New York City gets over 40 million visitors a year but only 12 percent of them ever end up checking out Brooklyn. Why is that? Brooklyn boasts 70 square miles of parks and gardens and quaint old bars. It’s home to Busta Rhymes, Andre 3000, and the Nets! It’s got the Botanical Gardens. Shit, you can even get gold fronts in Fulton Mall for less than $100. Oh wait. How’s this? Maybe the reason people aren’t that hyped about Brooklyn is that it fucking sucks.
Editors at the New York Times and the Village Voice love articles about Brooklyn as the “lovable underdog” that houses the “real deal” and is home to “the new Lower East Side” and bullshit like that, but the truth is Brooklyn is the most overrated place since Nicole Kidman’s vagina. These Manhattan socialites can rave about the hidden gems of Brooklyn all they want; they don’t have to live here. If they spent one week in Park Slope, they’d realize that Brooklyn isn’t the cozy little sanctuary of culture they so desperately want it to be. It’s just another working-class shithole.
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Take the jukeboxes, for example. A typical night out in Williamsburg (said to be the hottest of Brooklyn’s hotspots) inevitably leads to Janis Joplin’s Greatest Hits at Blu Lounge, all of Santana Live at Iona’s and “Smells Like Teen Spirit” THREE TIMES IN A ROW at the Brooklyn Ale House. And while you’re subjected to excruciating baby-boomer tunes (including that irritating “Star Spangled Banner” thing Hendrix did at Woodstock—no joke) you can listen to a jaw-grinding cokehead blather on and on to you about “What Brooklyn really needs right now is a multimedia bar where you could be playing a DVD of local bands like The Mooney Suzuki and then you could go up to the bartender and say ‘What is this video?’ and then she’d show you the DVD which you could then buy and part of the proceeds would go to the bands.”
No wonder you don’t make enough money to live in Manhattan, Chris. You are a fucking boring idiot with stupid ideas.
Personally, I live in a shitty slum called Cobble Hill. It’s not the worst Brooklyn has to offer. You don’t have black people screaming “What you doin’ in my neighborhood, bitch?” to whites like you do in Bed-Stuy and you don’t have drunken Polacks puking into dumpsters at 2:00 p.m. the way you do in Greenpoint, but let one grand truth be known, if any of us could afford to get out of this “lovable underdog” we would be in a Uhaul on our way to the old Lower East Side within the hour.
