Tuesday, September 1, 2009

Miss Understanding 2009

last Thursday i participated in a subway-party-cum-art-exhibit that somehow spiraled into a sociopolitical morass, & now feel the need to explain myself:

people play music on trains. people play music on train platforms. these are both common occurrences, not requiring phone calls to the cops, the transit police, or the local militia. commuters who do not want to hear this music are generally out of luck, unless they've brought headphones or have selective hearing--i know, i've been one of these commuters many times, more frequently now that my mp3 player is busted & a new one has yet to present itself for an acceptable price. somehow, 99% of these musicians don't get called out by catty after-the-fact wannabe pundits who demean the entire affair as the brainchild of "privileged white hipsters" invading "their" territory with loud noise & circus effects. speaking from the back of the J train--which passes outside my window hello J train i live off you--i heard unamplified violin, guitar, & banjo music, a girl singing, people bustling around handing out donuts & juice, maybe flowers. not disruptive. didn't see any commuters getting any more pissed off than they'd been when they got on the train. no one raises an eyebrow when subway musicians commandeer a car, often with much higher volumes of noise--i can't be the only person who's almost gotten kicked in the face by a breakdancer, but done nothing about it except maybe move a few inches to the left--& "white" is a lazy descriptor by internet douchebags who can't even be bothered to look at the pictures taken at the event, not only irrelevant but completely wrong. i'm not a fucking hipster & plenty of people present were not fucking hipsters. lazy generalizations will be the death of responsible reporting.* same with privilege--sure, some people there were probably subsidized at least in part by their parents. plenty weren't. "trust fund hipster" at this point is such a cliche that unless you are using it to describe a single person, it's all but meaningless.

[the sociopolitical commentary re: "songs about money" supposedly made on the Broadway Junction platform is asinine, however, though i don't know who made it--i am assuming it was a to-remain-unnamed aspiring Rock Star who in his rush to the top tends to step in his own mouth. as for the "acrobats" doing flips over the subway railings & dropping change from their pockets, i wish i had been in THAT car. that change would be MINE, fuckers.]

*the author makes no claim as to the existence of responsible reporting on this site, & never will

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