Beat Diaspora: Beats, Buses, Bricks

Back in Philly from my west coast excursion, wrapping up in the Bay Area.  What does it mean to have a bay as your locus of organization?  It means sprawl, to a large extent, cities & suburbs & satellites reaching all around a bay that is almost a lake, the more temperate counterpart to Tahoe, due east.  But it all converges on the shipyards, the port, the bridges, and then harbor leading out into the Pacific, the cluster at SF-Berkeley-Oakland.

I wasn’t around Oakland on the last Saturday of the month to take the Black Panther Legacy Tour, but I got my own streetside view from the mighty Teutonic-Sherbronic Chief Boima.  He’s got a good lay of the land after living there for several years, but also knowledge of the tale from the other side of the bay.  Western Addition, one of the few remaining black neighborhoods in post-urban renewal SF, also claims to be the BP birthplace.

Either way, tumultuous Oakland rolls on, with protests over a New Year’s Eve shooting devolving into a riot.  Today, native son Rickey Henderson is headed to the Hall of Fame.  This is an Oakland, not a San Francisco, not a Bay Area victory.  The Raiders are a religion.  And maybe this show of respect for the mighty Athletics will calm some overheated minds.

We cruised those streets less than a week before, old school hyphy (proto-hyphy? classifications be damned, “hyphy is an attitude,” Boima says) on 106 KMEL, Boima giving me & Refusenik a history of Yay Area hip-hop.  We didn’t come across any sideshows, not in the dead of winter, and who knows what the crackdown holds for next summer.  The sound’s time in the national rap spotlight has already come&gone, but that — and the spontaneity, the unpredictability, “you won’t find a flyer for it,” — may keep its integrity?  This could easily be my east coast mind conflating two distinct Bay Area phenomena, but it’s hard not to see a correlation to happenings in a city that still has a penchant for the bizarre.

Across the bay, then, with much time spent in the Mission district, a neighborhood transitioning from Latino stronghold to what Joel Kotkin calls “the ephemeral city.”  I understand that “hip” or “trendy” neighbohoods begin to acquire a certain sameness — my 24 hours in Seattle’s Capitol Hill were fairly indistinguishable from some Williamsburg/Northern Liberties/Wicker Park hybrid, minus the views over the Puget Sound and into the Olympic Mountains.  But in the Mission, there is a more unique dynamic at work.  Often the separation between Latino and young&white is block by block, but at the end of the day everyone is going to mix in the street, at the BART, in the taqueria.

The influx of younger professionals with money to burn is, of course, a boon to store and restaurant owners (tell me Taqueria Cancun was doing such a brisk business at 3 am ten years ago?).  And for those who already own their home, the rise in property values brought on by gentrification is only making them wealthier.  Not that there hasn’t been displacement, but how often do you get the city council fighting against encroachment on a poorer neighborhood instead of pushing for lucrative development to plow straight ahead?

Sometimes those facets can be bridged, though, and not just through the medium of commerce (one buying the good or service of another).  Music is a lubricant in a neighborhood rich with venues, and while I couldn’t attend a Tormenta Tropical myself (missing The Heatwave was a damn shame), I have nothing but admiration for Bersa Discos bringing cumbeiros in to rub elbows at The Elbo Room with the hip set.  They also print flyers in an estilo mexicano that blends seamlessly into the neighborhood.  Who’s throwing the party, gringos or Latinos?  More importantly, does it matter if it sounds right?  In capturing the audio&visual aesthetic of the Mission, they are sewing the neighborhood together one party at a time.

And not to slight my gracious host Boima, whose own sweaty African soirée at Little Baobab was another diasporic revelation.  There is no West African neighborhood to my knowledge, but dispersed as they are throughout SF/the Bay Area (dispersed in turn from W. Africa, natch), they all seem to cram into this tiny Senegalese bar and sing along to every word of the high-energy coupé décalé beats.  It’s a mixed crowd — black, white, gay, straight, anything in between — and everyone seems to be dancing.  Amazingly, it all seems friendly and never sleazy, just pulsating rhythms that command everyone to move, especially after a few of those ginger punches.

The Mission is a model — however in flux.

Tags: BART, bersa discos, black panthers, boima, gentrification, hipsters, latino, mission, neighborhoods, oakland, raiders, san francisco, taqueria, tormenta tropical

This entry was posted on Tuesday, January 13th, 2009 at 10:36 pm and is filed under America, américa latina, cities, club, geography, music, transportation, travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.