Except for the proliferation of “air world” retail and hospitality brands em-beigening every alpha global city, it’s different in both good and bad ways. But yes, it’s a lot closer to Paris now than it was in the 1980s.
As Fear City points out, doing business in broad swaths of New York’s economy when Trump was a young man meant doing business with the mob. But Trump’s main industries—development, casinos, and luxury real estate—were particularly infested with organized crime. And what makes him notable is that he sometimes appeared to do more business with the mafia than was strictly necessary. According to biographer Wayne Barrett, “he went out of his way not to avoid” contacts with the mafia, “but to increase them.”
[Good documentary, by the way. Especially when paired with “Once Upon a Time in New York”, which is about the prolific music scene at the time.]
I got to wander around NYC in both the mid-80’s and early 90’s a few times. Yeah, it was grimy, but a lot of cities are still grimy, that comes with the territory.
The big changes to places like NYC are not that the streets are (maybe) cleaner, or that red-light districts like Times Square or Boston’s Combat Zone are gone, it’s that everything is more homogenized and pricey.
Of course, people also got to eat, pay rent, etc, and selling your home-dubbed cassette at your shows, at dive bars where you might get fucked over by the venue, was never a good way to make a living as a musician. Pop music (of whatever genre) has always been a commercial enterprise, but some people have been lucky enough to make a lot of money at it (very few). And a few others were able to make a living doing it (a larger number, who mostly either were on reputable indies or had their own labels and managed to get a solid fanbase. The VAST majority of working musicians (making pop music at least) will never turn a profit making music though. So that means that lots of people able to make it in an indie music career do so because they either have another way to fund their passion or they are people with wealth. There are, of course, people who DO go into pop music to make money, but few of them ever actually end up being the next Beatles… But if you need to inhabit some kind of purity zone where money doesn’t matter at all, then the only people who will ever get to make music are the rich assholes who have few things of interest to say about life.
We’re all “sell outs” in that we all trade hours for dollars, because we all live in a capitalist society and if we didn’t do that, we’d all be homeless… Hell, some of us DO work full time and are STILL homeless.
I think the whole idea of “selling out” didn’t go away just because people no longer care about making music for the joy of it… they just understood that purity tests help no one.
At least it wasn’t some muscle car, monster truck or other wasteful luxury. At the time, a gas scooter was the most efficient powered single-person mover for carbon footprint and road/parking space. (With a whole lot of limitations that I’m familiar with.)
I owned a 84 or 85 Honda scooter, probably unknowingly influenced by that ad. It was a lot of fun for tooling around DC. Great gas mileage and no effort parking.
Some scooters had gears & some didn’t (or, perhaps, single-geared) - I can’t tell which one is in the ad. Those that were single-geared, topped out around 30-35 mph. As for those that coild change gears, I had one pass me on an expressway once (perhaps the owner had modified it?) & I was doing at least 60 or 65.
I had a Honda Express II, essentially a scooter without a floorboard - automatic clutch & single gear. It topped out at 30mph, maaayyybe 35 if I went down a good hill. But it took so long to reach 30 that it was impractical in real traffic; when it did reach 30 it was so loud that it sounded like it was going fast, e.g. to the point where some guy in his yard yelled at me to slow down (although I was doing the speed limit).
BTW, perhaps I had a sheltered childhood - I never heard “Walk on the Wild Side” before this ad came out. When I did hear it on the radio, I thought, “wait, I thought thisbwas a commercial.” I only knew who Lou Reed was at that point because “I Love You Suzanne” (& something else from New Sensations, maybe “My Red Joystick?”) had been on MTV.
I wish! I remember reading about a Clash press event and they were asked what selling out meant to them and they, reasonably, replied “you’ve got a certain number of tickets on sale for a gig and if people buy them all you’re a sell out”. Simple.
Scruples are the first thing we swallow when we are hungry.
