POETS AND PIRATES, MARTYRS AND MAGNATES

this is something i started writing about 50/kanye/chesney and never finished. I’m not going to – the moment is dead – but it’s a sketch. It was supposed to be an interrobang column on el horca (aka pitchfork media, a popular website for reviews of new music) and then got sucked into the annals of my computer.
JUST WHO I AM: POETS AND PIRATES b/w JUST WHO YOU ARE: MARTYRS AND MAGNATES
By Dr. Julianne Escobedo Shepherd
New York City, as my friend Chris pointed out recently, has become a formidable haven for “rich white yuppie dads” – real estate prices stay rising, Black businesses find are uniting against gentrification in Harlem, the heart of Brooklyn will soon be gutted in the interest of a subpar NBA team. In Fort Greene, down the way from my apartment, right down from Fulton Street Mall on the corner where the legendary Beat Street records used to live, a tower of octagonal shaped condos is being constructed, and it looks like death. And I keep hearing 50 Cent’s excellent “I Get Money,” a song whose ornery stock-market hubris makes him the de facto king of Nueva York as it completes its soul-destroying trek upmarket.
I had a dream last night, that I was watching a show, a rapper performing some enthusiastic but questionable performance, and while scoffing at dude’s weird naivete, in the dream, I thought, “Has living in New York made me conservative?” So following the lead of Lindsay Lohan, Kenny Chesney and the Europeans, I took a little sabbatical recently in order to get my mind right, kick a couple of habits (smoking, coconut water, season 1 of A Different World), and shore up for the inevitable long winter of cold nights and half-assed albums and bad industry parties with free cocktails that do nothing but strip away the superstar façades of my favorite pop musicians (T-Pain has no pores; T.I. is a hobbit).
And while I was away, the following things died: crack rap*, hip hop, the music industry, country music, “the love,” non-ironic American-made electronic music, the housing boom, the radio, the album, the cassette tape, the devan, PERL, analogue television and whatever-whatever.
I have seen Kenny Chesney perform live in concert one more total time than I have seen Kanye West or 50 Cent. Part of this is by no fault of my own – I have a flagrantly country-loving companion who forces me to attend such large-scale spectacles. And I grew up in the West, cowboy country, and so my tolerance for shitkicker’s music, as we called it back in Big Wyo, is heightened. On one hand, my citified ass forces an “otherness” on it – I see it, probably elitistly, as a sociological curiosity to cope with the backdraft of my odd/Cheney-foreshadowed upbringing. On the other hand, Kenny Chesney is just one fucking awesome dude. He’s most country in the way he knows – and yearns – to get away from city life, the grit and grime and capital of a place like NYC. But Chesney is way more Jimmy Buffet than Johnny Cash, crooning romantically or playfully about the Virgin Islands where he lives, rocking a sleeveless tee and cowboy hat and pelvis-thrustin like the best drag queens and Elvis.
TO BE CONTINUED
* Lie to rest whether its veracity was an invention of feckless suburban progenitors, heavily boner-ized by its fantastical otherness. Cause I read somewheres that crack rap is dead.