where brooklyn at?

i came to new york to seek the dream... i moved to brooklyn to find my tribe... the human instinct is much that of the television show "Cheers" variety... to find the place you belong, where those who look like you and share a similar vision are commonplace, instead of the outsiders you tend to be in the communities you grew up in...

in my mind, brooklyn represented this arts, intellectual mecca of black and brown folks, fueled by both hip-hop and the critiques of hip-hop and surrounding popular culture... i remember reading greg tate, asha bandele, and even joan morgan back in college and feeling some kin to the this new (to me) young, black intellectual space they were defining in the world...

attending school in the height of the puffy area, the bohemian intellectual was out of style... everyone was pursuing this newjack form of jiggy-dom... different from the classes that came before with their bourgeois aesthetic, what was hot was more flashy, more street... though the classist, capitalistic values were the same... welcome to the intellectual wasteland... where "money, power, respect was all you need in life"...

so, of course, i thought brooklyn "the place to be"... my older brother thinks so also, but for entirely different reason... when he came to visit, it was to see the brooklyn of hip-hop lore... to see these streets that bore so much weight on the music and culture he loved... and the images of hip-hop icons like Jay-Z and P Diddy adorning the buildings and billboards made Times Square an almost holy space... like Jay's face on the side of the building was some kind of affirmation of him as a young black man of this music, of this culture, of similar life circumstances... we are here, goddammit... and that's all hip-hop has been about... we are here, goddammit... and we won't be invisible... i will be as loud, in your face, as repulsive as i damn. well. please but i will not be ignored...

but it's about home too... what we represent and who we identity with, and the geography that defines us... as the streets change and pieces of bed-stuy, crown heights, and flatbush go the way of fort greene and crown heights, there are a bunch of migrants looking for home... and those of us... artists who move here, trying to find a way, are just in search of some stretch of land that will claim us back... that will feel connected to us and so entrenched that that part of our history becomes almost inseparable... like orwell's paris or langston's harlem. you can't separate biggie from brooklyn or spike from bed-stuy...

geography leaves its mark even on transplants and nomads... and we choose our destinations in hopes of attaining the marks we desire... where do you want to live is akin to asking who do you want to be?