Soulja Boys of the first colony

whatever you think of it, even if you think it really is the last trump, I think you must concede that this, like Soulja Boy Tell 'Em in the ruling power, is Where Things Are Right Now, where the lumpenproletariat finished up once all the structures died, everything that tells the New Culture from anything we knew even a few years back.  this, from now on, will be the norm.

(cannot stop myself remembering Dizzee Rascal's words of six years ago, to the effect that very soon his culture, or an interpretation of it, would be wholly universalised, and the panic and culture-war mentality that would create among the parental generation who'd got away from the cities specifically to avoid it.  looking at Portland now, you sense that moment has arrived.)

they have to be listened to - and noticed, and understood - by anyone interested in precisely where the places whose previous culture collapsed so swiftly in the 1980s, and which will almost certainly soon feel as alienated and as unrepresented as they did then, are going.  they surpass academia.  they're appallingly necessary.  I can't stop listening to them.