Nagin vs. Clinton in: Sublette’s Chocolate City

From the arti­cle:

But, music lover that I am, I under­stood imme­di­ate­ly that in evok­ing a choco­late city, the may­or was cit­ing George Clin­ton, the should-be Amer­i­can poet lau­re­ate. Like­wise, much of Nag­in’s audi­ence that day would have under­stood his appo­site ref­er­ence to the pro­to-rap title cut of Par­lia­men­t’s 1975 album Choco­late City. George Clin­ton did­n’t orig­i­nate the phrase “choco­late city”–it was a nick­name for Wash­ing­ton, DC–but he made it nation­al cur­ren­cy, expand­ing the term to include all black-major­i­ty cities in the years after white flight.

As I draw near­er to draft­ing a dis­ser­ta­tion pro­pos­al, it’s pieces like this that flesh out the epi­gram­mat­ic aspects of Big Ideas with cul­tur­al touch­stones that put in per­spec­tive the times as they’re lived, rather than just remembered.

[Lis­ten: Ned Sub­lette on Behind the News, with Doug Hen­wood]