"Brooklyn Boheme" Makes Me Nostalgic of Days Gone By

When I was watching Nelson's George's "Brooklyn Boheme" this past weekend, it made me nostalgic.

Even though the skylines of Akron, Ohio are from from Brooklyn, the documentary made me nostalgic of my youth.

People like Living Color's Vernon Reid, Spike Lee, Chris Rock, Rosie Perez and the other artists, poets, writers who lived in Fort Green Brooklyn has no idea the influence they had on my generation in Ohio.

Living Color made it cool to rock out like Led Zeppelin, while Spike Lee told me that I can make my own movies as well as be a skinny Michael Jordan loving black dude with big glasses who can seduce the ladies ( "Thank God For Kneecaps").

But even beyond the Brooklyn setting of Fort Green that period of the late 80's was special because pop culture gave African American youth options for success.

While "The Cosby Show" presented an urban nuclear family to great affect, Cosby's spin-off "A Different World" showed my friends and I that college was really cool.

Combine that with Black Entertainment Television's then weekly showcase of HBCU (Black college) football games with their mesmerizing marching bands and college was not just a destination for for me, but people I knew who didn't even think of going until they saw people who looked like us attending college.


However, somewhere after Dr. Dre's released "The Chronic" in the early 90s's, everything went to hell.

Where in the late 80's I could listen to Public Enemy rhyming about Malcolm X and NWA telling me to watch out for the cops with equal comfort, pop culture shifted away from black intelligence and diversity to slangin rocks and sacrificing education to make dat money shawty.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not blaming Dr. Dre for this cultural shift.

I still love "The Chronic" to this day, but post-Chronic, the entertainment industry shrunk the pop culture options of African American youth down to a thimble.

"Brooklyn Boheme" took me back to time where street, education, diversity and the arts were equal bedfellows.

Where you could be middle class like the Fresh Prince or live in the world of crack cocaine like Kool G. Rap and still see the possibilities of life no matter your circumstances.

Here's hoping that Mr. Nelson's "Brooklyn Boheme" will spur another generation to study, create and be just as diverse as we were; In the meantime, I'm grabbing my DVD of School Daze to not only reminisce about days gone by and to plot my future first visit to New York City.