My homie went to the Jay Dilla Tribute Party on Saturday? night in BK.
He was on the line @ 12am.
There were people inside partying and on the line outside.
After waiting in line for 30 minutes, the bouncer told the folks on line,
“Only single women can be admitted, no [heterosexual] couples,
no single men.”? (I would imagine that queer and lesbian
couples were okay. Luls.)
At a Dilla party?
What is this, a man tax?
Whats bugged is that Dilla was a dude on the margins,
a soulful dude.
His music is the antithesis of the kind of pretense showed
on that line.
I think the first hip hop party at a lounge, where I was legal
and could get in was @ the 205 club, off Houston. It was one room juke joint and it was awesome. It was the first time I saw a room full of Black, White and Latino folks sing along to “I Got Chu Open“, Red Stripes and Corona’s in the air.
They knew all the words.
No pretense.
I always remember how there were big assed rats in the
parking lot between Houston and the corner that 205 Club
is on. You had to run from those rats, they had that block
lock.
Currently, there is a Whole Foods and apartment/condo building
where that parking lot was.
Ironically, in a article titled, “Put a Cork in It: Bottle Service
Corrupts NYC Nightlife“, Trishia Romano explains the changing
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of bottle service in clubs. She writes,
There wasn’t really a program of bottle service.” But as the ’90s wore on, the quirky club-kid world faded and the real estate market exploded, making bottle service not just trendy, but almost necessary to stay in business. Lewis, with his partners Mark Baker and Jeffrey Jah, brought bottle service over to the now defunct Life, on Sullivan Street. “Rents are 300 percent more expensive” Jah, a co-owner of Lotus, says. “Insurance can be up to half a million a year.” Meanwhile, drink prices and cover charges stayed mostly the same. Something had to give.
…As club owners quickly figured out, everyone wanted to be a VIP, or at least feel like one. Bottle service was an easy and very financially sound means of achieving mutual happiness for both the club and the clientele. A 38-table club like Marquee, selling bottles at $350 a pop, can rake in $20,000 a night minimum, and that’s not counting bar sales or cover charges.
This, of course, is blatant pretentiousness.
Where is the soul?
Ironically, even before I heard what happened at the Dilla party
I was thinking yesterday morning about writing a follow up response to “How Hip Hop and Crack Politically Underdeveloped Young People” after having a twitter conversation with Jay Smooth about whether Rap music is just music or
a political project AND just music as well.
Yesterday morning I was reflecting on reading bell hooks ten
years ago and how she said, “Capitalism co-opts anything that
attempts to subvert it.”
Recently Angela Martinez Dy wrote about Hip Hop being
rooted in Resistance. In some ways it was, but I would contend
that it was mostly about Black men performing Black male
masculinity. Partying, boasting and bragging. I explore this more
in “Crack and Hip Hop…“.
I didn’t really KNOW what bell hooks was saying at the time, but
I get it now. Which brings me back to Dilla.
Looking at Dilla and the pretentiousness shown on the line, that
was some Manhattan meat packing district type club antics.
The gussied up outfits and every thing is cool, the sneakers,
the negro mohawks. I get it, I like funky outfits too, but what impact
does this kind of performing have on our culture?
Can we just chill or does it have to be music video fresh all the time?
What does it mean when the ways in which we celebrate our musical hero’s looks this way?
What role have we played in it?
Man, we use to have a nice chill spot where there was no cover & had a nice vibe. It lasted like a year, then one day I came in & they said it was $15 to get in. I was so conditioned that I only had like $25 for drinks & tips, so I bounced. Now it’s exactly like the Dilla joint & I only go there occasionally out of necessity.