From The Stoop to The Loft, Fly Girlz Meet Zebrablood in Brownsville

Representing NYC is an ambitious new initiative from Sam Hillmer that tries to empower the youth of East-New York by building stronger ties between them and the producers and indie-artists now beginning to live in their community. Hiller plays saxophone with Z’s, a New York band self described as No-wave/Brutal-prog/post-minimalist, but he’s also a teacher working in the New York Public School system and that experience lead him to create Representing NYC. Backed by several youth organizations, Hiller hopes this alliance of local kids and artists will “create connections in the rapidly changing neighborhoods of east Brooklyn, and give youth a much-needed opportunity to represent their New York.”
The first RNYC release, “Da’ Bratz From Da’ Ville” pairs Brownsville 8th graders Tamera and Ameena, aka ‘Angel’ and ‘Sophia’, aka The Fly Girlz, with Excepter’s Nathan Corbin AKA ‘Zebrablood’. The result is a super cool LP sliding between a spooky experimental noise pop and an urban Alan Lomax field recording, somewhat like what a Gang Gang Dance remix of ‘Buffalo Girls” might sound like: grizzled synths and crushed beats swirling around impetuous young voices perfect for a sticky urban spring. But, it would be impossible to think of this record without also thinking about the larger context it appears in.

Like other folk music traditions, the roots of rap are based in part on self-empowerment. At it’s beginning, rap was a reclamation and reinvention of ‘Community’ emerging from out the disintegrating structure of Bronx neighborhoods pushed to the brink by the spiraling decline of New York in the 1970’s. That music, the music of hip-hop’s first wave, was capital EEFF Fun in the face of an abrasive and corroded environment. The music was the sweat and heat of re-imagined disco, Rn’B and minimal break-beats. MC styles usually came in two varieties of sexy laidback braggadocio or up and anthemic party leading gang vocals. The Bronx may have been burning but that fire lit the party and carried down the line in the mazy trails of subway graffiti.

All the while, in the East Village and SOHO, self-empowerment took on a more hedonistic bent in the clannish no-man’s land of the downtown art scenes. No-wave and punk attitudes swelled with the boastful romanticism of a latch key generation still wistful for their A.M. radio. It may just have been Wendy and the Lost Boys playing cowboys and Indians, but their escapist fantasies also percolated with the self-promotional skills of Buffalo Bill and they were savvy enough to marry their bleak ethos to the other more ‘high’-minded art venues, galleries and performance spaces first beginning to open in and around SOHO.


What’s often now overlooked is how openly and immediately those two scenes interacted. A great citywide exchange of ideas and styles was taking place in late 70’s and early 80’s New York. Right from the start, while the godfather DJ’s were cutting up continental fare like Kraftwerk, a certain Krylon attitude was mixing with the ripped mannerisms of the downtown scenes. By the early eighties, Basquiat was all the rage and Liquid Liquid’s mutant disco was coalescing in ‘White Lines’. In The Bronx, in Manhattan, Artists’ eyes and ears were open to the changes and exchanges going on around them. Those participants of that New York were of their place; migrants and recent transplants maybe, but just as often, the children of the boroughs and they all carried with them an affection for their community and a sense of belonging to the people who came from those shared neighborhoods.

Now, more than a decade after New York’s 90’s rebirth, as once forbidden areas grow more Hollywood-like, sunny in disposition and laidback temperament, it’s easy to forget that despite the back-lot perfection of the L.E.S set, the integrated lineage of that New York isn’t as easily adopted as the clipped haircuts, vintage high-tops and Voidoid lean. It’s no secret the neighborhoods have been changing and as long as the change has been going on, the ‘G’ word has been flippantly tossed about like a cuss by the very same middle-class moving in. Gentrification and expansion has brought with it the swelling numbers of aesthetes and intellectuals self-aware enough to be embarrassed enough to see themselves as outsiders, and that’s part of the problem. “It’s their neighborhood, I just live here,” is the oft-tossed cop-out, used to justify a sort of cultural tourism, as if to belong is to co-opt.

Hillmer clearly see things different. He’s approached the kids he works with in the schools with absolute respect. It’s his opinion that he has as much to learn as to teach. “We see New York through the lense of Hip-Hop on the street level, in the lunch-room, on the stoop,” he writes on RNYC’s myspace. Really, it’s a perfect confluence of events. An artist embedded in the neighborhood who has connections, the self-reflexive desire to do good and the ear to recognize the value in what others might wrongly call unsophisticated.

On the debut RNYC LP–hopefully the first of many more–Ameena and Tamera avoid the pitfalls and pressures of their environment by learning to move deeper into it and re-approach their lives from a different angle. “The best thing about Brownsville is, like, to stay out of trouble and have fun. The worst thing about Brownsville is, like, the shooting and the trouble and violence around here,” one of the girls said on a recent WNYC interview. It’s a rough place but these girls voices sound unbroken and the tracks reflect a real hope and strength in the face of extreme chaos. The girls catalogue the hardships of their neighborhood but they also go off on ordinary teen tangents rapping with a totally fresh energy and spark.

And Corbin’s production stays free of pre-conceived ideas of what modern rap music is and also avoids the trappings of what could have been nothing more than old-school revivalism. Instead he approaches it on his own, indie/noise, terms and this, sometimes abrasive, production leads to something utterly unique. On that same WNYC interview, the girls admit that at first they didn’t know what to think of some of the sounds their collaborator made for them. It’s certainly hard to imagine them or any of their peers quite knowing what to do at a Z’s or Excepter show. Likewise, it’s hard to imagine most of Z’s and Excepter’s peers knowing quite how to move beyond their familiar and comfortable loft party affectations. Representing NYC is a mutual push into unexpected territories. It’s a gentle shoving in hopes of engendering even more ambitious experiments somewhere down the road from Brownsville.

check out more from ‘Representing NYC’ here.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, April 29th, 2009 at 14:06. It is filed under THITH Zine, We're Listening To.... You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.