I Can See Your Entire Ass In Those Jeans, Part 3: “A HISTORY: Poverty, Booty And Criminal Intent”

SERIOUSLY. Does it even matter what the history is behind this scurge? This fad has had a strangle-hold on the urban community and the society at-large for a generation or two now. This isn’t fashion, style or swagger, this isn’t even acceptable human attire. it should be against the law (wait let me not get ahead of myself…) I don’t want historians to put this trend in the record books as being representative of my era. That would be a blight on my generation- Levi Strauss is turning grave. What would  The Big Book Of History say when the get to dungarees: “towards the latter part of the Twentieth Century urban men explored gravity-defying feats of pantaloonage.  Belts became obsolete because the waistline moved to the thighs and the Penguin Walk was created. This is the trend that catapulted  the Pussy Push Movement of 2018 when a large portion of society’s females turned to Lesbianism out of pure dissatisfaction for what the modern man had become… That might be the scene, as historians look back on this era in a generation or two. I wonder how people are going to describe this trend once it eventually dies out.

You cant describe something without starting at the beginning. After all, how will you know where you’re going if you don’t know where you’ve been. In other words, you have to go back to go forward. Speaking of Back2GoForward, Mateo, friend and guest blogger to the site, gave me some insight on one of the origins of this craze:
When the 70’s heroin epidemic hit, shit got hard, and then 80’s crack wave washed through the hood, it shattered families that were already struggling. Hand-me-downs or HCRP (hood clothing recycling program) became an everyday staple in life. Many children would show up to school not with the latest fashion, but with what their older siblings’ wore for school the year before (sometimes two and three years.) Hence the ill-fitting clothes.

Rap artists in the 90 like Naughty By Nature helped push it into mainstream America, forever changing a once hood struggle into a false movement. Like all things we turned it into a way of being- a universal sign of poverty,  glorified  by people that can’t even relate to true struggle. Just take a look at the older hip hop artist from back in the day: early LL Cool J, Run DMC who were ,at the time, making hit records, they weren’t wearing sagging pants. Along the way we forgot that you can move forward and beyond old concepts and ideas. So here we are in 2009 going into 2010 wearing  two hundred dollar jeans  that don’t even cover what they’re supposed to. Even with the wave of tight jeans I can not understand how those can be worn around your knees.

Haa! Skinny jeans at their knees…that’s so New York. They sometimes buy the jeans so tight, it can’t go all the up.

Random NYC Tip.10 (ATM Vestibules)

Now this really is the oldest one in the book and the easiest to act out: You’re cold, pull out your ATM card and go into an ATM vestibule.

But wait, there’s more. We all know that you can use your ATM card at any bank, whether it’s your’s or not, meaning your card opens the door to ever bank vestibule in the city- 24 hours a day. Yes that does mean you can throw an impromptu after party there once the club dies down at like 3 o’clock in the morning. Just don’t stay there too long, you’re on not-so-candid camera and some (or most) banks have real people on the other side of those cameras, monitoring their vestibules throughout the night and they will call the cops on you.

Having an ATM card, even if it’s for a closed account at a insolvent bank, can be a lifeline for you. A ticket to sanctuary when you just can’t brave the elements anymore. I once ate an entire four-course meal in a Bank Of America vestibule wait out the rain and wait for a bus. Only in New York.  Bank designers are smart, however, you will almost never find an electrical outlet in a bank vestibule because if they did that, it would officially be The Spot and people would never leave.

Obviously this works in any city, obviously.

International Artist Of The Week – Vanessa Paradis – “Be My Baby”

This artist is international, but the song is definitely a throwback and it’s in English, but I like it. It’s from 1992. The real reason why I picked it is because I was trying to have four weeks of French artists: David Guetta, Les Plastiscines, Yelle, now Vanessa Paradis. One of my old bosses first put me on to this song years ago. The is Vanessa back when she was with Lenny Kravitz, long before she became Johnny Depp’s wife and the mother of his kids.

Doesn’t she just look angelic and serene in the whole video, I guess it’s the French sensibility and the black boyfriend. This video has Early 90s Lenny written all over it.

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