That Real Live Bunch From Jersey

New Jerseyan dissidents are frequently observed bandying about our state's population density (1,171.1 persons per sq. mi, son!) as if any one of us really has anything to do with it. It is certainly somewhat understandable that each Garden State resident who was elected to be born north of the Rio Grande expects to be counted as a legitimate point o' lite in this spiral galaxy of a clusterfuck. Belief in such a notion may be symptomatic of a contagious mania or an over-dependence on waning Jeffersonian ideals, but the fact of the matter (as I've been told on at least numerous occasions) remains that the inescapable crowdedness of Jersey results from a confluence of factors.

I'm no expert, mind-u, but this particular confluence seems bigger than any one of us and all of us put together. I confess that the details often escape my clutches --- I cannot list the major strands of this ball of yarn by name. With a gun to my head I'll rattle off "toxic waste, carjacking, property taxes" in a sighing sardonic sing-song, but don't quote me on that. I have yet to identify and isolate the invisible force that keeps our miraculous confluence all a flowin' and I am at a similar loss to cite one credible source to back up the initial claim. Not surprisingly I am unable to recall when and where I first overheard it mentioned.*

Yet I feel no less than reasonably overconfident that this confluence is true and living.  The noble mega-vortex is felt everywhere from the mind-numbing semiotics of Vineland to the quadruple bypasses of Mo'bius AirStrip One b.k.a. Spaghetti Junction. Reader, is there a better way to make sense of my surroundings than to posit my soluble self as the spigoted source of an infinitesimal creek (south of Bordentown they call it a "crick") that feeds into a mighty intermingling of currents, each a clogged artery of human conditions and humans, conditioned? Every one of us is a face in a throng in a crowd in a demographic cross-section, set adrift and bunched together at the whim of a tide pushed and pulled by yet a stronger tide whose motivations we meekly pretend to surmise.

This belief system is both spiritually attractive and rhetorically convenient, a twofer unattainable even on the Bergenline or at the Englishtown Auction. In its absence the shamefully droll New Jerseyan lacks the confidence to cast aside hubristic claims of individuality that would otherwise isolate his sorry existence from the greater sadness around him. It alone can account for an empowering pride born out of hopeless commiseration -- how else could Redman muster the nerve to speak on behalf of all of New Jeruz on a (patently absurd) KRS-One song titled "Five Boros"? Why, aside from the obvious, does King Sun repeatedly deny his Paterson upbringing, as if Just-Ice doesn't know the truth? How else could Jay-Z momentarily and publicly relinquish his Gotham-centrist stance and confess to his "Wilbur Dirt" school daze in East Trenton (his recent reference to DYFS similarly betrays an adult life spent on the Jersey side of the river and may have been subliminally inspired by a shaky Law and Order SVU plotline)?

New Jeruz's  monstrous sameness lends itself to representations that are equal parts self-effacing insularity and deferential self-aggrandizement. Rappers from New York (especially Brooklyn) valorize a sinister 'hood incarnate figure while Jersey rappers submerge the mundane particularities of their neck of the woods in populist flimflamming. Put another way, artists from Jersey who hail from the dingiest and least publicized wrong side of the tracks scenarios (e.g., Real Live from fucking Passaic) tend to cobble together eloquent and unnerving theses about the life (presumably a less navigable tributary of the struggle) but aren't too keen on attaching these observations to specific locales. The Brooklyn rapper comes to embody his place and its history but the Jersey rapper chooses homelessness, taking the collective he claims to represent with him for a drive through nowhere special while claiming solidarity with a planet of have-nots.

Real Live's  "Ain't No Love" (which sees K-Def triumphantly freaking the famous sample many years prior to Kanye West) heaves and hints at the ordinary roaring silence that shadows life in the deindustrialized sectors alongside Passaic River. The lyrics unite world weariness with empathy in a manner reminiscent of Kool G. Rap's "The Streets Of New York" but without a hint of localized rah rah. Larry-O mourns the slow death of "the city," not quite Passaic but a more generalized stand-in (really, lazy shorthand for the whole NYC metropolitan area), and although this gesture denies us a true Jersey street anthem for the umpteenth time (Queen Latifah's anemic "Jersey" hardly satisfies), his sublimated representation rings authentic.

On "Thousands" Chino XL promises "dismal sketches of Jersey trife shit," and although he delivers on that promise eslewhere on his debut album, this ode to living illegally evokes nothing peculiar to East Orange. Similarly still, Wise Intelligent's project-centric "Steady Slangin'" celebrates pan-ghetto swagger and thus does not explicitly transport the listener any closer than distant to his beloved locus classicus of "Divineland". These are meager complaints, though. Each song is a mini-masterpiece that asserts prideful Jersey rootedness and even provides snapshots of claustrophobic backyard malaise while chalking everything (including the oceanic self that lurks in highly personal rap lyrics)  up to an unspeakable if graphic confluence of factors.

Real Live "Ain't No Love"

Chino XL "Thousands"

Poor Righteous Teachers "Steady Slangin'" (Project Mix)

*I am willing to speculate, for the sake of argument and off the record, that I may have become acquainted with the theory in a somewhat garbled form during a raucous housewarming party in the desolately average "New Brunswick Highlands section" of Piscataway.