While writing "Supernatural Delight," (the first entry of Actual Facts) I realized that the disappearance of dancing from rap videos in 1992 was not the watershed moment I wanted it to be. Genre fanatics enshrine and sanctify the music of their adolescence. Such rituals are repeated by subsequent generations of fans, unaware that their longing for an invented prelapsarian past is linked not only to the history of the genre's discourse about its own development (see any "back in the day" rap song whether it waxes wistful about the pre-crack era, old school rap, childhood, or all of the above) but also to a  pervasive romantic tradition that precedes rap by centuries. The transition from day-glo D.A.I.S.Y. age reverie to Timberland stomping aggression was anything but tidy.

While a movement towards coarser beats and subject matter is apparent in the early '90s, the seeds for this change were planted many years in advance and too many acts (Just-Ice, King Sun, The Jaz, Brand Nubian, to name a few) defy the ol' implicit aesthetic binary (conscious vs. gangsta or whatever it's called this week) that manages to gain popular credibility the more the passage of time reveals it to be yet another fallacy. Partygoers of every era of rap likely danced carefree and fucked up under an omnipresent threat of violence or they just nodded along to the beats and threw game at the girls. Or they did all of these things in a single night while listening to songs that extolled the virtues of a cool pose, songs meant to incite public rowdiness, and songs that made a plea for unity and level-headed thinking.

My youthful wish for a enlightened party jam was burdened by fallacious thinking even if the desire came out of a sincere concern for the violence that I observed at house parties and teen clubs. There was no exact profile for a party disruptor. Kids who considered themselves righteous and learned sometimes found themselves dragged into altercations. Normally mild-mannered people beat the ever living shit out of their best friends while high or drunk. Herbs became emboldened by the easy availability of handguns. Sometimes scuffles broke out with no rhyme or reason whatsoever and people got lumped up while Kwame played in the background. The professed ideologies of rappers and their fans (through song or shit-talking) were not always congruent with their actions in the real world of collisions and conflicts. Still, a part of me clings to my original notion that a danceable plea for peace may constitute an exceptional listening experience.

I fully cop to the fact that I am privileging the kind of song that fulfills most of my ridiculously biased thirtysomething expectations while conveniently ignoring dated corniness and/or the often yawning chasm between the sentiment expressed on the record and the life of the artist. This holds true for Slick Rick's "Hey Young World" and also for the lesser known and equally strange Twin Hype's "Nuthin' Could Save Ya," from their uncelebrated 1991 Double Barrel EP. Twin Hype are of course the Newark, NJ identical twin rappers whose 1989 self-tittled album spawned two minor hits, "Do It To The Crowd" and "For Those That Like To Groove." "Nuthin' Could Save Ya" is more of the same hip-house brilliance. The duo's career was cut short by murder convictions, making their oddly authoritative pleas for a peaceful party experience, in which they order wallflowers to go berserk with "crazy flips and body jerks" and cleverly reverse the typical stick-up kid warning in declaring "nobody stands still, nobody gets hurt," feel all the more poignant. The rarely seen video, which was brought to my attention by their producer King Shameek (the architect of numerous dance-friendly jams including the incredible "Universal Flag" by King Sun) is early 90s absurdity all the way, the kind of jam that retro-fetishizing hybrid-happy young rap fans should eat up happily, if this old codger has anything to say about it.

The thread titled South Floral Park vs Franklin Square, located in the Long Island, NY forum of the popular and informative City Data site, begins innocuously enough. A newcomer with the nom d'plume "nybittman" writes "I'm planning to purchase a house in nassau county. We have seen a couple of houses in S. Floral Park and Franklin Square. Which is better option when it comes to LIRR, Schools and overall neighborhood?" To the untrained eye, this is a fairly straightforward inquiry, but online conversations regarding issues of housing and education on Long Island are often bitter and volatile. The original post is concluded with a potently vague incantation "Any information will be appreciated." To the bemusement of those of us with no real stake in the matter as it is initially introduced, nybittman gets exactly what he summons and then some. The thread ambles into a thorny thicket where the apparitions of snobbery, exclusion, cognitive dissonance, and circular fallacy perform a spastic moonlit line dance to a medley of muzak versions of Billy Joel's greatest rejected album cuts.

Before I continue, allow me to explain my odd interest in Long Island real estate. As a minority homeowner living in central New Jersey I often find myself engaged in discussions about race, class, and place that range from overly formal academic exercises to mutually antagonistic debates. As a blogger with a penchant for hip hop music that has developed on the periphery of the NYC metropolitan area I find the inner-ring suburbs of Nassau and Suffolk to be a fascinating place despite the area's reputation as a purgatorial middlebrow suburban wasteland. I am not alone in my interest. Back in the very early 90s I spent hours reading and rereading my local library's only hip hop book, Havelock Nelson's Bring The Noise, which mentions black migration to Long Island's creatively fertile if segregated "Black Belt" in chapters on Public Enemy and Eric B. & Rakim. Years later Jeff Chang persuasively linked the establishment of majority black communities to the rise of the burgeoning LI rap scene in Can't Stop Won't Stop. The native LI writer Jesse Serwer has written an impressive and informative series of articles on Long Island rap that frequently discusses the relationship between artistry and place. While rap music is rarely mentioned citydata.com forums, the Long Island communities that figure in the rap music are frequently referenced (usually in disparaging terms), and over time I have become a sometimes shocked, sometimes cynical, sometimes hopeful observer (read: lurker).

Back to South Floral Park vs Franklin Square:

Less than thirty minutes after the initial post, "Glad2BHere" arrives. Glad2BHere is a "Senior Member" (his posts to date have been read over 1,400, 000 times!) and his entrance into the thread is surely a sign that the stakes are higher than they appear. He responds in a manner so brief that those of us who harbor sensitivities towards discussions of race and class cannot help but feel wary of its implicit negative space: "These are two very different areas, not really comparable. What do you like about each one, that makes you narrow your search down to these two?" Nybittman maintains his composure, however, and plainly responds "We are not very familiar with Nassau county ... The real estate agent showed us a bunch of houses in Elmont, Franklin Square, and S. Floral Park. We basically like two houses out of all the ones we've seen so far ... I'm trying to gather more information about the neighborhoods before I make a decision." Okay, so far, so good - no direct mention of race, or class, or any such nastiness, and the request appears to be as simple and humdrum as any other you might encounter on a website devoted to real estate trends, right?

Wrong. Enter "Walter Greenspan." Walter is a stoic figure on a forum in which unlettered jeremiads, bigoted diatribes, and ad-hominem attacks mar otherwise civilized discussions. He is a man dedicated to seeking out and sharing the raw empirical truth, a fount of knowledge and enlightenment (his posts have been read 3, 500, 000 times and his Citydata.com reputation is 760!). The politics of home ownership on Long Island are maddeningly complex in part because the place is a sprawling "little box" zoning nightmare but Walter Greenspan promises to lead us out of the wilderness. Watch as he drops the actual facts on South Floral Park: "The Village of South Floral Park in the Town of Hempstead in Nassau County is the smallest village in either Nassau or Suffolk counties in terms of acreage ... According to my quick calculation, 64 acres = 0.1 square miles ... if South Floral Park was a perfect square, then each of its sides would be slightly less than 1/3rd of a mile." Better living through science.

It is this commitment to empiricism that informs Walter Greenspan's ongoing mission to educate his fellow Long Islanders about the quirks of local geography, and from him we learn of another sobering fact: "South Floral Park is one of those many villages and hamlets on Long Island where none of the places in the community have the village name in their mailing address: places in the Village of South Floral Park have a "Floral Park, NY 11001" mailing address." Aw, shucks. In addition to learning to differentiate between "cities," "towns," "hamlets", and "villages," one has to learn to distinguish between municipalities and postal zip codes that share the same name without sharing the same physical space in order to make sense of Long Island. To add to the confusion, school district boundaries rarely coincide with municipal or postal boundaries. Throw in census-designated places, unincorporated areas that defy explanation, and vanity towns that only seem to exist in theory, and the Strong Island Imaginary is born. This is clearly not the type of place where perception and reality are separated by an impermeable membrane.

A character with the suspiciously appropriate moniker "I_Love_LI_But" enters the discussion to warn the author of the pressing need for further clarification, requesting confirmation on "(a) which town each house is in and (b) which school district each house is in," insisting "Then we can give you some real information." Unwilling to risk a drop in his/her smoldering site reputation of 1066 by hesitating before dispensing advice, I_Love_LI_But suggests "do not buy anything in the Elmont School District. It has been recently named by Newsday as one of the 11 Long Island school districts that is rated as subpar ... it's YOUR money... The taxes are just as high as in a good school district." Despite this ominous warning, nybittman soberly relates that one of the houses in question is situated in South Floral Park, within the Elmont school district, while the other house is conveniently located in Franklin Park the municipality as well as the Franklin Park School district. I_Love_LI_But is quick to point out that the Elmont school district was recently tagged as substandard (along with ten other districts, most of which have majority minority and disproportionately low income student populations), and this is the precise moment that the thread loses all semblance of sanity.

Glad2BHere notes, sensibly enough, that a poor performing school district can affect the resale value of a house, but then proceeds to steer the discussion in a subtly different direction: "Are you interested in demographics at all? Just offering you the info, not meaning it in anyway other than to educate you so you can make the best choice for yourself." Wait, what? Where did this come from? The author of the original post laid out his areas of inquiry rather specifically, and race/ethnicity was not mentioned. To educate the author of the original post, Glad2BHere copies and pastes the ethnic/racial breakdown of each town, and we learn that South Floral Park is 84% non-white, while Franklin Square is 87% white, adding "SFP isn't the greatest in regards to safety overall, there are some issues with crime that is higher than in neighboring areas." He offers no sources to back up his claim, and that awful feeling of suspicion that I felt in the pit of my stomach towards the beginning of the thread is back with a vengeance. A million questions come to mind, some of them contradictory but all of them causing me anxiety, ranging from "what is the point of bringing up race when the author of the original post is no more than an anonymous screen name?" to "how can you expect anyone of any race not to discuss race and ethnicity when describing a community?"

Another local celebrity contributor, known as "sean sean sean sean," is on hand to dispel rumors and kick some ballistics. He starts by countering Newsday's methodologically vague claims of the academic inferiority of Elmont schools and goes on to note that Franklin Square and Elmont schools perform quite similarly. This leads him to suggest that any disparity in property values is likely linked to perceptions based on the racial/ethnic makeup of the two towns. I_Love_LI_ is displeased by sean sean sean sean's assertion and suggests that a home in Franklin Square is an inherently wiser purchase because home prices in South Floral Park are higher on average despite the crime problem noted by Glad2BHere. sean sean sean sean performs a little bit of research and demonstrates through the use of graphs and simple arithmetic that the data cited by I_Love_LI_ does not reflect South Floral Park the municipal entity, but the larger 1101 zip code. He also notes that both Franklin Park and South Floral Park are served by the same police precinct and that reliable statistics comparing criminal activity in the two towns do not exist, concluding that the two towns are nearly identical aside from ethnic composition.

sean sean sean sean's appeal to logic is not universally welcomed. I_Love_LI_But professes a blind faith in the statistics he cites: "I tend to believe there IS truth in what they wrote and that's good enough for me as I am not a statistician," while a seemingly irate Glad2BHere is content to throw out all statistical analysis in order to stay tethered to his initial claims: "The two areas are NOT nearly as close as you can get, by far. You can't just go by "stats" you read online. You would need to KNOW both areas from a homeowner standpoint and from experience." In his experience "There is a HUGE different b/w these two areas, from crime, to school district, to home maintenance, to demographics and location. This is NOT just about race, it's about everything." One almost gets the sense that Glad2BHere is attempting to paint sean sean sean sean as a naive cloistered academic, a kind of bumbling liberal do-gooder who wishes to superimpose his integrationist values onto sensible working class folks from an ivory tower. This does not appear to be the case, however: sean sean sean sean is adamant in arguing his case but remains conscious and accepting of of the fact that negative perceptions impact the market. He is similarly aware that pragmatic concerns are usually weighed more heavily than abstracted notions of justice in real world transactions.

But sean sean sean sean won't allow Glad2BHere to casually spread misinformation without a challenge. He delivers another stunning point by point refutation of Glad2BHere's claims while explaining that his sense of such matters is derived from a combination of careful analysis and direct experience. At this point, a rational independent observer would be led to imagine that a concession of defeat was imminent - if the schools perform similarly, the homes in both communities are well-maintained, both towns are favorably located, and one cannot be proven to be more prone to crime than the other, how can anyone make a valid claim that one town is an inherently more desirable place to buy a home? And yet, the debate continues. Glad2BHere finally resorts to citing anecdotal evidence, claiming to have encountered rock-throwing ruffians while taking a shortcut through South Floral Park. sean sean sean sean inquires further and it turns out that the site of the alleged rock assault was not in South Floral Park, but in neighboring Elmont. The ever reliable Walter Greenspan reappears to confirm this fact, which any observer could have easily gleaned simply by glancing at the handy maps that he attaches to his posts.

And so the conversation (or chest-puffing competition, depending on your perspective) ends. Is purchasing a home an ideological gesture? Are housing and educational inequities magnified by uninformed perceptions? Is it wrong for someone to prefer to reside in a homogeneous town? What do the shifting demographics of Long Island reveal about larger national trends such as illegal immigration, the resettlement of the South by middle class Blacks, and the movement of affluent whites to exclusive exurbs? How does marginalization impact artistic expression? I am not closer to answering these questions after studying this thread, but I am thoroughly engrossed and partly entertained, and sometimes that is the most one can expect from an odd fascination.

One night in maybe 2005 I piled into a colicky hooptie in search of a house party that was being held somewhere near the expired electric car line in Long Branch, NJ. Unlike my usual haunts, this shore city is not a felled industrial-commercial center but a faded resort wonderland for the monocled laudanum fiends of the Gilded Age. The broad shabby avenues stay freckled with harbingers of a sizzling new gentrification stirring in the uppermost part of the old South. Pipsqueak fences slung around peacetime craters bear fliers foretelling automated skypads and gleaming mausoleums for the delicate arts. Halogen coils framing eurotrash boutiques and the pastel sunbursts of restored hotels compete with neon signage toasting bulletproof partitioned takeout joints, conjoined pool hall-pawnshop predicaments, and restless Quisqueyana beauty salons.

The landscape hypnotizes fiercely. A half-dozen or so caliper-grinding k-turns quickly lulls this caravan into a clovered resignation. At midnight, however, we are found. A steely lucidity conquers the stock stereo's tidal static and a song from DJ Absolute's playlist featuring an unknown artist (that I now know to be Nucci Reyo) pours out of the speakers right into doubting eardrums. Over the tinny bucket acoustics the rapper's references to Jersey 'hoods as obscure as Lakewood (another declining fin de siecle resort town) subjugate our stingy attention. Our misfired trip to the briar patch is neatly redeemed. This is a voice that represents for the spaces and places we know, our dirty little half-abandoned cities punctuating miles of verdant sprawl along the crammed commuter arteries. Only one song deep into this catalog and we are perfectly aware that the rapper in question hails from Rahway, a minor post-industrial city with a noticeable rough edge once you find yourself east of Route 27 in spitting distance of the infamous state prison, another place positioned in the wobbly crosshairs of prognosticating urban renewal advocates.

There was one small complication: for the life of me I could not make out the artist's stage name. Jersey rap is so damned elusive. Back in the day it was sometimes difficult just to follow the genre from parts outside of the five boroughs. Without funds and a whip you couldn't trek to Ill Tracks, Vogel's, or the Princeton Record Exchange, forcing most to tape shit off Red Alert (or Crazy Sam if truly desperate) and buy mislabeled $3 bootlegs on Broad Street in Newark.  Jersey-based artists had a rough come-up. Local performance venues were small, far from luxurious, and were frequently closed only months after launching.  Any artist at least as famous as the O.G. Flavor Unit (no, not the second incarnation) was introduced to the world by a NYC-based DJ or promoter, which means that successful Jersey acts are typically perceived as belonging to a larger metropolitan area context. In the 21st century things were much the same and DJ Absolute's pronunciation of "Nucci Reyo" as falling somewhere in the ballpark of "New Jorel" sent me on a wild goose chase for years.

I wasn't about to start collecting mixtapes, so Nucci Reyo's music was doomed to evade my admittedly antiquated radar, barring some kind of lucky intervention. Eventually, at some point in late 2007, a chance google search yielded his correct moniker (or his name popped up on a blog post I was reading -- I can't recall for certain). One YouTube video at a time, I became acquainted with his evolving stage persona, which teetered convincingly between flashy Jersey pride arrogance and meditative penitence. His vague pitch for a unified revival of a distinctly Jersey sound and style and his tireless repping for overlooked 'hoods (he even shot a video in a public housing complex in Edison that is the last remnant of a thriving African-American community now ensconced in a mostly Asian, upper-middle class McMansion and strip mall tract) made me want to root for the kid, but his actual product seemed like a dim reflection of his true potential. His hustler come up tales didn't seem any less ephemeral than the works of forgotten Jersey rappers of yore like Mytee G. Poetic or Scott Lark Da Sensei.

Though disenchanted, I didn't give up entirely on Nucci Reyo. Earlier this year I was pleasantly surprised to come across (via YouTube of course) a nearly perfect concept-driven song titled "The City Soundtrack" that sees him rattling off  a litany of city sounds, emphasizing the constant war between temptation and piety waged every day by the normal folks who inhabit urban areas. He is not the first rapper to tackle such themes but his approach is humbly and sensitively attuned to the kind of mundane details (he locates his Any Ghetto, U.S.A. setting precisely with references to NJ Transit and landmarks within Rahway)  that complicate and deflate totalizing narratives of inner-city moral degradation. This new focus on the spiritual conflict, exemplified in the final couplet of "The City Soundtrack" where he observes "a five percenter trying to argue with a Christian" and implores the listener to "just listen" felt like a great complement to the incisive analysis of the localized triumphs and tragedies of the street life that had already permeated his music.

As it turns out, Nucci Reyo is in the process of deliberately reinventing his persona, message and his mission. His new YouTube channel features an EPK (electronic press kit) that reveals and clarifies plenty: we learn that he is from the Rahway neighborhood closest to the prison, that he has been making music since his youth, that he is struggling to establish himself as an independent artist after parting ways with major labels and former partners, and that his  transition towards pious lyrics (which we're told parallels a decision to eschew sinful habits) was inspired by acting in local gospel faith plays under his mother's tutelage. The EPK reminds me of the one De La Soul recorded to promote Three Feet High and Rising: one is inspired to side with the eccentric tri-state industry outsider putting in creative work in a makeshift studio in a relative's house (think also of  The Fugees recording The Score in Wyclef's uncle's basement, for a Jersey parallel).

His newer music videos are similarly characterized by a combination of ambitious bombast and earnest humility. "Music For The Listeners" sees the rapper donning nativity scene garb and flowing dead seriously about God's eternal grace and equating his attempt to forge a version of gospel rap still palatable to hardcore fans to the invention of hip hop itself, coming off like an evangelical Protestant version of X-Clan's Brother J. "Wherever You Go / Days Like This," is a three song, ten-minute music video and short film that deals with youth violence, grief, and the afterlife in an appropriately poignant and urgent manner. "Wages Of Sin" places Nucci Reyo squarely in a tradition of cautionary sermonizing rappers, and it should be noted that his insistence on dedicating the subject matter of all of his music to spiritual matters also places him (and most rappers, really) within a larger American tradition of medicine show and tent revival flim-flammers (the types that Charles Pierce calls "cranks") manufacturing bizarre counterfactual histories (the opening caption in "Music For The Listener" hilariously places the invention of hip hop in Rahway in 900 A.D.) to help sell their brands.

Those inclined to wince at Nucci Reyo's nods to evangelical literalism and its disregard for commonly accepted historical narratives and scientific theories (in "Wherever You Go" he urges a young friend to ignore school lessons on evolution and focus on realizing the truths contained in biblical texts) are reminded to recall that many of their favorite five percenter, Muslim, and afrocentrist/black nationalist rappers have made equally dubious and/or hypocritical pronouncements that happened to sound dope. His music remains raw, his skills have sharpened considerably, and although a few of his artistic decisions are a bit questionable ("Right Here Waiting" as the basis for a hook, for real?) his transformation into a faith-centered rapper has not turned his attention away from the streets of Jersey's forgotten places for one second - the characters in his narratives are not millionaire hustlers but the zip-up hoodie and dirty black denim rocking kids you might pass and write off on any given day. Their plight, as he frames it, is worsened not only by the coarseness of their surroundings but the paucity of adequate instruction on how to survive such an environment with one's human kindness intact.

Of course, none of this suggests that you should give Nucci Reyo a second of your time. It's the fact that the kid is nice with his that should compel you to follow his music. Trust me on this one - I've tried my hardest to be doubtful for years.

Bonus: Nucci Reyo's dedication to Guru of Gang Starr, in which he emphasizes Guru's humility and social consciousness.

Teddy CD over at T.R.O.Y. recently wrote about the surprisingly overlooked solo career of Terminator X (of Public Enemy and ostrich raising fame), focusing on his first album from 1991, Terminator X And The Valley Of The Jeep Beats. Terminator's second album (1994's Super Bad) remains a cult favorite; the singles "It All Comes Down To The Money" featuring Whodini and "Under The Sun" featuring Def Squad affiliate Joe Synister, are sometimes cited as lesser known gems of that era. Valley Of The Jeep Beats, though lauded when released, is rarely praised nowadays. That's a shame because the single "Juvenile Delinquintz," which features the youthful rap group of the same name, is a compelling indictment of the public education system, perhaps one of the best the rap genre has to offer.

A little while back I posted a piece describing how my eighth grade social studies class, encouraged by increased media coverage of the "culture wars" and the politically outspoken rap of the time (early 90s) staged a mini-rebellion against our well-meaning but passively eurocentric instructor. I recounted that we were particularly moved by songs such as Leaders Of The New School "Teachers, Don't Teach Us Nonsense" and YZ's "When The Road Is Covered With Snow." Both songs identify explicit targets -- inefficient schools and the eurocentric version of history -- but also tend to be a bit roundabout in their critique, opting to valorize contrariness rather than deconstruct an opponent's claims.  "Juvenile Delinquintz" employs a much more confrontational approach to similar grievances - this song is meant to amplify collective rage and elicit an immediate and powerful response from the listener.

The group's vocals and visuals are noticeably more aggressive than the other artists I mentioned. The video has moments of levity but the group members, rapping in loud, enunciated styles clearly influenced (perhaps coached?) by Chuck D and Ice Cube,  never come off as childish. The unashamed masculine swagger on display in this video is a risky move given the frequent defamation of minority youths in the national media during the years following the peak of the crack epidemic, to say nothing of the eagerness of commentators to link violent rap lyrics with criminal behavior. The dramatized rowdiness complements the bassy energetic music and fits within the aesthetic norm of early 90s rap videos but could easily be misconstrued as an advocacy of violent or at least disruptive behavior by observers who are unsympathetic to the group's protest and/or uninterested in analyzing the song as a knowingly stylized piece of art.Contrary to such expectations, however, these young rappers take on a more complicated  task than establishing a mood or eliciting a combination of disgust and pity. They actually engage in thought provoking analysis by linking the assumptions that inform a eurocentric curriculum that devalues and obscures black accomplishments to the attitudes of school authorities who rely on similarly dehumanizing generalizations to police their captive audience.

According to the logic of this song, the miseducation of black youth, especially in regards to history but also in regards to preparation for participation in the future economy, is catastrophic enough to justify disobedience. I do not know whether or not the rappers wrote their own lyrics and I cannot guess the extent to which Terminator X may have assisted in the direction and execution of the song and video. The rage that characterizes the verses certainly feels authentic and I believe it is safe to assume that even if the lyrics were entirely ghostwritten, it is improbable that the rappers' views on public education diverged sharply from the ones expressed in the song. In any event, the main question posed by the song is probably worth asking today: if black youth are labeled public enemies prior to any wrongdoing and such historically rooted slander can decimate one's chances of overcoming economic obstacles through the legal route of educational pursuit, how could one choose to sit idly by and not disrupt the classroom during a lesson that refuses to acknowledge blacks as humans, let alone participatory citizens?

Terminator X. ft Juvenile Delinquintz "Juvenile Delinquintz"

Thanks to Verge at T.R.O.Y. for ripping and uploading the vinyl single.

I was raised to believe I was raised at the lustrous vertex of a congenial port city periodically trespassed by crushes of wheezy befuddled migrants still sopping from their slapdash easterly joyrides. The story goes that motley flotillas were swayed by Nueva Jersey's blushing sirens to bend with the trade winds and mango mingle in the dissipating crosscurrents until the unseemly psalms of the passengers' febrile motherlands tailgated freon gases into the ether. Preachers, principals, aunts, and the graybeard derelicts dueling at speed chess and dominoes naturalized these kinked-out processes to the extent that mind-forged historical curiosities such as triangular trade and Operation Bootstrap were plugged out of the grand pluralist equation. Our majestic city's cosmic pollination was deemed a true and living peephole into paradise's peacefully integrated capes n' colonials census tracts. The sloppy pudding proof of a divine diversity was said to flourish in the washy but jostling marketplace squares, the pageantry-swelled plumed transepts of Lent, and of course the butter pecan, sweet cider, brown sugar, cafe con leche, honey-dipped blended young ladies cursing us playfully through glossed-out pursed-lips for the cool romantic stretch of the Dia De Los Tres Reyes Magos parade route.

Our tidy low-rise, privately owned but publicly subsidized middle-income building slouches on a triumphant intersection with seven other residential complexes. Together, these spots constitute an undeclared hamlet that encompasses nearly every architectural style and zoning type found elsewhere in the larger municipality. To make matters more sordid, the populations and thus perceptions of each structure, along with their legal and social statuses, shift with exhausting frequency. The facades have undergone only the most minor cosmetic surgeries, so the kaleidoscopic nature of life in drowsy "Crosstown" is a local secret unless you wander by and scrunch your clammy earlobes against the concrete. Who could guess that the transient, dissonant rhythms of life in Elizabethport, Jefferson Park, or Midtown were also getting burn in this little northside 'hood smugly nestled between the palatial mansions of Westminister, a series of Jewish cemetaries buffering Newark's riot haunted Weequahic sector, a million and one uptown dope spots, and surly old Newark International Airport? This locale afforded my parents perennial opportunities to proselytize newcomers with a brand of repressively liberating Protestant revivalism very imperfectly grafted onto a Catholic-animist family tree.

I became strung out on holier than thou exceptionalism years before MTV deified superficial heterogenity. Our parlor was an all-hours cascade of illiterate, jobless, star-crossed, asthmatic, and neurotic folks who, owing to their births in either Santo Domingo,  Bucaramanga, Port Au Prince, or Quito could not easily access the new-fangled technocratic solutions to poverty distilled by licensed government professionals. We were outwardly proud of our grass roots outreach even though it obliterated the plausibility of normative familial privacy. My mother engaged the women through tile games and needlepoint while my father preached to the men over lager and cigars; this was work they volunteered to do after finishing ten hour off-white collar shifts in dingy municipal offices. Somehow, messages of spiritual uplift, lessons in English as a second language, and sensible suggestions for the pursuit of employment and housing opportunities were delicately smuggled through the chatter. As the years passed my role in these interactions was upgraded from errand running to the intimate services of English tutoring and armchair head shrinking for every shade of young woman and precocious teenage girl drawn to our open house, many of whom stayed overnight in lieu of a safe or convenient place to rest their heads, knowingly and sadistically driving me to the brink of unfair hormonal chaos.

By high school, I was an unthinking and irrational creature, blissful in my recklessness. Half the time I initiated or invited the kisses and caresses that distracted from gerunds and split infinitives; either way my mack was a little too real to stop them from progressing. Reflecting on ethereal concepts like power relationships or propriety would have to wait. My mother, with her searing third eye vision and madly prudish disposition, was consistently unforgiving. She saw no reason why the forwardness of these girls, (half of whom had been coerced to fuck for bribery just to land on our sacred shores and all of whom wore their daddy issues like white gold custom nameplates) should be called upon as evidence in my favor. With every observed mutual lascivious gaze and less than coincidental brush-by in the hallway, my mother damned me and my unintended coquettes to a more degraded circle of hell, eventually decreeing that I spend as much time away from the kitchen and parlor as possible. This left my bedroom, when it wasn't being occupied by impromptu counseling sessions or fresh off the boat rag dolls using my desk to study for their GED tests.

And then there was the streets of Crosstown, linked to the rest of existence via NJ Transit and positively pulsing to the firmament with one-night skeezes, date rapes, adulterous contortions, romantic misadventures, prostitution of every imaginable stripe, and enough blistering pornographic graffiti to be divided into four glorious gospels.

Relative newcomer Meyhem Lauren's fierce Illmatic-like delivery and fixation on themes like contingency, ruination, and self-annihilation brings to mind the brief but memorable discography of fellow Queens rapper Ak Skills. While Meyhem's emotionally evocative, deceptively unrefined rhyme style is not easily mistaken for Ak's matter-of-fact late 90s delivery, both rappers borrow vocal and poetic techniques from the same source: the anxiously introspective exposition best exemplified by Nas's verse on "Life's A Bitch." On "7000 Thoughts," Meyhem channels Nasty Nas at his most poignant,  in a manner reminiscent of Ak's cautious explication of the pitfalls of street life on his lesser known songs "One Life To Live" and "One Thing Or Another," but also effectively evokes regret and pathos in a conversational tone that hearkens further back to one of Nas's principle influences, Tragedy Khadafi (formerly Intelligent Hoodlum).

Fans and critics of the rap genre are sometimes reluctant to assign praise to an artist whose style is immediately reminiscent of renowned masters. Rap's reception culture has long been famously dismissive of overt musical or poetic borrowing, but I subscribe to the school of thought that views this anti-biting stance as overreactive in certain cases, given rap artists' indebtedness to the acquisitive traditions of the blues idiom and their tendencies to construct songs and even verses from a pastiche of disparate source elements. Ak and Meyhem's derivations are strategically smarter and thus more artistically generative than the attempts made by lesser artists to crudely mimic general aspects of Nas's early style, (such has his cadence and somber tone) as if utilizing a tried and true stencil to trace superficially adequate, ultimately unremarkable verses.

In the case of Meyhem Lauren's "7,000 Thoughts," a cursory listen invites comparisons to Nas and even Nas's better imitators like Ak Skills. To some ears such a resemblance is an instant turn-off, indicative of a "non-progressive" or stagnant artistic approach or simply boring. However, Meyhem's rhymes are related in such a straightforward and down to earth  manner and recited with such emotive intensity that the poetic self he brings to the table, his likable populist voice, constitutes an innovation that distinguishes his style for the better in spite of lingering superficial similarities to the source material. Put another way, Mayhem isolates the right aspects of Nas's early style to extract and incorporate into his repertoire in much the same way a talented producer chooses to isolate the tiniest fraction of a record to best suit his vision for his new song.

Nas's verse on "Life's A Bitch" is tragicomic, perhaps bordering on depressing. After the listener's awe at Nas's verbal dexterity and perfectly situated use of internal rhyme in lines like "I switched my motto: instead of saying 'fuck tomorrow' / the buck that bought a bottle could've struck the lotto" subsides, he may well remain frozen and dumbstruck at the bleakness of the expressed sentiment. Ak Skills' verses are similarly inundated with pessimistic and remorseful musings that take center stage amidst lines of impersonal criminal braggadocio. Meyhem engages in bittersweet contemplation, spending the majority of the song nervously pondering whether clearly negative and even seemingly positive life decisions may have unintentionally impeded his quest for wealth and happiness. But he converses more directly with the listener by dropping appropriately sparse rhymes, posing sensible rhetorical questions, and eschewing preachiness and stoicism in favor of a conversational tone. This matters.

"7,000 Thoughts" is an affecting, unpretentious introduction to an accessible, thoughtful personality and a new conversation, a long-awaited follow-up to Tragedy's mournful meditations on the remixes of "Grand Groove" and "Street Life" and most importantly the kind of present-day Queens rap jam that just feels right.

Meyhem Lauren "7,000 Thoughts"

Thanks to unkut.com for putting me on to this artist and song. Get acquainted here.

This pretty little place is dead for a Friday, not quite vacuous but unseasonably emptied of the groomed loathing droves grumbling all by their loan sums. Reader I ask you: where does a buttressed institution fall on a scale from irreproachable to retro-ironically permissible? Let's all agree that the coastal Chattering Classes anoint soothsayers to finesse the zeitgeist-est, most frequently updated hive mind in history. This clandestine straight-legged electoral college is my most sacred scapegoat. I live right and exact in a composed, beatific shade apart from their harrowing gaze, fresh for less than $99.95. You might catch me perusing middlebrow boutiques without so much as a viable wish list, then I'm sinking into a jingo-jangle popcorn shoot 'em up film festival at the tacky-floored cineplex odeon.

Unsinged by glaring plasma telescreens and their phoned-in sanctimony, I do my thing. To the cursedly un-chic firstborn son of famously charitable parents, the shopping mall was a revolting, stirring  idea. I had to get there, I had to, just to pull skeezers and freakazoids because I didn't know any better. I really didn't -- ages before the city built an oddly divisive off-ramp for the torrid garden of outlets abutting IKEA and oozing UEZ wiles to ensnare winterwear lusting New Yorkers, Eastwick's commercial district was the same old tragicomic bombed out shithole you forgot was there, or anywhere. Livingston, Short Hills, and Paramus  lined up to sucker punch Elizabeth right in the solar plexus where Broad and Morris stuck it to the the train tracks so from the 70s on, anyone asking about shopping in Midtown might as well have hailed from Neptune.

Sorry, Ira, but you and I will never commiserate over the loss of the openly discriminatory Howard Johnson's! What's that Nunzio, you pray for the day Bamberger's is roused from its dirt nap? Fellas, I can't tell you jack about brave Local 41 or the superiority of dovetailed furniture. The fuck I know about the hardiness of  Singer sewing machines or the genteel charms of the Belcher-Ogden mansion? I'm always talking about skins all the time. Brand new bitches in lip-smacking flavors, citrus els and Ballantine Ale for the road, boosting 'Lo in faded imitation of our Brooklyn-based betters, and what else? A whole lot of looking and not touching, getting cussed out by dropout security, racking cassingles as if shit mattered, and mostly silent wishing for invisibility and gluttony to cross paths on the same day and stay there (never happened).

Which brings me to here and now. Chase your space age polymer science fair special improvement block grant renewal initiatives amusement sparks back into the rotten core if you think it'll make a difference. Menlo Park is where the real wizardry been happened, though. I'm wounded -- both of my folks went back to the essence within a year of each other -- but I'm holding a piece of the rock that they scrambled plus I got a chip on my shoulder now. In their absence an impulse buy seems like a perfectly permissible dose of self-medication, so here's to the have-knots. The headlines today are banshees of subpriminal minded slasher gore, white collars soaking wet, misappropriate behaviors exposed across the boards. I'm not trying to live large amidst anyone's misfortune but this big barren holodeck better be my oyster today.

If only it were all so simple. The cash burns upon re-entry into the plastic money clip but the decision is stuck in two decades of retrograde window shopping. Nothing to show for it and now I can't get a witness to the bragging rights. I could snag every quasi-vibrator in Brookstone for my girl plus a few sprockets at the Sony Store and still titillate the Armenian housewives lounging in the food court in their dimmer-switch equipped pink and purple nylon jogging ensembles, but to what end? A Puerto Rock in a Lake Placid top (kids used to shoot each other over that shit) salutes me before ducking into Build-A-Bear with his Dippin Dots addicted daughter; I can only wonder where his lootcakes are coming from. I'm the sole patron in the goddamned As Seen On TV Store aside from an Abercrombie pinoy in scuffed Timbs but the solar-powered Jupiter Jacks and fishing rod pens  just aren't the panaceas they're made out to be.

So I buy some batteries from a sales rep that sat next to me at graduation, gently shoot down his attempt to sell me a Blackberry, and bounce.

October '92 was the quincentennial of El Descubrimiento De America and for most of the month my eighth grade social studies teacher rhapsodized piously about Cristobal Colon's capricious seafaring.  This  stonewall straggler of the rapidly distressing Italian section of town (called “The ‘Burg” long after the last German speakers departed) gave off amperes of tribal pride as he recounted the Genovese (this is long before a unified Italian state) navigator's struggle to convince Reina Isabel de (brand spanking new) Espana that silken Asia was closer than it appeared on scientifically accurate maps. Though hoarse from bocce-ball victory maduros and stooped by scoliosis, my teacher proved to be a consistently arresting orator on par with the majority of my later college professors.

In his company, we took on the appearance of greenhorn cadets. We followed as he diverged from his gushing heroic hymnals to praise civilization itself, in his mind an alabaster monument honoring the same European gallantry that oversaw its construction. His unrepentant milieu once rewarded his love for military adventurism with a teaching position, so he served this post through several demographic earthquakes, imploring his entirely Black and Puerto Rican captive audience to venerate the West  as a static megalith dozing atop a legibly crested foundation of official history. This, he theorized, conditions the wayward soul to graft a much needed sense of purpose onto a deracinated and thus aimless guttersnipe existence.

In spite of our perceived wretchedness we were inspired to decipher the subtext of his rhetoric -- that we are, at best, star-crossed benefactors of enlightened  condescension -- and wage a woefully disorganized campaign to subvert his wickedness. We saw no challenge more noble than to break him and his stories down. Our mutiny was a fount of inarticulate vitriol and half baked contrarianism gleaned from mimeographed five percenter mysticism, cheaply bound pseudo-historical conspiracy tomes, Do The Right Thing, the chapped and flaking recollection of a Young Lords/Black Panthers alliance tossed about in barbershops, and the crackling dubs of X-Clan tapes. By late November our teacher found himself muted and neutered, a nervously dispossessed colonial sentry looking forward only to pensioned obsolescence.

The youthful mind can be rightfully likened to an arena housing dueling utopian and scientific philosophies or personified as a vicious carouser pursuing refinement through selective decay. Once awakened to the vainglorious intersection of egoism and collectivism, it revels in the elegantly gloved evening time murder of stagnant ideologies. Youthful epiphanies are dumb smart in their intensity and smart dumb youths brandish a metabolism that only accelerates when challenged by dispiriting neglect. Our teacher's suggestion that we lacked a history older than our last defeat in battle or our first recorded baptism provoked us to construct defiant alternate prequels and epilogues. This fan fiction was in effect a looming middle finger meant to cast a dismissive shadow on the Leaning Tower Of Pisa and the hurtful assertion that the exodus of Italians, Jews, and Poles from our city's center left the place a hot jungle mess.

The staggering contradictions inherent to our rebellious dalliances with feuding slogans, symbols, and ideologies were lost on us. Our hasty denunciation of a mostly congenial and genuinely concerned instructor required us to selectively suspend our heaven-sent common sense. This allowed us to claim the moral and logical high ground even while swearing that Africa was really the hot jungle mess part of Asia or envisioning our degraded surroundings as ground zero for a return to unrecorded or intentionally obscured Afro-Asiatic splendor. The validity of our claims was less important than the actions we undertook to refute or at least disparage the official version of history. Once we became aware of Arturo Alfonso Schomburg's success in locating and documenting the contributions of Afro-lineal peoples to the history of the Americas after he was ridiculed by an overtly racist history teacher, you frankly couldn't tell us shit.

In this exact spirit, we adopted Leaders Of The New School's rabble rousing "Teachers Don't Teach Us Nonsense" (over the more juvenile hit single "Case Of The P.T.A.") as an anthem. We were  amused to hear Busta Rhymes cram a well reasoned plea for critical thinking into the same verse that houses a half-grunted call for uncivil disobedience. The rappers of LONS articulate a set of understandable grievances, including a lack of instruction directly applicable to viable employment opportunities, but their message is not wedded to a particular critique or strategy, only centered on the visceral thrill of resistance. The song resonated because one of the voices playing the tyrannical sneering administrators in between verses identifies himself with an Italian surname; years later I read the liner notes carefully enough to recognize that the name belongs to the song's engineer.

"Teachers Don't Teach Us Nonsense" celebrates the moment in which the young brain acts as a receiver of multiple squelched transmissions without the benefit of filters or equalizers or any means to modulate messages in advance of their adoption. Another type of transcendent moment, the one that occurs immediately after the realization that history is bunk and prior to the scramble to reinvent self, is beautifully rendered on YZ's "When The Road Is Covered With Snow," from his overlooked '91 "EP" release. Forgoing the nationalist polemics of his brilliant hit single "Thinking Of A Master Plan," the Hightstown, NJ native depicts the Eurocentric narrative as a deathly snow blanketing a road of Black achievement in need of immediate clearing. For the majority of the song he zeroes in on the fleeting instance in which the previously enslaved mind breathes free of the burden of a historicized grudge, a frozen nanosecond rarely appreciated in youth but vital to the project of extinguishing those lingering, unreflecting past selves.

Leaders Of The New School "Teachers Don't Teach Us Nonsense"

YZ "When The Road Is Covered In Snow"

New Jerseyan dissidents are frequently observed bandying about our state's population density (1,171.1 persons per sq. mi, son!) as if any one of us really has anything to do with it. It is certainly somewhat understandable that each Garden State resident who was elected to be born north of the Rio Grande expects to be counted as a legitimate point o' lite in this spiral galaxy of a clusterfuck. Belief in such a notion may be symptomatic of a contagious mania or an over-dependence on waning Jeffersonian ideals, but the fact of the matter (as I've been told on at least numerous occasions) remains that the inescapable crowdedness of Jersey results from a confluence of factors.

I'm no expert, mind-u, but this particular confluence seems bigger than any one of us and all of us put together. I confess that the details often escape my clutches --- I cannot list the major strands of this ball of yarn by name. With a gun to my head I'll rattle off "toxic waste, carjacking, property taxes" in a sighing sardonic sing-song, but don't quote me on that. I have yet to identify and isolate the invisible force that keeps our miraculous confluence all a flowin' and I am at a similar loss to cite one credible source to back up the initial claim. Not surprisingly I am unable to recall when and where I first overheard it mentioned.*

Yet I feel no less than reasonably overconfident that this confluence is true and living.  The noble mega-vortex is felt everywhere from the mind-numbing semiotics of Vineland to the quadruple bypasses of Mo'bius AirStrip One b.k.a. Spaghetti Junction. Reader, is there a better way to make sense of my surroundings than to posit my soluble self as the spigoted source of an infinitesimal creek (south of Bordentown they call it a "crick") that feeds into a mighty intermingling of currents, each a clogged artery of human conditions and humans, conditioned? Every one of us is a face in a throng in a crowd in a demographic cross-section, set adrift and bunched together at the whim of a tide pushed and pulled by yet a stronger tide whose motivations we meekly pretend to surmise.

This belief system is both spiritually attractive and rhetorically convenient, a twofer unattainable even on the Bergenline or at the Englishtown Auction. In its absence the shamefully droll New Jerseyan lacks the confidence to cast aside hubristic claims of individuality that would otherwise isolate his sorry existence from the greater sadness around him. It alone can account for an empowering pride born out of hopeless commiseration -- how else could Redman muster the nerve to speak on behalf of all of New Jeruz on a (patently absurd) KRS-One song titled "Five Boros"? Why, aside from the obvious, does King Sun repeatedly deny his Paterson upbringing, as if Just-Ice doesn't know the truth? How else could Jay-Z momentarily and publicly relinquish his Gotham-centrist stance and confess to his "Wilbur Dirt" school daze in East Trenton (his recent reference to DYFS similarly betrays an adult life spent on the Jersey side of the river and may have been subliminally inspired by a shaky Law and Order SVU plotline)?

New Jeruz's  monstrous sameness lends itself to representations that are equal parts self-effacing insularity and deferential self-aggrandizement. Rappers from New York (especially Brooklyn) valorize a sinister 'hood incarnate figure while Jersey rappers submerge the mundane particularities of their neck of the woods in populist flimflamming. Put another way, artists from Jersey who hail from the dingiest and least publicized wrong side of the tracks scenarios (e.g., Real Live from fucking Passaic) tend to cobble together eloquent and unnerving theses about the life (presumably a less navigable tributary of the struggle) but aren't too keen on attaching these observations to specific locales. The Brooklyn rapper comes to embody his place and its history but the Jersey rapper chooses homelessness, taking the collective he claims to represent with him for a drive through nowhere special while claiming solidarity with a planet of have-nots.

Real Live's  "Ain't No Love" (which sees K-Def triumphantly freaking the famous sample many years prior to Kanye West) heaves and hints at the ordinary roaring silence that shadows life in the deindustrialized sectors alongside Passaic River. The lyrics unite world weariness with empathy in a manner reminiscent of Kool G. Rap's "The Streets Of New York" but without a hint of localized rah rah. Larry-O mourns the slow death of "the city," not quite Passaic but a more generalized stand-in (really, lazy shorthand for the whole NYC metropolitan area), and although this gesture denies us a true Jersey street anthem for the umpteenth time (Queen Latifah's anemic "Jersey" hardly satisfies), his sublimated representation rings authentic.

On "Thousands" Chino XL promises "dismal sketches of Jersey trife shit," and although he delivers on that promise eslewhere on his debut album, this ode to living illegally evokes nothing peculiar to East Orange. Similarly still, Wise Intelligent's project-centric "Steady Slangin'" celebrates pan-ghetto swagger and thus does not explicitly transport the listener any closer than distant to his beloved locus classicus of "Divineland". These are meager complaints, though. Each song is a mini-masterpiece that asserts prideful Jersey rootedness and even provides snapshots of claustrophobic backyard malaise while chalking everything (including the oceanic self that lurks in highly personal rap lyrics)  up to an unspeakable if graphic confluence of factors.

Real Live "Ain't No Love"

Chino XL "Thousands"

Poor Righteous Teachers "Steady Slangin'" (Project Mix)

*I am willing to speculate, for the sake of argument and off the record, that I may have become acquainted with the theory in a somewhat garbled form during a raucous housewarming party in the desolately average "New Brunswick Highlands section" of Piscataway.

Me and Paola have been cool for a minute now. But it's a different cool than you're thinking. No, not that fawned-over mestizaje of rained-in Luso-enlightenment and picked-a-part delta-Chi-town detachment that conceived the bossa nova on a tastefully upholstered snooker table. That's a wondrous theory and all, but you will seldom catch me touting a postcolonial fantasy after it reveals itself to be inconveniently untrue. We're cool like something else altogether. After a few weeks of unbroken routinized boredom, my mind is stuck on a frosty glass, cold harbor, segue stirred memory of the seventeenth time our Tuesday evening plans dissolved into something too temperate, too janky, and I'm good again. You cannot accuse us of not knowing each other.

After exhausting the better options we trade circuitous fables and toss back cheap spirits while some breezy jaunt, say George Benson's "Face It Boy, It's Over," whirs and bounces throughout her violet and fuschia Victorian duplex lodged tidily in Long Branch's least remarkable neighborhood. To some of you out there, it may be worth noting that this represents an advanced level of righteous smooveness my pops wouldn't necessarily have endorsed even at his Clark's Desert Boots meets pomegranate guayabera peak of perfection. Sometimes, too many times, Paola jokes that church bells are right around the corner. I ingeniously respond with a series of obvious nonverbal cues suggesting only dread, every time. But realistically, this saturnine tropicalia quest leads only to the autumnal pax americana we'd both prefer to overlook. We're going precisely nowhere, baby.

We do strike a tepid consensus, though, which should count for something.  She packs several metric tons of agonized longing into every half-baked warble and sexy little nose scrunch and that alone keeps me partially civilized. She doesn't curse me to East Windsor if I respond to her text messages one note below enraptured or palm her ass during serious conversation.  Paola is something else, all rite, and only a middling, easily distracted ingrate takes her chanteuse-ness for granted. Portuguese to Spanish to English translation being risky and grating, she summons the brutish Americanese conjured in a Pentecostal prayer nook/makeshift classroom carved out of the side of a Dunkin Donuts in Parlin and does what she can. Her body English is right on the ball, curving somewhere between Pica Zuro and Colombian so you know I'm bound to mistranslate and fuck this all up.

For now I know better. Her filtering, her phrasing, her sequencing, and her pitch is Brasilero to the core or it's senseless babble.  She may lovingly muster "my cousin Andrea from Nueva Cobriza is an erratic wildflower in a fragile vase" and even pronounce a few of the words correctly. But this is not truth-telling, literalized or poetic. In reality, she is nudging and noodling with tone, pocket, and color in a manner not dissimilar to low resolution YouTube clips of Elizeth Cardoso in her prime. In this same chill mode she murmurs her pulsing dissatisfaction with life in these united states -- the energy expended on buying big giant dumb flashy sexy things, isolation as normative behavior, and so on. My second instinct is to soothe her through trickery, to play the golden-hearted cosmopolitan everyman mystic who with a decidedly sophisticated to-do list and endless availability to whisk away.

Against her better nature she's willing to endure trips to see the World's Oldest Barn Owl (in captivity at a farm in Mendover) or the Museum Of Supernatural History in bucolic Koenig Meadow. Now, you may fool yourself into believing that my anxieties die upon contact with air, but I know Paola better than you. And if she's  more like you or I than we might initially guess, then even the most unsettling of roadside oddities or bombed out downtowns will eventually be banished to the section of the brain reserved for terribly useless memories like the South Amboy Memorial Day Parade. I had to come up with something very real, I figured, or risk catching her daydreaming out loud about Manhattan socialite hives that I can't even find.

To truly know me she must know a trillion coupons stuffed into a Hush Puppies shoebox, National Geographic fold-out maps strewn across the living room, Don Quijote memorabilia, Flintstone's glassware from Roy Rogers, YMCA camp, Old Spice bottles spanning decades, random books on loan from a makeshift library located within the neighborhood's last surviving synagogue, sanctified needlepoint art, a gallery of refrigerator magnet advertisements,  my parent's imaginatively worded threats of corporal punishment, interminable Reader's Digest subscriptions, a neon green laundry basket storing assorted and often mismatched winter accessories, a closet full of snack trays and bridge tables, corners and crevices and cupboards and end tables all one degree of worn out just below quaint since the time of the flood.

Yes, if we're to continue, she must be immersed in the unrefined but dutiful trappings of the (yo yo dieting) middle to lower middle class, the earnest and scrappy ambition that proudly asserts its vision of uplift in hallowed Ivy halls to a chorus of harmless, contemptful snickering. She must sit knee-deep in the detritus that signifies borderline white trashiness for those whose racial destiny was somehow compromised but alternately indicates glacial upward mobility for us (sure to be grateful) colonized full-castes. This is our shared, contested zone, our dusty rumpus room, our space-time, and there is no summation of it more accurate than slogging a bent spoon through powdery mashed potatoes intermingled with dry unseasoned roast beef at the motherfucking Country Buffet.

Skeptical but intrigued, she meets me at the spot after work, hair frizzing from rain-sleet but still looking right, slightly overdressed for the occasion. The exterior inspires zero coherent memories but instead a whole litany of vague sensory responses that nearly amount to negative sentiments. It isn't life that flashes by. It's as if all the blandest or least comforting instances were strained into a soft disquieting paste and every moment of joy or interest set aside for the dog to gnaw. But as we enter the establishment my entire plot is subverted in front of me, for the line to pay in advance (and don't we deserve it!) is composed not of single mothers and their children, but an amateur jazz quartet and their bulky uncased instruments.

By the time we are seated and picking ever so cautiously at our assembled meals, Paola is supremely unconvinced that live elevator music is not the normative Country Buffet experience (it isn't). She's right, though, nowadays live elevator music is the normative Country Buffet experience. The band unwittingly resembles the demographics of the surrounding area, as well as the population that typically patronizes the restaurant: there is an unemployed Indian engineer in his mid-thirties on drums, the bass is handled by a youngish Puerto Rican social studies teacher, a white and possibly Canadian retiree in a denim shirt plays the keyboard, and a black municipal employee  in his fifties with graying temples strums the guitar. We don't converse with these guys, of course, but inventing bios is the sincerest form of flattery.

We listen. They are corny and amateurish, barely operating as a unified force, tripping over the kind of musical do-nots that are neither affecting nor smart. But something happens to the spirit of the place as they play, and not just the spirit of the place that my brain and ignorance conspire to create. Paola is typically vivacious-- her womanly lilt sounds like the oldest trick in the book and I've relaxed my ego long enough to savor her fluttering half-comprehensible storylines. Our eyes meet more often than normal, we bump into each other in line for soft serve more frequently than chance might permit, we sigh and curl our lips in time with the offbeat stylings of the house band and the music is just loud enough to prevent us from saying or hearing the wrong things.

Where our mutual gaze unlocks, I spy on my fellow patrons. An elderly black man makes a concerted effort to insinuate himself in the conversation of the family in the next booth. They are not amused by his tales of adventure set in Venezuela in the 70s and they struggle to return to their conversation about lottery tickets. A young Dominican couple whisper-argue ferociously about splitting household chores. A perfectly articulate, nonplussed Guatemalan busboy relates his dissatisfaction with losing a college scholarship on account of his alien status to a strikingly beautiful Arab girl. Half of the patrons are sportively conscious of the band's presence and the other half go about their business without so much as a neck bop or a polite smile. I've never felt more polyglot, more thankfully anonymous in godforsaken Middlesex County, or more proud that I'd likely be ejected from the set of a Digable Planets video shoot.

We've never been cooler.