Giving eminent domain a good name: after nine years, a caption regarding a "strange bedfellows" Atlantic Yards meeting kinda came true
Mike Bloomberg's back in the news, which reminded me I never posted on this, another example--as with Bloomberg's kiss from ACORN's Bertha Lewis--of the "strange bedfellows" that Atlantic Yards could generate.
Hey, remember that odd breakfast meeting in, May 2010, with Mayor Mike Bloomberg, developer and Brooklyn Nets minority owner Bruce Ratner, incoming Brooklyn Nets majority owner Mikhail Prokhorov, and "resident Brooklyn-credibility totem" (to quote David Roth) Jay-Z?
The breakfast was a photo op only, so the New York Times invited readers to contribute captions.
As I wrote at the time, most captions capitalized on the incongruity of the mayor meeting the hip-hop mogul--a Times photo including Prokhorov surely would've generated different cultural quips--but a few, including mine, referenced the project at hand.
One of the more telling captions came from Daniel Goldstein, long the face of the Atlantic Yards opposition, addressing Jay-Z by his nickname: "Hova, You should write a song about eminent domain, give it a good name again."
Well, nine years later last April, Jay-Z had pretty much done that, in a freestyle tribute to the recently-slain Los Angeles rapper Nipsey Hussle: "Gentrify your own hood, before these people do it/Claim eminent domain and have your people movin’/That’s a small glimpse into what Nipsey was doing.”
Given that Jay-Z could “say much or nothing, and it not only sounds good, it also sounds heartfelt," to quote the insightful Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, it drew both applause and backlash.
As Aaron Ross Coleman wrote in The Nation, “being told to gentrify your neighborhood by someone accused of gentrifying his own is predictably infuriating.” The backlash, though, didn't stick. That too is part of the Jay-Z aura.
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| Photo: New York Times |
The breakfast was a photo op only, so the New York Times invited readers to contribute captions.
As I wrote at the time, most captions capitalized on the incongruity of the mayor meeting the hip-hop mogul--a Times photo including Prokhorov surely would've generated different cultural quips--but a few, including mine, referenced the project at hand.
One of the more telling captions came from Daniel Goldstein, long the face of the Atlantic Yards opposition, addressing Jay-Z by his nickname: "Hova, You should write a song about eminent domain, give it a good name again."
Well, nine years later last April, Jay-Z had pretty much done that, in a freestyle tribute to the recently-slain Los Angeles rapper Nipsey Hussle: "Gentrify your own hood, before these people do it/Claim eminent domain and have your people movin’/That’s a small glimpse into what Nipsey was doing.”
Given that Jay-Z could “say much or nothing, and it not only sounds good, it also sounds heartfelt," to quote the insightful Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah, it drew both applause and backlash.
As Aaron Ross Coleman wrote in The Nation, “being told to gentrify your neighborhood by someone accused of gentrifying his own is predictably infuriating.” The backlash, though, didn't stick. That too is part of the Jay-Z aura.
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