It’s 2011, and luxury brownstone owner/avatar for everyman New Yorker Michael Rapaport (who will go on to campaign for disgraced former governor Andrew Coumo as well as disgraced outgoing mayor Eric Adams, both of whom oversaw massive waves gentrification) is wearing a T-shirt that reads ‘Brooklyn’, standing in an alley, providing the intro to the video for ‘What Happened?’ by NYHC-turned-pop-punk-turned-hardcore-again novelty act H2O. He wants you to know that he has some questions. “Do real men wear drainpipe jeans and mascara? What happened to CBGBs? […] What happened to WKTU Disco ‘92? Where’s Mr. Magic? What happened to rap music? What happened to the passion? […] How many Ramones are still alive?
Aside from the fact that there are readily available answers for all of these questions, Rapaport displays the same hypocritical sentimentality that fuels the every “New York is dead’ thinkpiece. Unlike Nas or Steve Ignorant proclaiming the death of the genre they helped pioneer, making a bold statement in order to provoke and challenge their contemporaries, New York’s menagerie of death notices is more often than not the product of a transplant lamenting the loss of their favourite second-wave-gentrification bar or cafe to make way for a third-wave-gentrification bar or cafe.
New York still has a thriving DIY punk scene, for example, musicians throwing shows wherever they want regardless of permission, occasionally securing permits for park benefits, like when the legendary 90s crust band Detestation performed in Maria Hernandez Park in order to raise money for Bushwick Street vendors, who deal with constant harassment from the NYPD egregiously cracking down on selling churros without a license. Yet, you can still find plenty of New York relics who’ll tell you that punk is dead, the type who long for a time before The Casualties “went woke” (replaced their singer following allegations of sexual assault).
And it’s not just the relevance of punk that’s up for debate. Ever since creating hip hop, New York has been something of a helicopter parent to the genre – overly concerned about rappers’ wardrobes or annunciation. It’s been a long-standing tradition for New York rappers love to claim they are “bringing New York back” – or even hip hop itself.
However the likes of Bub Styles and legendary photographer Gee’s Chinatown Sound videos showcase rappers’ lyricism at its rawest, without the pearl-clutching or complaints about 15-year-olds experimenting with different syllable patterns. Partial proceeds of their merch drops are also donated to the Chinatown First program, giving back to the neighbourhood they chose to represent.
Yet part of moving forward is acknowledging that counterculture has not posed a threat to any status quo for a long time; in fact, it’s now being repackaged and sold. My heart broke seeing KRS-One freestyle for former cop Eric Adams, calling him the “hip hop mayor”. Slick Rick’s new album features a song dedicated to his fellow New York landlords, in which he describes going to great lengths to shake tenants down. The Bushwick Collective, which sounds like a community-based organisation, is essentially a project to turn the neighbourhood into a tourist attraction by covering its walls in street art, a sanitised version of graffiti, with the fundamental difference being that it increases property values in the neighbourhood. There are now literal street art tours of Bushwick, where tourists flock every weekend to take pictures of some of the most banal art to ever come from aerosol.
In 2020, death came for New York in a more serious way when our city emerged as an epicentre for the coronavirus pandemic. No one looked each other in the eyes as we walked down the streets. The words “make-shift morgue in Central Park” are forever burned into my memory. Not only was the pandemic itself a nail in the coffin for many beloved small businesses, but the aftermath was perilous too; as soon as things started to recover, rent skyrocketed.
Recently, the tenants of 538 Johnson, one of New York’s last remaining venues for truly insane house shows, were finally evicted, and its legendary hallways were painted over to make way for incoming tech companies. While there will always be new DIY venues popping up, with landlords frequently requiring annual income of 60 times the monthly rent, and making individual roommates pass background checks and supply credit scores, the possibility of seeing Ratos de Porão play your friend’s living room on a Tuesday is now far less likely than it once was.
There’s a lot to be mad about, and there’s a lot to fight for. I love this city, and I genuinely believe that we will continue to adapt and make great art no matter what. However, if we ignore the declining quality of life for the average New Yorker, in favour of complaining on that surface level about how things aren’t the way they used to be, it rings hollow.
Or, if you want to be dramatic: NYC isn’t dying. It’s being killed, and the people who are killing it have names and addresses with NY ZIP Codes.
Alex WaltonShameless Desperate Cashgrab For Bad TimesYouth Against Satan
I’ve been listening to Alex Walton for over a year, yet all my best efforts to describe the sound have led me to: ‘For fans of early Jonathan Richmond, NYC cutter punks Dollhouse, or staring at the fluorescent lights of the Walgreen’s ceiling on your third day withdrawing from psych meds, barely able to parse the words ‘Medicaid coverage has lapsed’ as a pharmacist misgenders you. And also, later Jonathan Richmond.’ I stand by this description, although Lex also offered me a more straightforward explanation. “I just tell people it’s rock music with lots of words in it, and however many words they envision when I say that, double it.”
Lex’s last full LP, I Want You To Kill Me, 23 tracks of reluctantly confessional, passionate, distorted garage rock for those who can’t afford a garage, features a survey as its album art, containing questions such as: ‘Would you care if Alex died? Do you find shallow histrionics tiring? What song rocked the hardest?’ A more recent EP, Shameless Desperate Cashgrab For Bad Times, is exactly what it sounds like. “I was having 5 to 9 cataplexies a day, couldn’t leave my bed, couldn’t work. It’s a bunch of demos I had sitting around that I used to get money, and it worked.”
Bub StylesOuterwear SZN 5Cold Cut
Judging by the grin on his face as he looks at the camera and says, “Yo, you wanna go to the Courtyard Marriott lobby and just shoot one real quick? I do!” before proceeding to do just that in his video with Lord Sko, it’s hard to tell if Bub has ever worked a day in his life. But take one look at his catalogue dating back to 2016, with over three mixtapes a year since 2020, you can practically hear Mekhi Phifer’s “I love the hustle” monologue from Paid In Full playing in the background. His discography is so vast that there’s a decent chance he’s sampled it at one point.
His most recent, Outerwear SZN 5 is a concise 35 minutes of bodega bars, bringing to mind 90s legends sparring outside their corner store, grimy atmospheric beats, and Olympic-level ad libs. Even when he’s threatening you, he always seems to be in a good mood, something relatively unheard of in a New York rapper (apart from maybe Rowdy Rebel), but let me make it clear that his music is not ‘positive rap’. It’s the same gully New York rap shit that would feel at home in a cipher with Sean Price, establishing within a few bars that he’ll spot the telltale signs of your fake shoes and provide you with a new perspective on why your attempted career as a drug dealer was entirely inadequate. The difference is that he just doesn’t seem interested in staying mad about it.
United Jump FrontThe Jump OffensiveUnited Jump Front
United Jump Front is a Brooklyn jump style collective founded by DJs Jessxo and xxhardbit3s that stays true to the values of free party/soundsystem culture, while shining bright LEDs on a new generation of queer, POC, and trans ravers, who spread the gospel of hard house, jumpstyle, tekstyle, and other genres whose names sound as if they are the titles of arcade games found at the homebase of freedom fighters in a dystopian techno thriller. Yet, their parties are devoid of pretension, bridging the gap between rave and club as the BPM accelerates. You find yourself shuffling amongst furries, anarchists, candy ravers, punks, and the immaculate weirdos who prove none of those things are mutually exclusive. When the poppers hit, and you’re in the back of Trans-Pecos, trying to keep your legs moving as your thoughts melt away, there are no hierarchies; there is only jump.
“We are all united by big slutty ah kick drums” – Jessxo.
DJ FreedemClubwareSelf-Released
DJ Freedem’s music emerges from a place of survival, curiosity, and an affinity for bridging worlds, blending subgenres of club music with his Southern roots and upbringing. It’s nostalgic, aggressive, wild, and soft, mixing club beats with filthy and infectious in your face chants. Hypnotising synths and head-knocking drums provide a backdrop for Freedem to get weird with it, ‘Crime Mob 160’ deconstructs ‘Knuck if You Buck’ over a loop of Ozzy Osborne’s classic “ayy” adlib from ‘Crazy Train’. They bring down dirty south vocals to the dance floor of parties like Kenni Javon’s immaculately named Dick Appointment, which he describes as “The perfect blend and conduit for club and rap music. Especially music created by Black, queer/trans people”
Freedem also managed to start a movement with a single Tweet: “If you’re white, give a Black person a plant this instant.” It led to the underground plant trade, an Instagram helping connect people to do precisely that.
WatchlistWatchlistToxic State
“Landlords with their hands out, a paycheck’s never enough / End up being priced out by some yuppie fuck”
If the lyrics seem simplistic, that’s because for Shannon (last name withheld for cool reasons), singer of the unrelenting, political, crust-inspired hardcore punk band Watchlist, those words were her reality after her and her husband (Watchlist drummer Ru) found themselves priced out of the neighborhood her family had lived in for over 200 years, while she was seven months pregnant, leaving them with no choice, but to relocate to (area withheld for cool punk reasons ).
Being the only artists on this list I was hesitant to highlight without permission I reached out to Shannon for her perspective which she boldly summed up as follows. “For me at least, punk is cathartic, a way to express my anger towards a cold, profit-motivated capitalist world with others that don’t fit the mold that also share the same baseline politics of solidarity with people most affected by the US government, both home and abroad.”
Along with bands like Love and Compassion and No Knock, they are part of the most recent wave of NYC punk bands who perpetuate the DIY ethos of Logout Productions, a collective dedicated to throwing punk shows wherever they felt like it, using them to raise money to help fight the ongoing products of gentrification and capitalism in New York. I mean, if punk is no longer a threat, turn it into a weapon and then threaten someone with it. In the city, where Crass lyrics can be printed, framed, and sold in a gallery that used to be a squat, why not shout along to tracks like ‘Playground’. There’s not much need for nuance when you’re living your lyrics. Sometimes it’s as simple as they put it on that song: “Picking locks, popping squats, liberating all of the blocks / This city’s not your fucking playground”
