New York’s alright

New York’s alright if you like drunks in your doorway!
New York’s alright if you wanna freeze to death!
New York’s alright if you wanna get mugged or murdered!
New York’s alright if you like saxophones!

Fear —New York’s Alright If You Like Saxophones

So sang Lee Ving, lead singer of early ’80s Los Angeles hardcore punk band Fear. The song has been ricocheting in my unconscious (as an “earworm,” as my German roommates call it) for the last couple of weeks, ever since a friend S. posted it on Facebook in a half-jibe to my band who just added a saxophone player to the line-up (we’re thinking more Stooges’ “Fun House” and less Wham! “Careless Whisper”). But while the song may read as a laundry list of things that are wrong with the city, coming from a controversial band like Fear (whose catastrophic appearance on SNL caused a minor stir), it was both a scathing critique and a celebration; an homage to the gritty realism of the city. Fear was a band that loved to hate, and New York in the 1980s, with its desperation and feeling of imminent apocalypse, was the ideal place to get your hate on.

But anyone who’s travelled to New York in the last 10 years, as I did last weekend, knows that, apart from certain places in the deeper parts of Brooklyn, that element of danger is all but gone. The subways are no longer covered with graffiti and Times Square is no longer a red light district full of miscreants and derelicts but a shiny Disneyfied advertisement. And while it’s always nice to walk through a place and not worry about getting face-stabbed, it’s like an important part of my New York is quickly disappearing. Of course, while I did spend summers in Manhattan as a kid visiting my mom, maybe if I lived there I’d have a different opinion, one that said good riddance to the seedier side of things.

But for me, New York always represented not only the land of opportunity, but also the price of success. Sure, you could get anything you wanted, see the sights, the glamour and glitz and have the chance to become rich and famous yourself, but right next to it would be the darker side of it, a sobering reminder of the balance that must be struck. Winners and losers, side by side.

But New Yorkers themselves will probably never lose their attitude. I love watching how strangers can just start talking shit on the subway, and meeting eccentric characters like the Queen of Williamsburg, a flamboyant outspoken Jewish Octogenarian with a mumu and bad hips, who last weekend regaled a friend and I with tales of growing up in the burlesque scene of New York. Moments like that remind me of the vibrancy of old school New York. But meeting original New Yorkers seems increasingly rare. As rents increase, the White Flight reverses suction and the families of the blue collar workers that built the city are becoming marginalized and pushed further into the boroughs, and New York slowly loses some of the raw character that I loved.

Maybe that’s why I like Montreal. It’s a city that is still raw. That’s also why I find the rejuvenation of the lower Main sad, with its closing up of the hot dog joints and strip clubs (RIP the Sex Machine); what some people see as unsavoury, I see as an important part of the cultural landscape. In the same way Edward Burtynsky can photograph the ecological disaster that is the Albertan Oil Sands and make it beautiful, there is a beauty in the ugliness of Montreal that I find fascinating and almost comforting. Sure, I welcome many improvements to the infrastructure of the city (can we fix the effing potholes already?), but I think it’s dangerous to think that the only way to make a city better is to make it cleaner and newer.

As we move into the future and begin to re-define Montreal, perhaps we shouldn’t look to cities like New York. Rather, we might find inspiration from cities like Berlin, where, according to my German roommates, they have embraced their shittiness and the artistic community has experienced a certain freedom because of that. They know they will never be New York and they don’t try. They just do. Is Montreal terrible because we’re poor, dirty, isolated and confused about our identity? Or is it wonderful for those very same reasons? I suppose in the end Montreal’s alright. If you like saxophones. And stilts.

RIFF-RAFF@SYMPATICO.CA