I was chilling at home late on Monday night, and I was trying to unwind after a long day. I’ve been managing my media startup, genx chronicle.com, and I just published two children’s books on Amazon Kindle about life with my adopted cat Copper. Plus I’m working on a memoir about my life and the places I’ve and worked abroad.
So I have a lot on my plate, and I just really wanted to chill out. I popped on YouTube on my Roku, kicked back with a Burnside Bourbon, Oregon Oaked, which is a nice bourbon from the Pacific Northwest.
The first couple songs I watched were pure eye candy, with lots of hot women to chill me out. I did “Cyclone” by Baby Bash, and “Bartender,” by T. Pain, among others.
But then something got into me, and I popped on “These Hoes Ain’t Loyal” by Chris Brown. Now maybe it was because I had been hoping to have an Okcupid date this past Sunday, but when I suggested we meet in midtown east, she balked, and countered with the Upper West Side. Which is all fine and dandy, I mean I grew up on the UWS and I love it, and my mother still lives there.
But I live in Queens now, Astoria to be precise, and trekking to the UWS for a first date is not my idea of a good time. So I told her that, albeit in a much more friendly way, accommodating way.
And I never heard from her again.
So I was pretty fuckin’ pissed, and it fell into the long line of women who won’t come to Queens for a date, which is actually all of the women in Manhattan and Brooklyn.
I guess you could say I was feeling some class anger, and some anger toward women, and maybe that’s why I popped on Chris Brown’s song. But whatever the case, it really spoke to me. Because I moved to Astoria from the UWS, and then Morningside Heights, about nine years ago.
Since that time, I’ve done okay in the romantic department, but there’s been a huge dip compared to when I lived in Manhattan. It’s just straight up obvious math. You live in Manhattan. You have more money, and presumably you’re more successful. More women want to date you. A follows B follows C follows D, and bang! If you live in Manhattan you’re getting laid all the time, and if you live in Queens you’re trekking to Union Square for dates with mediocre chicks who’ve deigned to meet your Queens ass.
I understand that this may sound like a caveman, unevolved way of viewing male female relations, but there’s just so much truth in it that anyone who would deny it is simply not self-aware enough to understand the world.
So I was really feeling Chris Brown belting out those lyrics.
When a rich nigga want you
And your nigga can’t do nothing for ya
These hoes ain’t loyal
These hoes ain’t loyal
Yeah, yeah, let me see
So that’s exactly how I felt after my recent Okcupid experience. It’s happened so many freaking times since I moved to Queens that I stopped counting.
The best analogy I can think of for this dynamic between men and women comes from Scarface, that 1983 Brian De Palma classic, which not incidentally, so many rappers have come to idealize. It tells the story of a low-level Cuban criminal who is shipped off to Miami during the mass deportation of criminals and mental health patients by Fidel Castro known as the Mariel Boatlift.
So Al Pacino plays Tony Montana, who arrives in Miami with one friend and virtually nothing else. Through industry, hard work, and killing a lot of people and selling a lot of cocaine, he rises to the top of the Miami underworld.
Eventually he meets a violent end at the hands of his South American rivals and suppliers. But there’s a touchstone exchange he has with his friend during a pivotal scene in the latter part of the movie. Tony tells his friend:
In this country, first you get the money
Then you get the power,
THEN you get the women
It may sound retrograde, or paleolithic, but it rings more so true to me on this night. It’s perfectly in line with what Chris Brown is preaching. He and Scarface are in lock step with each other.
There’s no question that Chris Brown took a major risk with this song, which was released in 2014. It’s also true that he was convicted of felony assault of his then-girlfriend Rihanna in 2009, to which he was sentenced to five years of probation.
But this isn’t about whether Chris Brown, or Scarface for that matter, are good guys. In fact, I would guess that they probably both are not good guys, when it comes right down to it.
But they clearly touched a cultural vein with American men, particularly struggling and striving men, who feel that the only chance they have of meeting the women they really want to meet is to make it big first.
And who exemplies this trend more clearly and powerfully than the most powerful man in the world, Donald J. Trump, the President of the United States himself? Because every woman he’s ever been with since he’s been a public person has been super, like mega, hot, right up to the 45-year old and still smokin’ hot Melania, who cohabitates with the 71-year old and decidedly frumpy, not hot, POTUS.
It’s an age-old story, and mindset, if you think about it. Rich man sweeps beautiful common woman off her feet. But pay attention, because therein lies the key word. Rich. As in, get rich, dude, by any means necessary. Donald Trump did it, and look what it brought him.
Just get rich. That’s the way you meet the American girl of your Dreams.
