Early in Jim Jarmusch’s 1999 film Ghost Dog, Forest Whitaker, a hit man, steals a luxury car and, while driving to his assignment, slips a disk into the luminescent lips of a CD player, which comes to life with bright blue lights that rise and fall to Killah Priest’s track “From Then Till Now.” Outside, the crumbling churches, projects, small businesses of a de-industrialized “inna city” stream by while inside the car, Killah Priest raps about the oppressive realities of the ghetto and his longing for the lost, dream-distant African kingdoms of the ancient past. Killah Priest’s movement between the two worlds is intoxicating. Then: “children used to grow on lilies” or “[we studied the] epistles of Paul beneath a waterfall.” Now: “[children] roll up Phillies” or “[we] spray paint initials on the wall.”

Killah Priest’s rap:

Guns, shootouts, and crack sales/Black males who pack jails, trapped in hell/No peace, cold streets, surrounded by police/This whole week, buildings with no heat/No lights, the gas pipes, the snow leaks/Dog fights and lowlife throw dice the whole night/Thieves, creepin’ in the midnight evenings/Saw through the misty regions/Go to your house, take a vial for the demons/Moon in the lunar eclipse/Prophets stand in the midst/of the seven candlesticks/I can't take it. Beauty that was/once sacred is now getting’ facelifts/fake tits, and fake lips/Cold embraces, memory erases…

What makes this particular scene in Ghost Dog so remarkable is that Killah Priest’s nostalgia for the glory days of African civilization is matched with the director’s unspoken, and therefore deeper, nostalgia for the ghetto that's streaming by either side of the stolen Japanese automobile. What Jarmusch, and as a consequence his audience, are longing for are the “bombed-out” neighborhoods, which by the late-90s already seemed in danger of extinction. In the 80s, when presented with the sight of the fallen world of the inna city, one was horrified by the fact that such urban degradation was even possible in the richest economy in the history of humankind. No wonder someone like Killah Priest wanted to leave this place for a world far, far away way in a time long, long ago, governed by benevolent black kings whose fields are bright with golden wheat, whose urns overflow with sweet wine, and whose wise elders congregate and interpret sacred texts by waterfalls. These vaporous Nubian fantasies rose from the pressures of an unremittingly oppressive urban environment: the dangerous streets, blunt and brutal law enforcement, the empty storefronts, high unemployment, the decaying modernist housing structures, the remains of fast food over here and “broken glass everywhere,” the stench in the elevators, the daily drive-by shootings, the nights hunted by the living dead (“base heads”), the rusting frames of long-dead American automobiles.

But by the 90s, particularly the late-90s, with the recolonization or Disneyfication of the urban core, these bombed-out neighborhoods meant something else entirely: they were raw material for greedy developers. What the audience and their director felt and knew was that soon this ghetto spooling by the hit man would be usurped by Starbucks and other expanding symbols of white middle-class consumption. And so, like two suns in the sky of a science fictional planet, this scene in Ghost Dog is illuminated (indeed, dazzled) by a double nostalgia: one that is looking beyond the horrors of the hood to the pleasures of the ancient African past; another looking back from their Disneyfied present to the immaculate ruins—untouched by corporate capital and logos—of the postindustrial city.

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