Walking at Night in a Cold World
Last week, I walked south from my apartment to Elmhurst Park, a small sliver of land that backs up to the Long Island Expressway. Between Corona Park to the east, Astoria Park to the west, and said Expressway to the south, this northwest chunk of Queens has a severe lack of public greenspace, unless you count cemeteries (some five million bodies are buried in Queens, which is double the borough's living population).
It was around 25 degrees and there was snow on the ground. I wasn't trying to hang out in the park. This is just what I've been doing lately when nothing else feels good: pick an unexplored, interesting-looking part of the map and walk there. I walk a lot in general—with my dog, to and from work, to catch shows and meet up with friends in Brooklyn and sometimes even Manhattan—but there's something special about a completely pointless walk on an unfamiliar route.
I do my most intent listening while walking. The combination of movement, visual stimuli, and light endorphins focuses me and enhances my receptors. I've never reviewed an album without spending at least an hour or two walking around with it.
On the day in question, I was listening to underground rap classic The Cold Vein, the 2001 debut of NYC duo Cannibal Ox. I've heard it many times before, and years ago, I may have even tapped it for a similarly curated walk around a frigid New York (I forget). Today it's chosen mostly by process of word-association—like how I did "Snow (Hey Oh)" at karaoke a few nights prior—but it's also a classically gritty Rotten Apple album, and that felt like the vibe on January 23rd 2025. Opener "Iron Galaxy" bridges these worlds by kicking off with a Big Chill sample ("It's a cold world out there. Sometimes I think I'm getting a little frosty myself") and then launching into urban commentary: "New York is evil at its core, so those who have more than them, prepare to be victims."
Vast Aire and Vordul Mega are monikers fit for mecha suits, and they rap about Norse mythology and Portishead, but like most of their sci-fi enthusiast peers in turn-of-the-millennium underground rap circles, the fantastical elements are there to emphasize—not erase—real-world concerns. I wrote a lot about this a few years ago in a 20th anniversary essay on Fantastic Damage, the 2002 solo debut by El-P, who also produced the entirety of The Cold Vein. These guys are all so inextricably of their city, and they do love their city, but especially in this era, their music is more often focused on exposing its harsh realities. As Vordul raps on "A B-Boy's Alpha," "Rudy Giuli don't give a fuck about a mouli" (nothing more New York than Italian-American racist slang).
Conventional wisdom states that you can't call yourself a New Yorker until you've lived here for 10 years, and I like that. This city needs a healthy bit of gatekeeping. In May, I'll have lived here a cumulative eight years, and the identity is finally starting to set in, which lends credence to the whole 10-year thing. Yesterday, I directed a loud "fuck you" at a car that nearly took out my kneecaps in a walk sign-illuminated crosswalk. I didn't quite yell it—traces of my passive-aggressive Northwesterner are still holding on—but maybe I will in January 2027.
Queens is a fascinating collection of a million little pockets, each one different from the next. My usual walking routes are second-nature now, but if I go so much as one block off course, it's like I'm in another country. In 2019, an Axios study calculated that two Queens residents chosen at random have a 76.4% chance of being from different ethnic backgrounds, compared to a national average of 57.3%. The last place I lived before coming here was, as of 2022, the whitest big city in America.
I'm not trying to exoticize the melting pot here, nor am I saying that I miss nothing about Portland (go re-read the first paragraph if you think I don't long for proximity to nature), but I do think it's worthwhile to acknowledge the most unique aspects of your surroundings. Otherwise, we might as well live in gray disconnected boxes and only interface with others via the internet.
While walking past the mostly Chinese businesses on Grand Avenue in Elmhurst (but also a 50-year-old pizzeria I've been wanting to try), The Cold Vein was making me feel like I was in Peter and the Wolf, or any of those vintage cartoons where individual jazz instruments are personified by, like, cars and weather and trash can lids. El-P's haphazard collage of samples and synths sound like winter in the city.
"Straight off the D.I.C." has angular train horns cutting through dully howling gales of wind; those sour stabs on "Vein" are what sound in your brain when melting snow drips down the back of your neck; the sickeningly bright "F-Word" is sun glinting off of a curbside snowbank. He pulls these angular noises from everywhere—the standard '70s R&B and jazz boom-bap backbones, ambient eggheads Brian Eno and Philip Glass, even the 1986 Transformers OST. Over it all, Vast and Vordul pontificate like "Rap gargoyles stoned at night on top of buildings."
A few days later, I walk home from work. It's just as dark as it was on my 5:30PM walk to Elmhurst, but this time, it's more like 12:30AM. As I was closing down the bar, The Blue Nile's "Downtown Lights" came on the house playlist. I had one of those brilliant, I know what I'm listening to on my way home, moments that I love.
1989's Hats might be the best "nighttime in the city" album ever made. The Blue Nile specialized in what was regrettably dubbed "sophisti-pop": literate, crooner-y, synth-heavy, stately stuff. Roxy Music's Avalon is the urtext of this shit. The band's 1984 debut, A Walk Across the Rooftops, is also quite good, but with its Seinfeld bass hiccups and jerky rhythms, it's less of a mood piece than Hats.
As I'm crossing Northern Boulevard, a train bound for the Bronx rattles overheard, right in time with the music:
Working night and day, I try to get ahead
But I don't get ahead this way
Working night and day, the railroad and the fence
Watch the train go roll around the bend
There are several moments on this album that cause tears to well up in my eyes. It's been a rough month, and The Blue Nile's desolate passion is making it all hit me now. In particular, the desperate "Let's Go Out Tonight" devastates me. It's a plea for one last escape in the face of something ending—probably a relationship, but in this moment, I'm choosing a broader reading. "Baby, let's go out tonight," singer Paul Buchanan pleads, "Where the lights all shine like I knew they would." Seeking a familiar bar where happier times were once had, where a bit of that spark might be recaptured against encroaching darkness. "I know a place where everything's alright," he promises, sounding pitifully unconvincing.
It's good for me, this emotional bloodletting. Out in the night, cold gripping my face, gauzy keyboard atmospherics in my ears, I feel it all, as I might not were I sitting on my couch looking at a screen or two. I remind myself that bundling up, putting on headphones, and going outside, though it may often seem arduous, usually jogs me out of complacency, monotony, despair, or whatever's ailing me at the moment.
As I get in the elevator up to my apartment, Hats closer "Saturday Night" starts. It's Tuesday, a much less interesting day of the week, but it hits all the same. A glimmer of dawn at the end of a long, painful night, it's the unexpectedly hopeful coda at the end of the album. "Who do you love?/When it's cold and it's starlight?/When the streets are so big and wide," sings Buchanan, not desperately seeking an answer so much as setting up a payoff.
I think about how lucky I am to be returning to a warm home that has leftovers in the fridge and a comfortable bed. I get to hang out with my cat and dog. My favorite person in the world is up there.
I love an ordinary girl
She'll make the world alright
She'll love me and I know
Love is Saturday night
