Raw Thoughts 4.18.25- NYC Hell 3:00 AM and Get A Hold

Me writing and editing these.

Keep it a buck, creativity is hard. The actual act of creation is hard. The trick is not to create for yourself but to create something that you would be interested in because if you would be interested in it other people would be too. It's really difficult because obviously you have to be vested in whatever you're working on but at the same time you have to maintain some level of distance so that you can retain a sense of novelty whenever you listen to it or read it or look at it or whatever your chosen medium is. Also thinking of a general all-purpose term for doing creative things besides "creating" is pretty hard.

I feel like I'm almost there with the writing. I reread my work on here a lot and lately I think it's pretty good. It has a good sense of flow, kinda jazz-like in terms of composition, kinda poetic. Definitely conversational. These do actually serve as an accurate representation of my natural train of thought, just with better editing and more thoughtful word choice. The poetry side quest actually does help in terms of word choice and composition and transitions. I'm relatively satisfied with where I am right now in terms of writing. I probably won't be a couple months from now when I inevitably improve but that's just the process, isn't it?

I don't think I ever got to that point musically. At least not yet. That's why I haven't put anything on DSPs since 2018. Nothing I did back then really made me feel anything. Even now I don't really feel like anything I do hits that vein. I made some cool sounds that went together in cool and interesting ways but I couldn't make myself feel any of the things that make a song or an album resonate with me so I ultimately have to deem that project a failure.

What makes a song resonate with me? Outside of obvious answers like emotion or technical stuff like wordplay or interesting chord progressions or whatever, I love anything that gives off a sense of place. I love being able to listen to something and be transported somewhere. I love immersion.

This is why I love Burial so much. Anytime I listen to his stuff I feel like I'm in some random section of South London at 2 am. I've never been(yet) but I imagine that London feels like Street Halo or Truant. It's good subway music. It captures that sense of being in a crowd yet alone at the same time. I talk about liminality a lot, probably way too much, but his work, particularly the late 2010s EPs capture it incredibly well. He always described it as "after the club" music and I always loved how it sounded like trying to find your own peace in the middle of a war zone.

There's a difference between copying the sound and copying the feel of something. I've been able to mimic the basic sound since 2017, him and surprisingly, Foul Play, which a British friend introduced me to ten years ago. But so far the energy escapes me and that's what's important.

Kinda why I'm doing-

*gestures emptily at a bunch of haikus, tankas and long form pieces that are ostensibly about songs and social media platforms but go into ennui and Marxian adjacent nonsense*

If there's any album I will defend it's NYC Hell 3:00 AM by James Ferraro. It got a lot of acclaim when it first came out and I'm sure it's still highly regarded but I swear you don't love that shit the way I love it. If it's not my favorite album ever it's at least top... 20-25?

I don't really keep an ongoing ranking of albums in my head that I quantify based off of merits. I can't consume music like that because art outside of the parameters of quality in execution is subjective. It's not sports. Even with hip-hop which has always been obsessed with "Top 5 or 10 dead or alive" I can't do that. Mostly because I think it's dumb and mostly because styles have evolved and changed so much in terms of lyricism and production that you can't really objectively make that call, even if you talk about impact or sales. Especially if you talk about sales because no one really has Hammer or Flo-Rida as their GOAT. You would have to do some Bill James sabermetric shit just to be able to make a real argument and that takes the fun out of music doesn't it?

Also Jada's top 5 dead or alive he's right about that. He's not number one but he has a guaranteed space in there just off of never having a bad verse ever in life.

I have favorite runs but they're not really ranked in any fashion. I feel like saying "at this general period in time, this artist was hitting all cylinders creatively" is a more fruitful way to talk about music, especially in hip hop where careers are made ephemeral for numerous reasons. For the record 95-01 Jay Z and 2000-2005 Cam'ron are my favorite all time runs.

The reason I love NYC Hell, 3:00 AM so much is because it is exactly what it says it is. It feels like New York when it's too late at night. It feels like intrusive thoughts. It feels like looking at ornate wallpaper at a restaurant that has probably seen better days and noticing a stain on it that you later come to realize is mold growing underneath it because there's a leak behind the wall that no one will ever bother to fix. A real sense of the avarice lurking underneath the artifice. This all starts right from the get-go.

The introduction is my focus for today. It starts with the word "Money" being read by a speech-to text bot, then you hear this despondent, droning string section. It seems simple enough and outside of "Beautiful Jon. K" and maybe "Upper East Side Pussy" it seems a bit out of place compared to the rest of the album, which is heavily industrial inspired with elements of contemporary hip hop and R&B at the time. If anything it's Ferraro's take on what Future was doing at the time.

When Ferraro made his rounds through the music press doing interviews during the rollout for this album, he often talked about encounters in the underbelly of the city that rarely gets mentioned. He specifically talks about SRO hotels in Chinatown that are more or less holding cells for rent. For ten dollars a night you could stay in what is ostensibly a dog cage. A lot of the residents are retired, disabled or both. Many of them are construction workers in between jobs. A lot of them are part of the gig economy. There have been a few murders at these hotels. There's always roaches and mold. The entire album has random clips of spoken Chinese interspersed. "Qr Jr" for instance. In a city full of contradictions, Chinatown is a place where they all come to a head on a consistent basis. It borders the former Little Italy, SoHo, the municipal district/civic center and encroaches on much of the Lower East Side. In this latter eastern part you have the supposed Dimes Square, which I always knew as just Chinatown even when gentrification truly began to affect it in the late 2000s. By that point they just started calling it the Lower East Side(or BelDel for "Below Delancey" they really liked to get cute with it once DUMBO took off).

Within Chinatown you have class struggles between the philanthropists and sweatshop owners that run museums and the working people that have strived there since the days of Gangs of New York. Chinatown Prime(as opposed to Flushing, Elmhurst, Bensonhurst, Homecrest, Sunset Park and probably a few that I missed) is a fairly Democratic stronghold in contrast to the satellite Chinatowns across the New York City metro area, possibly due to these continued class struggles.

Every time I listen to the intro I'm instantly transported into that part of Chinatown. The part that you never see tourists in. It's a day in mid-August. It's 9:15 pm. It's still 82 degrees. I'm about to turn onto Hester Street. Every store is closed but the block still reeks of fish heads from when the markets were open this afternoon. I smell fish and blood and ammonia and dirt. The heat makes it even worse, almost to the point of nausea. The train is a few blocks away over by Canal and Center. I still see one or two old ladies on the corner hawking food. I think it's beef, I don't know Cantonese. If I look north I can faintly see Italian flags and shitty gift stores that sell NYPD and MAGA gear to tourists from Dubuque. If I walk over to the Bowery I can see the faint glow of lighting stores closed for the day broken up by the occasional boutique or bikram yoga studio. No matter which direction I go in though I will not be able to escape that smell, though. To be honest, do I really want to?

In my Apple Music I have what I call an "inspiration playlist". Just songs that have elements that I like from a compositional standpoint or a lyrical standpoint that I listen to to break down why they work or why they resonate with me. I have "Fake Pain", the second track from NYC Hell 3:00 AM on it. "Earth the Oldest Computer", which I wrote about earlier this year, is on this playlist. So is "Gravity" by Miguel, which has a bassline I want to figure out in Logic. I listen to that for that opening bassline warble and I listen to Hell on Earth by Mobb Deep to figure out drums. Havoc has the best drums. Just that delay... "Evangelion" by Thundercat is on this playlist and the subject of something that will come out... eventually. I can either keep expanding it or chop it up into four or five separate tangents I want to go on. Probably more vaporware to add to the stack of projects I've abandoned over the years.

This playlist also has "Get A Hold" by A Tribe Called Quest, off of Beats, Rhymes and Life. This was the first Tribe album produced by the collective known as the Ummah, whose primary members were Q-Tip and the late Jay Dee(J. Dilla). A lot of fans say that Beat Rhymes and Life was their fall from grace, others say it was The Love Movement. In any event "Get A Hold" is the standout track of Beats, Rhymes and Life.

It's a good Tribe single, if you were to create the platonic ideal of a Tribe song it would probably be this, but the reason I love this song is because of where it transports me.

Every time I hear this song it transports me to the Brooklyn of my childhood. Despite A Tribe Called Quest being Queens artists, they successfully recreated the feel of a specific era of Downtown Brooklyn and Brownstone Brooklyn. For lack of a better term, the Living Single era. When I was a kid I lived a few blocks away from the original Nkiru Books. I probably passed by Talib Kweli without realizing it when my parents and I got kung pow chicken. Further down Flatbush Avenue were independent boutiques like Hooti Culture. Over on where 6th Avenue met Flatbush, over a video store that would later become Woodlands and a bunch of other places, was where my dad's saxophonist friend lived. He used to be in Me'shell Ndegeocello's house band and his kids babysat me and took me to Discovery Zone at the Albee Square Mall. Further down by 5th Avenue was the original store front for the controversial Dr. Sebi. Across Flatbush over in Fort Greene was another friend of my dad's who played with Cassandra Wilson's band. Hell, when we went to the movies on Flatbush Avenue we might have passed by Erykah Badu and Common. Those were the times, then.

This was a unique era in Brooklyn history and New York history and it feels like it has been completely erased. Whereas even ten years ago a new business would throw up a picture of Biggie and have a sign that said "Spread love it's the Brooklyn way" now they don't even do that. I have no idea what the so-called Brooklyn brand is. Even across racial lines it still seems to be catered towards the white gaze, which was never really the case in the 90s. If you had to define Brooklyn's popular image up until maybe Bloomberg's third term or Deblasio's first it would be either jazz influences, books or goonery. I guess now it's... funkier that Manhattan? Whatever that means? Slightly? Maybe? Depending on what train you take?

You can't even say that it's cheaper that Manhattan in 2025. There are blocks in say, Prospect Heights and Crown Heights, that I knew as Crip blocks in the 90s and even 2000s that have 3500 a month one bedrooms. Myrtle and Broadway was the epicenter of a K2 crisis and rents over there are insane. You need half a million to buy into a building that was probably mentioned in a Heltah Skeltah song. He didn't even go by Sean Price then he was Ruck! There are condos built by Chinese and Australian investors in South Williamsburg that replaced shitty salsa bars/coke fronts my dad took me to on gigs when I was 3. If I go a few blocks east I can still see DDP graffiti and dog food being sold. So it goes.

Gentrification is misunderstood. It is a perfect paradox of centralized decentralization. The actual areas targeted have been in the sights of regional planning committees and real estate lobbies since the 1970s. How they get from Point A to Point B is usually up in the air. The Living Single Era, as I called it, is defined by a class of newly ascendant black creative and professional classes that contributed cultural capital to New York as it tried to sell itself to America and the world. After these classes eventually lost favor due to economic collapse and consolidation in creative industries, its cultural markers became part of the identity of The New Brooklyn, which was Diverse and Worldly. This got watered down through waves of surging venture capital and coop resales until we got to the point where Biggie's childhood apartment was sold for over a million without mention of its most famous occupant.

The Lenin statue is long gone but yes, this luxury rental building is in fact called Red Square and yes it did have a Lenin statue. Christadora House over on Avenue B is a luxury coop that used to be a hideout for the Black Panthers. They even used that as an initial selling point.

The same goes for the downtown of NYC Hell, which was the home of Chinese, Latino and Jewish immigrant communities and labor struggles. The history of these struggles was sold as clout to the aspiring big dicks of the Clinton-era finance boom. The growers who aspired to be showers, if you will. This begat hotels, Hell Square and eventually whatever right wing mediocrity Peter Thiel put his money behind at the intersection of Canal, East Broadway and Division. I'm not sure how modern downtown stealing aesthetics and slang from Harlem and The Bronx circa 2008 figures into this but I'm smart and I can find a way to tie it all together.

The misunderstood part is that the "problems" it tries to cover up are displaced, not erased. The Lower East Side, with all of its new ugly luxury hotels, still deals with widespread poverty and labor issues amongst its Chinese and Latino enclaves. The greater Bed Stuy area, probably because of developers and Deblasio-era policy has become a tapestry of overpriced coffee shops and back blocks. A block with a three million dollar townhouse on it could be around the corner from a block with two or three bodies a year. This patchwork style of gentrification, much like its stylistic predecessor in Chicago under the Daley 2 and later the Emmanuel administrations , is probably partially responsible for the factors creating the drill scene that hit Brooklyn in Trump's first term. Namely the destruction and displacement of communities leading to how gangs and crews manifested throughout Brooklyn and to a lesser extent the rest of the city.

The New York of Get A Hold, with its eyes to the future and its ebullience, has long since fallen to that of NYC Hell 3:00 AM. The rich, cloistered in their enclaves, watching their portfolios with one eye and waves of construction and destruction outside of their windows with the other. The poor, living six at a time scurrying around to deliver things to the resurgent middle class filling poorly constructed and renovated condos with bowl meals and efficient clothing solutions. New York has always been in a tug of war between rich and poor but this current era of cultural stagnation is defined by the middle class's return.

But we will get to them later. We will get to them.