My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge
I know you want it,
the thing that makes me,
what the guys go crazy for.
They lose their minds,
the way i wind,
i think its time
la la-la la la,
warm it up.
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting
la la-la la la,
warm it up.
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge
i can see youre on it,
you want me to teach the
techniques that freaks these boys,
it can’t be bought,
just know, thieves get caught,
watch if your smart,
la la-la la la,
warm it up,
la la-la la la,
the boys are waiting,
la la-la la la,
warm it up,
la la-la la la,
the boys are waiting,
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge
Once you get involved,
everyone will look this way-so,
you must maintain your charm,
same time maintain your halo,
just get the perfect blend,
plus what you have within,
then next his eyes are squint,
then he’s picked up your scent,
lala-lalala,
warm it up,
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting,
lala-lalala,
warm it up,
lala-lalala,
the boys are waiting,
My milkshake brings all the boys to the yard,
and they’re like,
its better than yours,
damn right its better than yours,
i can teach you,
but i have to charge
My name is Luka
I live on the second floor
I live upstairs from you
Yes I think you’ve seen me before
If you hear something late at night
Some kind of trouble. some kind of fight
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was
Just don’t ask me what it was
I think it’s because I’m clumsy
I try not to talk too loud
Maybe it’s because I’m crazy
I try not to act too proud
They only hit until you cry
And after that you don’t ask why
You just don’t argue anymore
You just don’t argue anymore
You just don’t argue anymore
Yes I think I’m okay
I walked into the door again
Well, if you ask that’s what I’ll say
And it’s not your business anyway
I guess I’d like to be alone
With nothing broken, nothing thrown
Just don’t ask me how I am
Just don’t ask me how I am
Just don’t ask me how I am
Uptown, according to the Urban Dictionary, is the part of New York north of 110th Street, the part of Manhattan north of Central Park. That is the sense the word has in hip hop and in this blog.
The Wikipedia draws the line at 59th Street, but that makes the word next to useless: that would take in the rich white parts of the city to the east and west of Central Park. It is the sort of New York you see in children’s books, a very different world from what lies north of 110th Street.
Until the other day I never thought of Uptown as one thing, as one place. There was Harlem, of course, in the middle and then the places round the edges of it: Spanish Harlem, Columbia University, City College and the Dominican neighbourhoods beyond that.
I did not see Uptown whole: I saw it cut to pieces by language and race. That is the way I thought of it when I lived there and I think most people who live there do the same.
But when you step back, when you compare it to the rest of New York City and the rest of the country, especially when you look at the books and films and songs that Uptowners, black or white, have come out with, then it hangs together as one place.
Differences of race and language do matter – Uptown is far from colour-blind – but there is also a common experience that affects everyone who lives there with an honest heart.
They call that common experience “New York” or “the city” or “the world”, but it is in fact just Uptown that they are talking about. Because that is the New York, the city and the world they know. I left Uptown long ago but that picture of the world is still in my head.
And in that world there are hundreds of thousands of blacks who are poor, mostly through no fault of their own (yes), while down below 96th Street are some of the richest white people in the world. It is very hard to see that day after day and year after year. The world is the opposite of a Norman Rockwell painting.
And so when you hear how wonderful America is, when you see the smiling white people on television, you want to pretty much throw up. The injustice and the lies that the country is built on become crystal clear. Everything comes down to power.
You have little patience for sentimentality because in your experience it is almost always the sugarcoating for some sickening lie.
And so from out of that world comes Billie Holiday and “Scarface”, the Harlem Renaissance and the beats, “I’ll Fly Away” and James Baldwin, Howard Zinn and Bigger Thomas, “My Name is Luka” and “Milkshake”.
Spike Lee often sets his films in Harlem but you can tell he is not from there: he looks at Harlem through rose-coloured glasses that no one there wears.
When I was younger there were certain Americans authors that I just loved, while I had little patience for the others who were supposed to be so much better according to my English teachers.
Here are the ones I read the most: James Baldwin, Amiri Baraka, June Jordan, Jack Kerouac, Henry David Thoreau, Sinclair Lewis, Ntozake Shange, Noam Chomsky, Gloria Naylor, Erich Fromm, Edward Said, Alice Walker, Zora Neale Hurston, Lewis Mumford.
Half are black, half are white. Two are foreign-born. But there is something that 10 of the 14 have in common: early in their lives they all lived in the same bit of America: Uptown Manhattan, Manhattan north of 110th Street in New York. Like me.
As far as I know Thoreau, Chomsky, Sinclair Lewis and Alice Walker have never lived there. But the other ten have, either in Harlem or at one of the universities next to it (or both):
Harlem: Baldwin, Naylor, Hurston, Jordan, Baraka
Barnard: Jordan, Shange, Hurston
Columbia: Baraka, Kerouac, Fromm, Said
City College: Mumford
Themes and ideas that keep coming up in these authors, whether they are black or white:
Many of the things you hear about America are self-serving lies.
If you are not careful, American society will make you into a soulless machine.
Most Americans are cut off from their own true feelings.
A hollow falseness lies at the heart of mainstream America.
American society has injustice built right into it.
America is split down the middle by race.
See things as they are, not as everyone says they are or wish they were.
Money and progress are not necessarily always good things.
In the end it all comes down to power.
Of course, some of these are things you can know just by being black anywhere in America.
Manhattan north of 110th Street is not part of apple-pie America. The image of Harlem becomes burned into your mind forever. The poverty. The rank injustice of race. It is so overpowering that it can cut through the blindness of even white people. At least some of them.
So even if you have money, even if you have white skin, even if you have had the best that America has to offer, it is hard to live there and believe that America is anywhere near as wonderful as it seemson televisionor in the history books. Not if you are honest. Not if you value the truth. Not if you see with your own two eyes.
The big smile that has been pasted over America comes to seem like the big lie.
And the angry things that Michelle Obama says make complete sense to you. The Southside of Chicago seems to be the same sort of place. And you start to wonder if Barack Obama, who once went to Columbia and has lived in the Southside all these years, you wonder if he truly means everything he says or if he is just kissing up to the mainstream.
But at least you know he knows. You do not know if John McCain knows.
Postscript (2014): Obama is kissing up to the mainstream all the way. Sickeningly so.
Nella Larsen (1891-1964) was an American writer of the Harlem Renaissance. She is best known for two books, “Quicksand” (1928 ) and “Passing” (1929). Her characters are women like herself who are part white, part black and not quite sure who they are.
For years she was out of print. In the 1970s she started to be read again. Those who teach courses in black and women studies at American universities like her books because her characters question who they are as women and as blacks.
In America there is the One Drop Rule: if you look part African, then you are considered to be black. If you look pure European, then you are seen as white. Most people fall squarely on one side or the other. But some, like Nella Larsen herself, lie on the colour line. Some pass for white.
“Passing” is about two friends who are on that line. One marries a black man and lives as a black woman in Harlem. The other passes for white: she marries a white man, who has no idea she is part black, and lives as a white woman. She thinks it is the answer to all her troubles, but in the end she finds she would rather be poor and black than rich and white!
Helga Crane, the hero in “Quicksand”, is also on the colour line. Much of the book is based on Larsen’s own life. Crane goes from place to place, but she does not feel like she belongs anywhere. Not with whites, not with blacks. She goes from man to man but never finds love.
Larsen’s books were so good that in 1930 she got a Guggenheim Fellowship, the first black woman ever to get one. But soon after her life started to fall apart. First people said her short story “Sanctuary” was copied from someone else’s story. Not true. Then in 1933 she went through a very public divorce.
She left Harlem. She said she was going to South America. Some thought she never left the country but changed her name and passed for white. No one knew what became of her till 1964 when she turned up dead in the Lower East Side, a poor part of New York. She had been working as a nurse in Brooklyn all those years.
Her father was a black man from St Croix in the West Indies, her mother a white woman from Denmark. Her father left and her mother married a white man (some say it was her own father passing as white). Larsen grew up in a white part of Chicago, the only black person in a white family. It was not till she got to Fisk, a black university, that she found herself among blacks.
She went from place to place till she came to New York in 1912. In time she became part of the Harlem Renaissance.
Harlem (1658- ), also called Uptown, is the part of Manhattan in New York City just north of Central Park. For much of the 1900s it was, in effect, the capital of black America. Its glory days were in the 1920s during the Harlem Renaissance. The Apollo Theater is there and so is the Cotton Club.
Some streets have been renamed:
Martin Luther King Jr Blvd – 125th Street, the main street going east to west
Malcolm X Blvd – Lenox Ave, the main street going north to south down the middle of Harlem
Adam Clayton Powell Jr Blvd – 7th Avenue
Frederick Douglass Blvd – 8th Avenue
Strivers’ Row, which is 139th Street between 7th and 8th Avenues, has some of the best terrace houses (row houses) in Manhattan.
Harlem was a woods and then farmland. In the 1800s summer homes began to appear, a place to get away from the city. In the 1880s the city itself started to spread into Harlem. At first it was a well-to-do white neighbourhood of Protestants and Jews.
Harlem turned black during the 1920s. It saw a flowering of the arts: the Harlem Renaissance. It became famous for its wild jazz joints along Lenox Avenue where both blacks and whites went. Harlem was still part white in those days. There were even white nightclubs where most blacks could not go, like the Cotton Club.
Blacks came mainly from the South and the West Indies. Some came from the old black neighbourhood on 52nd Street in Midtown Manhattan.
By 1930 Harlem had 225,000 blacks, making it larger than any black city in Africa or the world. But the 1930s brought bad times. The buildings started to fall apart and yet more people arrived. Riots broke out in 1935, 1943 and again in 1964.
In the 1950s and 1960s another wave of blacks came to New York from the South, but this time most moved to Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn and Jamaica, Queens, not Harlem. By the 1960s they each had more blacks than Harlem.
Harlem hit bottom in the 1980s:crack had arrived and property owners were giving up buildings as a lost cause to the city. Most people were poor and black, with Hispanics in the east and the north. There was a small black middle-class.
Most white people were afraid to go to Harlem, even to busy 125th Street in the middle of the day. That level of fear is not based on a sound reading of police reports. It is based on outright fear of blacks. Chinatown seemed worse yet plenty of whites went there.
With rising property values in Harlem since the late 1990s it is no longer as poor as it once was. Parts are even turning white again.
Given how close it is to Midtown Manhattan, Harlem is extremely underbuilt.
You can never tell what’s in a man’s mind
And if he’s from Harlem, there’s no use of even tryin’
Just like the tide, his mind comes and goes
Like March weather, when he’ll change
Nobody knows, nobody knows
The man I love, well, he just turned me down, he’s a Harlem brown
Oftimes I wish that I were in this ground, six feet underground
He idolized me, as no other could, no, no
Then he surprised me, leavin’ me a note sayin’ he’s gone for good
Gone for good…
And since my sweetie left me,
Harlem, well, it ain’t the same old place
Though a thousand dandies smile right in my face
I think I’ll mooch some homemade hooch and go out for a lark
Just to drive off these mean ole Harlem Blues
You can have your Broadway, give me Lenox Avenue
Angels from the skies stroll 7th and for that thanks are due
From Madam Walker’s beauty shops to the Pro-Ro System 2
That made those girls angels without any doubt
There are some spots up in Harlem where I’m told it’s sudden death
To let somebody see you even stop to catch your breath
If you’ve never been to Harlem, then I guess you’ll never know
The power of these mean ole Harlem blues
Ah, there’s one sweet spot in Harlem known as Striver’s Row
‘Ditty folks come call them, one thing you should know
Is that I have a friend who lives there I know he won’t refuse
To put some music to my troubles and call ’em Harlem blues
And since my sweetie left me, Harlem, well, it ain’t the same old place
Though a thousand dandies smile right in my face
I think I’ll mooch some homemade hooch and go out for a lark
Just to drive off these mean ole Harlem Blues
Ah, there’s one sweet spot in Harlem known as Striver’s Row
‘Ditty folks come call them, one thing you should know
Is that I have a friend who lives there I know he won’t refuse
To put some music to my troubles and call ’em Harlem blues
To put some music to my troubles and call them the Harlem blues
Harlem, the Harlem blues, Harlem, the Harlem blues.
YaYa Da Costa (1982- ) is an American actress. She came in second in 2004 on season three of Tyra Banks’s “America’s Next Top Model”. She beat Toccara Jones but lost to Eva Pigford. She was also the lead female character in the film “Take the Lead” (2006), a true story where Antonio Banderas changes lives by teaching ballroom dancing in a rough part of New York.
Her full name is Camara YaYa Da Costa Johnson:
Camara is her given name. It is African.
YaYa is what she started calling herself at four.
Da Costa comes from her mother, whose father is from Brazil.
Johnson is from her father
YaYa Da Costa is her stage name, sometimes written as Yaya Dacosta.
She grew up in Harlem in New York, the daughter of a university professor and a school teacher.
She has wanted to be an actress ever since she was four. She learned acting, dancing and music after school. But her parents wanted her to get a good education and not pin her hopes on acting. So they sent her to boarding school in New England. She worked hard – and acted in some plays along the way. She got into Brown, an Ivy League university, one of the best in the country. There she studied International Relations and African Studies.
She also studied in Brazil for a while. She even appeared in an ad there for Seda. She can speak Portuguese as well as Spanish and French.
While she was at Brown she wanted to take a break from writing a 30-page paper. So she filled out the form for “America’s Next Top Model” for some laughs. But then later she was chosen to be one of the 14 women of season three!
She was by far the best model of the 14. She has beautiful eyes and one of those thin bodies that look like a work of art that fashion designers love. But on the show she seemed like she was looking down on everyone. So the judges gave first prize to Eva Pigford instead.
Da Costa says she does not look down on people, but was made to seem that way on television. But she is proud all the same. For example, she did not straighten her hair like most black models. It was nice to see, but still it was a sign of her pride
Even though she came in second, Ford still signed her up as a model. She appeared in many different magazines and did television ads for RadioShack, Fructis, Oil of Olay and others. She also appears as a model in the music video “Pulling Me Back” (2006) by Chingy and Tyrese.
Today she no longer models but is working on becoming a great film actress. Not great in the sense of being a famous Hollywood star, but great in being able to touch lives for the better. Among the actresses she looks up to are Angela Bassett and Alfre Woodard.
She went back to Harlem to find her old high school acting teacher. She has helped her to get started on the road.
Abagond 