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September 9, 2012
Jay-Z: "Civic-Minded Hip-Hop Mogul" or "The House that Hova Hyped"?
Atlantic Yards Report
I already critiqued the fawning interview/essay about Jay-Z in the New York Times's Sunday T Magazine ad-jammed supplement, but the cover line deserves notice too: "The Civic-Minded Hip-Hop Mogul Holds Court With Zadie Smith."
Civic-Minded? That sounds like a termed dreamed up by, or in syncrhonicity with, developer Bruce Ratner's p.r. advisors, who have him regularly self-reporting as a "civic developer," a gauzy term that implies a social mission rather than a calculation that something beyond the minimum--better architecture, subsidized housing, jobs (?!)--is necessary to get a project passed.
So, while the article, headlined "The House That Hova Built," says little about the Barclays Center, it is indeed, as I put it, "The House That Hova Hyped." Jay-Z is portrayed, at the arena, wearing expensive clothes--this is a fashion magazine supplement--and being cited for "civic" goals like making sure "Brooklyn" was part of the name of the Nets when they moved from New Jersey. (Civic? That's marketing.)
Some cautions
Not everybody was buying it. Shane Danaher wrote in Music is My Oxygen:
Yesterday’s New York Times profile of Jay-Z (courtesy of unimpeachable novelist/memoirist Zadie Smith) took a precariously laudatory tone toward its subject, a tack that helped both to highlight the Jiggaman’s extant qualities (of which there are many) as well as the contradictions that make those qualities such a tough pill to swallow.
The article’s cause célèbre—the opening of the Barclays Center in Brooklyn, which will house the partly-Hova-owned New York Nets—exemplifies this apparent contradiction.
Housed in Jay-Z’s neighborhood of origin, the center will drive economic resurgence in a region long considered low on the social rungs. However, it’s hard to say whether Jay’s involvement is better described as charity or mercantilism, since he undoubtedly stands to add to his $460 million personal fortune as an upshot of the deal....While [Smith's] optimistic view of the [latest Jay-Z/Kanye West] LP [Watch the Throne] casts it as a manifesto for community empowerment, other critics have looked with scorn on the album’s baroque materialism, especially coming as it did in the midst of the vituperative, if somewhat soft-headed, Occupy Wall Street movement.
The truth is that Smith, however talented and interesting, is not unimpeachable. neither is Jay-Z. (Oh, and the center will not "drive economic resurgence" in Jay-Z's "neighborhood of origin.")
Posted by steve at September 9, 2012 10:33 PM