any of the Parker bookscan someone recommend me a good detective or crime novel?
alt? Raekwon wasn't alt what you saying?starting reading the raekwon book that i think someone mentioned on here. it's great so far, good to hear a first hand child's account of what it was like living in the dodgy bits of NYC in the 80s. more grist to the brain mill. wondering if he'll go off the rails when he gets famous, as per every other biography i've read of alt(ish) musicians who got big in the 90s.
yeah, sorry not a very precise choice of words. i meant artists who aren't part of the pop thing but who still managed to become absolutely massive. nothing to do with alt hip hopalt? Raekwon wasn't alt what you saying?
Just heard Lias reading the bit about meeting Mark E Smith - culminating with him saying "lose the Jap on bass" which I guess they did, cos he went on to form Jaguar No Me.@IdleRich Alex Sebley is mentioned in passing, but the story you related is not - like I said earlier even the other members of the band hardly get a mention for the most part
I don't mean to be critical of the book, but for a book described as "a work of fiction based on fact" about a "drug band with a music problem", well... the characterisation isn't up to much... they're not even names sometimes..
that's why I said earlier that "Mark E. Smith steals the show" because at least he comes across as a, admittedly, cranky and nasty, human being, but at least I could fill in the blanks and imply a personality gleaned from other sources
I'm reading this now, too.
I mean you say this but i remember the morning after the London riots started and i went out with my nan (she had no idea what had happened the night before) i saw a couple guys hop out of a black van and dash into the high road looking to take shit.its amazing in this raekwon book, which you should all be impressed that i'm reading because it's very literary, very experimental, you have to read the original text alongside interpretive guides to be honest otherwise you can't make head nor tail of it, and these are all in french because obviously this is all post-structuralism at heart - anyway its amazing to read about how violent brooklyn and staten island were in those days. i mean obviously that's nyc lore, everyone knows it, but all this kind of thing is a clear dividing line between the european and US experience of cities i think, all this kind of thing is very much still in living memory. bits like this are illustrative:
It’s a good thing nothing went down, because U-God used to carry a butcher’s knife on him at all times, strapped to his body, hidden in his drawers. But that wouldn’t have done much to scare off eight crazy niggas. These psychos probably would have used it to carve us up. These motherfuckers with their old man driver had made a job of cruising around, throwing dudes into the back of their van, taking their shit, and doing whatever the fuck else to them. In that era, Brooklyn hood niggas were notorious for behavior like this, just robbing people anywhere they found them, not caring who saw it. That shit was fucked up, but in a way it was a compliment. Clearly me and U-God looked like money that day.”
Yeah. I don't know London that well. But not surprises that it happens every now and then.I mean you say this but i remember the morning after the London riots started and i went out with my nan (she had no idea what had happened the night before) i saw a couple guys hop out of a black van and dash into the high road looking to take shit.
I mean there's parts of London where shit like this still happens in the face of gentrification
to which i ask in what way are those US cities "fucked up" in a way you don't see in Europe?Yeah. I don't know London that well. But not surprises that it happens every now and then.
I do think there's something in the American psyche that I) remembers when cities were pretty dangerous in the 80s and 90s ii) is a reaction to bits of quite a few cities being a mess even now. I mean a lot of US cities seem to have parts which are pretty fucked up, it's not that rare, in a way that I don't think I've ever seen in europe
I guess there's a few things, in terms of what you can see visually as you walk around. One is the physical decay of the buildings, all these things that have been set on fire, are falling down and so on. Another is the number of people with nowhere to live. Another is the open heroin and crack (etc) use, and people totally out of it and wandering around. Every now and then you see street dealing of the above as well if you go into these places, which I've never come across in europe myself. I mean it's not exactly a secret that the US culture and gov policies are essentially that you won't get much help if you start to struggle.to which i ask in what way are those US cities "fucked up" in a way you don't see in Europe?
“Anyway, U-God and I were looking good, walking to the train in Brooklyn, when this van pulled up with an old man driving. It stopped, the back door opened, and eight kids jumped out. We could see that all that was back there was a mattress. There were eight of them and three of us and it didn’t look good. Luckily the old man recognized Kato because he was from Farragut. He called Kato over as U-God and I realized that these were stickup kids and this was some bad shit.