The Bronx is Still Burning: Swizz Beatz, No Commission and Gentrification
Scenes from the borough that hip-hop and crack built, or buried
I didn’t go, not because I did not want to go, because I definitely did want to. I saw the flicks and heard the love and wanted in. This is my borough. But, I don’t do heat well, and neither does an 8 month old, and NYC is presently under crazy heat wave conditions that make you want to fight bus drivers like some new kind of lucha libra is upon us. So, I passed. But, still watched the scene happening from everyone else’s camera lenses. My man (“my man” is better known as Tyron Perryman) sent me the loosie, a single shot photo of the carousel rotating clockwise under the auspice of a soon-to-be inflated moon. The BX is poppin’ now, I heard. Or, again. Swizzy did that. And I look at the gallery spread recaps on Instagram, filters run amuck, and think we are art, too. The colors, Coors beer cans and Blacks and Browns and Whites smiling adjacent to DMX lauded stages, multitudes facing painted side walls and blotches of sideblock eaten by the kind that don’t know Robert Moses or what jumping atop flipped pissy, pussy juice stained mattresses means, what the Cross Bronx Expressway did, what Arthur Ave. still does, what Boston Rd. and the Shower Posse means to the borough that Hip-Hop and crack built, or buried, or vice versa, depending on the version of the story and which class, poor or rich, tell it.
We are building better gentrifiers in the Bronx, cleaner gentrifiers—they wash their own clothes and pay rent on time and go to Wallworks and cuchifritos spots, and order the right foods because they watch TV and learn the origins of flavors and the peoples and learn how to pronounce the names of the meals. Shit, I don’t know how to pronounce the names, still the lazy “R” roller I am. The accents cut, the language steel to my tongue, stuck; I am from here, but they are not. Look at Hudson Yards, Hudson Yards not yet built, but beginning to be built, with the fresh made billboard thingies that hang over construction to let white people know it is not ready but when it is, come, and bring your sushi and overt racism and fancy toilet water fragrances with distinct names and all your checks and savings bonds and 401ks.
And it is not as safe as it will be yet, but soon. The Piano District is also the probation capital of the globe, so watch out for the crackheads and the just-coming Homers. In the picture with the Hudson Yard billboard I saw, I saw a leaner Fat Joe lean backed on a fancy car that he will drive to Jersey, because he drives nice things now. Fat Joe used to sling crack, and now he has a house in Jersey away from the crack, the cracks, away from the gun shot I heard at 1 AM on Saturday, as in this week in August in 2016. People scatter here, and the feet sound like roach taps, dudes still pee outside at 5pm on Creston in front of buildings with gardens at front, in the middle of a street fair, because dude peeing is not a gentrifier, but I know he probably stays at the 3/4 house across the street so he knows what time it is. Do you? What are the options?
My daughter’s mother and I were doing laundry, fulfilling our parental duties, and there was a man making his way towards us, while the daughter of ours played and busied herself with machine sounds, and I saw the man’s feet and they looked like Rikers; the black joints straddling the tip-top’s of his toes, with the straps strapped on, with the super-thin soles underneath. And I gave him a dollar and thought, they only do that in the Bronx. The moment was like doing it in the park, like Crazy Legs, like the cats that bomb over by Bruckner or near the Concourse, or if you get off at 161st and find the skating park. Because it still feels like the 80s here. They filmed The Get Down here in Mott Haven by St. Mary’s. I remember because I walked during my lunch break one time and saw the crew and thought I saw a wave of breaking bad, because now others know what Fab 5 Feddy knew when he walked Basquiat and Haring and Warhol over the bridge to projects, oye to see the art and the train cars smothered in acrylics, smelling of moths, seething with stale shit, high stakes.
I remember going to Brooklyn to record once in a recent time — these are after the days long gone when Junior Gong brought the sound statewide, and I saw white boys with soccer balls in Bedstuy and was like, where are the stick ball players and shoot-outs and chain snatchers…why are they not scared any longer? This is good, no? This is growth, yes? People can move here and feel as if they are a part of the culture, one with the culture, and the steam the concrete gives off. This is how it starts. This is commodification’s tipping point. Condominiums are condiments now, are what condoms were then, what co-ops used to be, why consciousness cannot live.
Because where? You cannot coexist where wine shops and wi-fi are indicative of exit strategies for the surbanite looking to not be near a bulletproof glass bodega or liquor store; to not nest next to a santeria, rickety swing holding playground park, packed with sprinklers the width of machete, thick of children short and sweet like stumps of sugar cane. We want cultures to come, to melt, meld together, molten chunks of latin gringo negro bachata catholic hebrew liberal gumbo, to embolden the rest to come and dance and sing and pick at the thickest of skins of the marginalized and go “look, see for yourself…they breathe and eat and play and breastfeed like everybody else!” Ah, look at all the people smiling, the leche con fuego is here and the after taste is high rents and destabilized living and lack of income, pero look at the pot mama, it is done, it is burning.
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