Legendary rapper Jay-Z has penned several love letters to his hometown of Brooklyn, crooning on “We Fly High” that, while “Manhattan keep on faking it, Brooklyn keep on taking it!”. The song is Jay’s tribute to his town’s trademark grit and toughness. He’s from a no-nonsense borough of blue collar workers and old-timers still upset by the loss of their beloved Dodgers. It’s a cosmopolitan borough marked by several sharp divides: rich and poor, black and white, young and old (although the residents are perhaps all united in their hatred of the Yankees).
Director Lorin Askill gets his own opportunity to pay homage to the borough through his music video for Flume and Chet Faker’s “Drop the Game”. Although he was born in Australia, Askill is currently based in New York City and it is clear that his current home plays a major role in the creative choices made for this video. It features the lone dancer Storyboard P, who is also from Brooklyn, has appeared in one of Jay-Z’s music videos, and has strong ties to the city. Several times during the video, cars and trucks drive past without stopping or paying attention to his disjointed and tortured movements. Askill also set the video outside of an auto collision repair shop in
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The lines “Hush, I said there’s more than life to rush...drop the game it’s not enough” are repeated twice, and during both instances, Storyboard P slows down and his movements become smoother. This is an indict of the city’s insistence on continual toil and lack of empathy. In general, the video’s creators take issue with the anonymity and isolation that people experience in big cities. In slowing down the video and telling viewers to not always focus on the “rush” of their daily obligations, Askill effectively advocates for a borough that’s organized around community instead of the individual grind that Jay Z
city like New York has on our fantasy. His preoccupation with the way that we
Watkins, S. Craig. 2005. Hip hop matters: politics, pop culture, and the struggle for the soul of a movement. Boston: Beacon Press.
A warrior is a hero, a role-model, fearless, loyal, persevering, brave - there are few that are able to fulfill these standards. Yet Melba Beals, a fifteen year old girl, not only claims this illusive role, but cannot escape it. Through the journey into integration Melba acts as a dynamic juxtaposition, moving from a scared little girl to a fierce soldier, yet never truly satisfied with her position. This conflict arises from her personal, family, and religious values, the impact of integration in Little Rock, and her experiences during her time at Central High. The title Warriors Don't Cry is employed as a command as well as a way of life and later a regret as this memoir progresses.
Dope is a controversial film which addresses many issues with today’s youth living in crime-polluted, drug-infested neighborhoods in the city of Los Angeles. The movie, though a low budget film received relatively positive reviews from both Rotten Tomatoes and Meta Critic which have been known for destroying a film’s reputation in the public eye, causing ticket sales and movie goers to plummet all before the movie’s opening weekend, which is when movies earn the most profit. Dope is both comical and surreal bringing more of a lively and relatable experience to movie goers. Rotten Tomatoes and Meta Critic, although known for killing the movie buzz are websites in which movie critics and cinema
Philippe Bourgois’ In Search of Respect: Selling Crack in El Barrio shows the author’s living experience in East Harlem with the purpose of studying the impacts of economic marginalization and racial segregation on the Puerto Rican community in an inner city. Bourgois highlights the socioeconomic and cultural gap between the inner city and the mainstream class in the upper East side Manhattan. During his time living in an Puerto Rican community, he was assumed by most Puerto Ricans to either be an undercover cop or a crack addict because of his race. Later, he was able to gain access to the lives of Puerto Rican crack dealers by getting into a place called the Game Room where provided a cover for drug sales. It was Primo, the manager of this place who became Bourgois’ friend and an informant about their lives in East Harlem.
The prestige of writing a best-selling, critically lauded a book brought assignments from the New York Times Magazine, which she wrote both light-hearted and serious commentary. In a December 1943 piece called “Why Brooklyn is that Way,” Smith shown the core of her childhood borough’s unofficial champion.
Facing hardships, problems, or obstacles shouldn’t discourage one from completing their task or job. Many of authors usually put their characters through tough complications to show the reader that no matter what happens; anyone could pull through. In the short story, “The Most Dangerous Game” by Richard Connel, the main character Mr. Rainsford gets stranded on an eerie island with a bad reputation. He meets General Zaroff and gets thrown into a huge hunting game, where his life is on the line. In the end, he wins the game and will continue to hunt animals, but not people, as the general once did. He will continue to hunt because one, hunting means everything to him. Two, he will not continue the general’s crazy ways, and resort back to the legal and non-dangerous to other humans sport. Third, he feels powerful when he becomes the hunter and not the hunted. Giving up hunting would be like giving up his life, so just because of a minor block he had to overcome, he will not give up hunting.
The film depicts the lives of those who live on a city block in the Bedford-Stuyvesant neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York where Sal’s Famous Pizzeria is located. Racial and ethnic hatred is shown through the characters who frequent the Italian restaurant. Sal’s son, Pino, wants to move the Pizzeria into their own neighborhood away from his father’s black clientele, whom he despises. In Mark Reid’s article, “Black Comedy on the Verge of a Breakdown”, he states that Pino celebrates an ethnic-racial apartheid system in which ethnic and racial groups remain in their proper neighborhoods” (101). In response to his son’s backward request, Sal says, “So what if this is a Black neighborhood, so what if we’re a minority. I’ve never had no trouble with … [these] people. Don’t want none either, so don’t start none. This is America”. It is ironic because Pino’s favorite people are black, but he does not see them that way. It is as if he is contradicting himself. Pino’s brother, Vito, does not agree with his sibling’s racist ways, but Pino forces him into accepting racism. Reid goes on to say that this behavior is characteristic of those who join violent mobs because they do not support the violence, yet they give in to it (101-102). It resembles peer-pressure except on a larger scale.
Overall, the film was carefully planned out with evidences sufficient to feed the audience. Broomfield’s films are known to be self-promotion and this may be his way of seeking knowledge of the hip hop world. His fearless approach was engaging and subtle and this could be a factor that promotes the film to capture the real.
Although a fiction film, New Jack City details a chapter of New York’s development in which the city struggled to regain control over its dwindling economy and increase in extreme poverty and criminal behavior brought on by crack-cocaine. The poor economy encouraged a desperate scramble for money, and the rush for money, by any means, became the channel through which individuals sought to achieve the American Dream. Further, they planned to realize that dream in any way possible even if it meant making a profit from the very thing [Crack] that brought on their demise in the first
Street fight follows a race for mayor that turns extremely dirty, with the incumbent taking corrupt measures against the “protagonist” of the film Cory Booker. Cory's plan is to go through the city of Newark to talk to the people in order to better understand them and connect with them on an individual level. His appeal to the people is that“incumbents ether
The beauty of hip hop is that it is malleable. It is not defined by strict boundaries but by multiple characteristics. Young artist J. Cole (2013) explains this best by stating in an interview, “I think there’s no rules [in rap]. You can say what you want. That’s your poetic license: to test people’s boundaries.” (p.1) The results of such malleability and the need to experiment within the unwritten boundaries of hip hop are the birth of different styles and sectors/scenes in America. These sectors are represented by the geographic location of the artists and the distinctive sounds and styles that the artists utilize. For years the genre of hip hop was found primarily in the United States in these particular scenes. In the past few years, however, Toronto has been making waves and slowly making a name for itself in the rap game due to the native artists gaining popularity and critical acclaim across the globe. As a result, it had come to question whether the Canadian city can be defined as its scene due to styles the artists from the city are using or whether or not the artists are simply mocking styles from other distinct hip hop scenes in America.
“You don’t have to live like this. There are more than just these projects out here, you know. Don’t you want to go some place you’ve never been before? You love trains, but you’ve only ridden a subway” (Clockers, 1995). Andre worked as a street level police officer in Brooklyn. His message was simple, but could be easily lost in translation. The message was intended for Strike Dunham, a 19-year-old African American drug dealer. Strike was involved in the drug trade at an early age. As he began dealing crack cocaine and street drugs, his life took a different direction than that of his older brother, Victor. Rodney, who mentors Strike and is the drug-dealing kingpin of the Brooklyn Projects, has other plans for Strike. As Strike had learned from Rodney in the past, he now mentors his own protégé, Tyrone, an 11-year-old boy who hangs around Strike (Rich, 2012, p.1). The film shows that the crime-fighting agenda in the mid 1990’s was misinterpreted and wrongly directed within the inner city. The racial disparity, hardship, discrimination and loss of life of minorities living in the inner city during the 1990’s occurred due to social injustices and misinterpreting how to resolve issues of drug trafficking and violence in the inner city.
In Noh there are many things that are significant, and that have deeper meanings. For instance the simple way that they walk, sing, and move all mean something more. While doing the presentations on a Noh play I noticed something beautiful about the play that I had chosen. Spring was mentioned a lot, it had many cameos in the play. In Yuya the entire back story of the play is the discussions of going to see the cherry blossoms. Spring in Japan means a whole lot more than just another season. It means new life, and new beginnings, a way for family to come together and start anew. So while taking this course I really picked up on the seasonal aspect of Noh whether it be spring, autumn, summer, or winter. Each setting gave a new feeling of how people reacted, and it’s true in real life also. So in this essay even though spring will be the main topic I will be discussing all of the seasons and what they mean in Japanese culture, with some symbolic things and Noh examples also.
When you associate anything with New York City it is usually the extraordinary buildings that pierce the sky or the congested sidewalks with people desperate to shop in the famous stores in which celebrities dwell. Even with my short visit there I found myself lost within the Big Apple. The voices of the never-ending attractions call out and envelop you in their awe. The streets are filled with an atmosphere that is like a young child on a shopping spree in a candy store. Although your feet swelter from the continuous walking, you find yourself pressing on with the yearning to discover the 'New York Experience'.