last night a dj saved my life

Yes, once again (look at March 07) I was 'saved' by the much maligned reggaeton. Instead of a dance floor I was driving from Pittsburgh to Milwaukee. During some point of boredom and exhaustion and just plain not paying attention I missed not only the toll road through Gary, but also 94 through downtown Chicago! So I was stuck trawling around the city on the slow and costly 294. This is a boring route through 'hillbilly hell'-like suburbs as well as the usual strip malls, airports, and nowheresville that Chicagoland is to me. This was the final leg of my trip and that extra hour through the suburbs just sucked.

I was also sick of my music and growing tired of the stale stuff I heard on Chicago-area Quiet Storm shows, though I do like the fact that there are around 3 or 4 R&B stations to choose from in Chi-town. I happened to come across a good reggaeton cut and just stayed on the station out of curiosity. To my luck it was a nationwide broadcast of a reggaeton mix spliced w/house, techno, and some merengue. Some dj bloggers think that famous DJ Kazzanova on 103.1FM sucks, but hey, to my Anglo ears it was nice, and it did a heck of a job keeping me awake to the Wisconsin border. I almost crashed a few times paying the ever-changing toll rates, 80cents, to $1 to $1.50. Just when I narrowly avoided crashing into a barrier counting out my 80cents for the toll, the rate changed! But hey, the music was still good.

And what intrigued me was the periodic between tune shout-outs in Spanglish. Granted, I missed half of em, but could at least hear the names and cities. What is interesting about reggaeton is that it really is a 'pan-Latin' thing and you get the props going to Mexicans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Salvadorians, etc. And then it got me thinking about the intense immigration networks going on here that exist 'below the surface' to most of our eyes. Those of us not somehow connected to the Latino community can live our lives wholly oblivious to this huge part of our country, though just below 'the surface' of our lives exists a huge sub-culture, if it is even sub. And then you have these migration networks scattering families all over the place with kids in Arizona shouting out their friends in Oregon, girls in Chi-town giving big-ups to the crew in Jersey City and Atlanta, and on and on. Someone should probably walk a couple miles with these kids. It is a trip some cultural anthropologist or sociologist should undertake, though they'd probably render fascinating cultural insights into academic babble that makes me want to burn the book and fire all the professors. Why is that when dealing with something as fascinating and relatively accessible as Latino youth culture, academics have to make the entire study entirely unreadable to anyone without a PhD in Sociology. Oh well, I'll go look for this treatise on reggaeton, probably published by University of California Press or worse yet, some tiny East Coast liberal arts school. We'll see and I'll let you know. Interesting stuff happening in this country, interesting stuff.

The gods will not save you

I'm going to go against all my 'positivity' from Monday's post. I hope you heeded my advice.

At any rate, I found an interesting story from another person trying to fix up my hometown of Pittsburgh, PA. This is another example of an artist working to save his or her hometown. I love the arts, I really do, despite my deconstructionist tendencies which say that art is 'decadent' and self-serving. I think the arts, in particular the public arts, are valuable resources of any healthy democracy. So in one sense I commend the gentleman in this article who is working to change Pittsburgh through the arts. Yet at the same time, I caution those who think that ART will change a city in decline. It is as weak of an argument as the one claiming that stadiums and convention centers will 'revitalize' a city. The arts are cool and even necessary, but will not save us. People in dead-end neighborhoods with high unemployment and the other associated problems need one thing, jobs! You can have all the art in the world, but it is worthless without gainfully employed individuals to enjoy it.

Please tell me a city that is defined by art? Perhaps in the distant past a city or 3 could eek out an existence as manufacturers of a particular craft or form of artwork. Maybe an city in the Renaissance existed solely to produce violins or something. But this was a niche and used for export. The problem with America is that we don't make anything, and you can fill as many offices as you want with 'high-tech' workers and coffee shop programmers and boutique clothing store operators and what not, but you will never replace manufacturing jobs. People say our economy 'advanced'. Did it? Or did those jobs just move elsewhere and people were left behind? It isn't like our world isn't manufacturing things anymore, we still buy cars and clothes and tvs, but that stuff is made in China or Mexico or wherever else the cheapest wages and environmental standards are at the moment.

So back to art. If a city isn't making anything (which few American cities are) then it is successful by at least managing the money used to make stuff. This is one reason artists are in NYC or LA or SF. Those cities are big into the arts because they are huge population centers because they once MADE STUFF (yes, even LA!--it beat out Detroit's manufacturing prowess in the 50s!) and those cities now have enough money to manage investments elsewhere, and the money made can then be used to buy art.

My long winded point is this, good luck to you who try and save the city through art or nightclubs, or a dining scene. Unfortunately, that is all window dressing. If you don't have good jobs to employ people who will waste their leisure time and money on those things, then the city falls. And fall it will. I love vibrant cities with entertainment and clean streets, but I also like places with an employed population. I would rather we all have jobs in some boring city than 10% of us living it up in the artist district while the rest of the city sinks in poverty. Enjoy America as it crumbles and becomes irrelevant and I guess use art to save someone because the other options (drugs, gangs, boredom) are far worse. But remember, you can't save your city, though you might be able to save each other.

BTW, if I haven't destroyed all your hope, here is the article that started this
http://americancity.org/article.php?id_article=318

America Must Change

It's winter and I'm super cold-my coat was stealthily removed from me at a bar last nite as the temperature hovered 'round -10. The Packers lost, New England will win the Super Bowl, and I'm starting to think this whole thing is as staged as WWF or as fixed as boxing. But www-wwait it gets worse! There is a presidential race!! A race w/a bunch of morons talking about nothing. Hmmm, have we heard ANYTHING about the massive trade deficit? No. About the dollar being worthless!? About our shitty infrastructure? Our debt and the looming recession? No. Our cities are shameful places ignored by everyone who can afford to. And we have no energy policy of value, no plan to deal with real issues facing our country. No, of course not. But there are plenty of poised and driven men and a woman who claim to have answers. Granted none of us know what the answers are, but they have them, if we only vote for them.

This presidential ignorance to our problems angers me, but negativity is of no use to me right now-I've had enough. Today is the day to celebrate Dr. King's life and work, however you do it. You might volunteer, listen to a speech, attend an event, or simply clean your kitchen on this day off (for the lucky). Frankly, I don't care what you do, but you really need to think about the state of this country and the direction it is in. Do more than bash the "other's" stupid and obtuse behaviors. You (and surely I) need to think about what we're doing and not doing and how we can actually try and impact this country in a positive way. Yeah this IS elementary school type stuff I'm suggesting, but to DO something different is much harder than the movies make it seem. So think long and hard, pray if your inclined, and look around and try to realize that if we keep going down this road as a nation things will only get worse. While China, Korea, Saudi Arabia and others build grand new cities, America continues to decay. This needs to stop.

I have no answer as to what you or I should do. But if we simply zone out into our computers, music, tv, and entertainment-maybe even laced w/a chemical additive, nothing will get better. Toss away the distracting amenities for a minute and think. I'll get back to you later.

For now and because this is a part-time music blog check out this old Raheem Devaughn track that speaks to this conundrum: "Who"-by Raheem Devaughn-'The Love Experience'
and asks us:
"Who's gonna really care? Who's gonna take us there?
Who's gonna change their life? Who's gonna pay the price?
Who's gonna take a stand? Who's gonna live for love?"

I wonder and I also think I know the answer.