Brooklyn Down: The members of Antibalas outside their Bushwick headquarters.

Antibalas
Fela-sophy
Afrobeat is alive and well and living in Bushwick.

‘The headquarters” is in Bushwick, on a street dotted with Rottweiler-guarded auto-repair shops—the clubhouse–frat house–recording studio–political hub of the fourteen members of Afrobeat band Antibalas, passionate disciples of Fela, the Nigerian singer who gave birth to the Afrobeat genre and used it as a platform for espousing his political views. Antibalas, similarly, set their politics to a horn section and a James Brownish, polyrhythmic beat. They’re at work on their third studio album and preparing for an appearance at the World Music Expo in Spain.
ROCK THE VOTE: “The music is inherently political,” says drummer-percussionist Dylan Fusillo. “We’ve definitely fought a lot amongst ourselves trying to answer questions about what we’re trying to do. Everybody is very much against war, the military-industrial complex, the Bush administration, and commercialization. I don’t want to say the obvious progressive-liberal shit, but definitely the obvious progressive-liberal shit. We’re not revolutionaries, and we’re very conscious of that. We’re musicians and that’s all. But it’s political music. Anything that gets people off their asses a little bit is kind of political.”
FELA AMERICANS: “If a few people buy a Fela record, they’ll learn a little bit about what he went through,” says trombonist Aaron “A.J.” Johnson. “His life could really open someone’s eyes as to how easy Americans have it.” “Here we spend 30 hours without power,” Fusillo adds, “and it’s a fucking disaster. People are making T-shirts about it. Liberia’s been in a fucking blackout for 40 years and they don’t get any T-shirts for it.”
FOOD FIGHTS: “When we’re on the road,” says Fusillo, “we spend a lot of time fighting about where to eat, because there’s so many dudes traveling together. It’s like summer camp, in a way.” “The best restaurant,” bassist Nick Movshon says to a chorus of approval from his bandmates, “is Matamoros on Bedford Avenue.” To Johnson, it’s “Dok Suni, the Korean place on First Avenue. My God, I love that place.” “Pakistan Tea House,” keyboardist Victor Axelrod chimes in. Tenor saxophonist Stuart Bogie’s pick: “The Diner on Broadway, in Williamsburg.” Adds Bogie, “Sometimes you’ll walk into a restaurant with a dude, then you just look away. You’re ready to kill this guy already, and now you have to watch him eat! Or, even worse, hear him eat.”

(Photo: Courtesy of Yo La Tengo)

Yo La Tengo
Heaven, Hell, Or Hoboken?
Manhattan Bohemia’s colony to the west.

Yo La Tengo is the most enduring band in indie rock, helmed for nineteen years by Ira Kaplan and his drummer wife, Georgia Hubley, Hoboken’s answer to Thurston and Kim. Since leaving Manhattan in the mid 1980s, the two have lived a lifestyle almost as suburban as their surroundings, coasting into their forties in an old Buick, watching The Simpsons, listening to jazz. And in the eleven years since they picked up bassist and Brooklynite James McNew, they’ve done a slow swan dive from their early Velvet Underground–inspired, dissonant indie rock to a blissful, jazzy, soul-searching sound.
BEYOND PUNK: “I started going to shows at CBGB when it was the Ramones, Talking Heads, Television,” says Kaplan. “People thought these were the next Beatles and Rolling Stones, that the Ramones were going to have hit records any day now. Like, everyone here knows how great ‘Sheena Is a Punk Rocker’ is—it’s only a matter of weeks until it’s coming out of every radio. It really felt that way. What I liked about it was that was only one side of things. Television and the Talking Heads were dressed normally. Even the word punk didn’t describe a genre of music but was a euphemism for the underground.
PAPER BOY: “Writing for the Soho News was my first job,” says Kaplan. “And I was pretty proud to be part of New York Rocker, but I didn’t do much music writing after that folded. Soon after, I was working at Maxwell’s, and with a friend of mine from New York Rocker, I was doing a series of shows at Folk City, mostly in 1982. We were the first non-punk venue to book Hüsker Dü, and we had an amazing show with Sonic Youth and the Meat Puppets. But the club started getting in trouble with their neighbors and had to stop having loud music and go back to being a folk venue.”

Elvis Costello
The King
Is this year’s model a New Yorker?

A flurry of recent Elvis sightings—not Presleyan but Costelloid—in Manhattan has led to speculation that pop music’s great overachiever has taken up residence here. But Costello is resolutely unrevealing on this matter. Perhaps revealingly so. “That’s privileged information,” he says. “I’m not at liberty to tell you.” Got it.

“I remember coming to New York for the first time quite clearly, and it being as powerful and mythic an experience as it is in films and songs,” he says of the early, oxygen-depleting club tours with the Attractions. By the eighties, Costello was headlining Madison Square Garden (“We played so much the wrong set for the venue. Perversity. It was a dreadful night”), but it’s the old Palladium on East 14th that he loved best. “That was just a ferocious treat then,” he says. “You knew you were somewhere.” Visiting Nick Lowe once in his dressing room there, Costello was shocked to stumble upon Andy Warhol (“I mean, what the fuck?”).

To Costello, New York is a safe place. “The only time I ever felt a bit anxious was once when the pavement was frozen in ice, and I became aware that I couldn’t get away quickly—that if someone asked me for my wallet, I’d probably have to give it to him.

“But I feel at ease, strangely enough, in such a teeming place,” he continues. “It’s so tumultuous, but at the most unlikely hours, it can all fall away. And that experience is repeated at different times, in different emotional circumstances. It is a properly evocative place.”—George Kalogerakis