Bad Boys: In Shadows I Flourish feat. Shyne
A zine about the idiosyncratic career of a Brooklyn rapper
I have completed a short volume about Shyne Barrow, erstwhile rapper and Belizean politician. Shyne’s tale does not really relate directly to my abiding interest in northwest Europe. But I think there is a connection that is more than gratuitous.
I tried to ground Shyne’s behavior and attitudes in the origins of North American polities. His native country was a haven of English freebooters and only became a sovereign nation a few decades ago. Migrating with his mother to Brooklyn, he quickly absorbed the culture of another New World outpost, one with Dutch origins that by the twentieth century was totally subsumed by aggressive commercialism. Or maybe that commercialism was right at the heart of the Dutch project all along.
Part of why I find Shyne a fascinating character is that he has seen New York from the outside (a son to a single mother in East Flatbush) and from the inside (in the studio with Puff Daddy, unjamming an AK-47). He mastered several different modes of expression: Shyne became conversant in NYC hip hop culture, and more recently in Central American politics, with a detour through Jerusalem and the Jewish religion.
The Dutch traded New Amsterdam for a couple of tropical resource extraction projects. Shyne traded gangsta rap for a role as a media-savvy booster of tropical tourism, although that choice was constrained by America’s criminal justice system. Culturally omnivorous cutthroats tend to distinguish themselves. Particularly when their journeys take them across oceans and force personal reinventions.
Settle in and let me tell you a story that you probably remember some of.
