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Articles by Rishi Nath
System Clash: Massive B
On Empire Boulevard, in the heavily West Indian section of Brooklyn, posters with powder blue print plastered on scaffolding announce The Best of the Best 2013 – a huge annual reggae festival in Miami. It is near midnight on a Sunday, and in front of The Buzz nightclub there are two lines that spill out in opposite directions. Passing cars, many blasting Hot 97, slow down. The long, snaking line of women draws the eye.
Exit West: An Interview with Ishmael Reed
The author of Conjugating Hindi on leaving New York, Afro-Asian solidarities, and learning Hindi Over the last six decades, Ishmael Reed has written ten books of poetry, including Cab Calloway Stands in for the Moon or D Hexorcism of Noxon D Awful (1970) and Chattanooga (1973), twelve novels, including Mumbo Jumbo (1972), Flight To Canada (1976), and Japanese By Spring (1996), a dozen works of nonfiction, including God Made Alaska For The Indians (1982) and Blues City: A Walk in Oakland...
Pay me what you owe me
Somewhere in Bed Stuy, an old homeless man shuffling up to me, asking for money… Then he began to shout at me… Pay me what you owe me motherfucker! —White Tears, pg. 53 Well, the most important thing is, I want you guys to have a real precise perception of what I do, and how I make my money, and how I affect people’s lives, and how I represent people. Because it’s really important.
Others made of kindness
Another Kind of Madness, the viscous, lyrical debut by American poet Ed Pavlic, moves at two different speeds at once. While the narration threads quickly and easily through the interior worlds of Ndiya Grayson and Shame Luther, the scenes, set alternately in beachfront Mombasa in Kenya and the South Side of Chicago, unfold languorously.
Open City - Fact/Fiction
I’m only nineteen but my mind is older/when things get for real my warm heart turns colder In 1994, the rap duo Mobb Deep released a song heralding their arrival on the New York scene: Shook Ones (Part II). Chilling and spellbinding, the song begins with a cacophony of sirens, and gives way to a loping, melancholic piano loop as Albert “Prodigy” Johnson and Kejuan “Havoc” Muchita—then teenagers—intone gravely.
Searching for Soca Paradise: An Afternoon With DJ Rekha
4:51 p.m. 111th Street J Train Station, Richmond Hill, Queens A mint square materializes on the screen of my phone, bearing a message. Cool five stops away. The text is from Rekha Malhotra—DJ Rekha. It means she is on the J train, nearing Richmond Hill. She is coming from the East Village, where she will soon begin a teaching position in the Clive Davis Institute of Recorded Music at New York University.
Anatomy Of A Fuel Shortage: The Hess Station on Liberty Avenue in Queens
During the week of Hurricane Sandy, I reported on a Hess station on Liberty Avenue in Queens, one of the few in Greater Jamaica that had gas immediately after the surge. I returned a few days later—after Governor Cuomo ordered the release of millions of gallons of free gasoline—and found the station still clogged. For ten blocks, the parking lane, usually empty on Sunday night, was filled with waiting cars. Many were parked; some were empty.
Scenes From Sandy: South Queens Recovers, Slowly
The online reports following Hurricane Sandy’s landfall contained some horrific scenes from lower Manhattan and New Jersey. In Chelsea, a building’s façade dissolved; water exploded into a Hoboken Path station. Queens also suffered, although few images have surfaced. A young woman in Richmond Hill was electrocuted. The secluded neighborhood of Breezy Point in the Rockaways faced a conflagration that engulfed more than 100 houses. In Jamaica, York College had become a full-blown shelter.
Queens Stand Up: The Essential Reading Guide on Hip-Hop’s Forgotten Borough
Queens Stand Up: The Essential Reading Guide on Hip-Hop’s Forgotten Borough A handful of books provide vivid details on the rap that grew out of Queens. Prodigy and Havoc of Mobb Deep. Prodigy's memoir My Infamous LIfe sheds a candid light on the sometimes violent and often incestuous world of nineties Queens hip-hop. Is Queens the most overlooked hip-hop borough? Some have suggested placing 1520 Sedgwick, the address in the South Bronx where hip-hop began, on the national register.
Ghetto Qu’ran: South Jamaica Through The Life Of 50 Cent
I am riding my bicycle through South Jamaica, Queens, searching for places where 50 Cent hustled. On Rockaway Boulevard, I glide through red lights, past the small West Indian restaurants and Bangladeshi clothing stores. I stop at 145-40, where, in 1998, police executed a search warrant for a young Curtis Jackson at the flophouse where he had a room. Now renovated and available for rent, it bears no sign of ever being a residential building.
Bebi Rejendra, Student
It is often said that biggest export from Guyana—the only English-speaking country in South America—is its people. There are roughly 250,000 Guyanese in the New York area (almost one-third of the population of Guyana). While some are dispersed in Brooklyn and the Bronx, many Guyanese Americans live in Queens.
Everything Is a Surface
Alain “Ket” Mariduena first gained international notoriety after a 1990 profile in the Videograf series. A bookish young man, bespectacled face obscured by a black Mets cap and blue bandana, peers intensely at the camera. “Graffiti’s about bombing—trains. Not streets, not fucking trucks, not highways. It’s about trains.” A break beat triggers, and the film cuts to an empty underground station.
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