Mel of The Outfit TX (our pick for Best Music Act in this year’s “Best of Big D” issue) gave a new interview to Vice to talk about his rap group’s latest album, their previous effort (called Down by the Trinity), and his hometown (Dallas).
Last year he described our city’s music scene to Vice thusly: “Dallas has always existed as Texas’s Bay Area: a diverse, cultured, ratchet festival of Badus, Boosies, and Bilals.”
So you won’t be surprised to read the — ahem — colorful language he employs to describe the familiar-to-us notion that Dallas in many ways remains a segregated city. Pardon the bleeping. This is a family blog, and I’d hate to offend your tender sensibilities:
“You’ve got people alive and well in Texas who completely hate each other. The Klan is still around. The city is still segregated, even Dallas. If you visit and kick it up north it’ll look like something out of the f***ing Jetsons. The buildings glow in the dark and change colors. It’s progressive as s**t, all kind of development, big houses. It’s beautiful. That’s where everything is. But when you go below I-30 and you get to Southern Dallas, it looks like 1998 in some areas. Where I grew up it’s still some of the same construction cones in some of the same parts of the street that were there in ’96.
“Dallas is the tale of two cities, completely. The way they have kept certain people away from the development and how they’ve grown just one part of the city—it’s a perverse disparity. You’re not going to find a Chipotle in Southern Dallas, just for example. So living that every day, that started to become a factor we explored in Down By the Trinity. I feel it might’ve been still ahead of its time a little bit, especially with everything that’s been happened recently.”
(H/T Bradford Pearson)
