1

For better or worse, [the city] invites you to remake it, to consolidate it into a shape you can live in. You, too. Decide who you are, and the city will again assume a fixed form around you. Decide what it is, and your own identity will be revealed, like a map fixed by triangulation. Cities, unlike villages and small towns, are plastic by nature. We mould them in our images: they, in their turn, shape us by the resistance they offer when we try to impose our own personal form on them. In this sense, it seems to me that living in a city is an art, and we need the vocabulary of art, of style, to describe the peculiar relation between [human] and material that exists in the continual creative play of urban living. The city as we imagine it, the soft city of illusion, myth, aspiration, nightmare, is as real, maybe more real, than the hard city one can locate in maps and statistics, in monographs on urban sociology and demography and architecture. – Jonathan Raban, Soft city

Imani Jackson’s Jaywalking in Chicago.

2

I’ve seen Mick Jenkins perform “The Water” multiple times at Young Chicago Authors’ Wordplay. Trees be told, I downloaded his most recent mixtape Trees &
Truths hoping that its gorgeous bass-on-bass-on-bass would grace my ears
at some point during the tape’s running time. It didn’t. A month or so later
while making conversation with an acquaintance I asked what she’d been listening to lately. She said “The new Mick Jenkins ‘The Water.'” I got very excited. Then we got excited together, then we talked about The Weeknd. She’s cool.

There are times when all of the bars don’t hit me as on the same level. This time though, I was enveloped in the song’s torrent. The beat is unstoppable, Mick’s
tone is always unstoppable, the “Ginger Ale for yo hoes'” gives me existential pause on a song so considered, though Mick’s recurring Ginger Ale motif is one of the funniest/coolest rap/art things going. It’s a beast of a track, soothing apocalypse, booming trance.

Mick Jenkins’s The Water.