip-hop left a fair piece of space open for something like “neo-soul”, because rappers and DJs happen to kind of like that sort of thing, maybe even secretly kind of better than hip-hop sound-bombs?

And you see John, I can begin by being annoyed with the art or with the politics., the esthetics or the philosophy, without any conflict at all: empiricism in support of rationalism, and the other way ‘round.
So am I at heart an angry leftist, or just an angry art critic? Thanks to you and others like you, I may never have to choose.
“Nostalgpalyptic”
Nice. I built a whole paragraph riffing on that one. I’m not immune.
Never said otherwise.