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So we opened up a New York office. 

Ramon being a native Austinite didn't make us hip enough, so I sold the car and what was left of my soul and hopped a plane for Williamsburg, New York - ground zero for people who wear infuriating outfits for a living. 

Of course, before the trust-fund condos and "vintage" shops sprang up, 1 or 2 or 10 genre-defining hip-hop legends got started not all that far from here. Last night I went to my first rap show as an NY transplant, and it was actually worth the commute.

In 2001, MTV filmed an episode of Cribs that rapidly rose to cult status among hip-hop heads. Viewer expectations--the usual Cribs fare of lavish and disgustingly tacky homes--went utterly unmet. This episode is, for many, "real" hip-hop's response to the unabashed commercialism that characterized the Bad Boy era and became a hip-hop norm. Instead of a crib along the lines of Missy Elliot's nauseating 4,200 square foot apartment in Miami, this episode featured a 2 bedroom, 2 bath home studio in Staten Island, N.Y. The gutta, M.O.P.-esque fringe of hip-hop is forever enshrined in this, the gulliest Cribs episode of all time.

The episode is so ghetto that it almost seems staged. How, after all, could Redman have been asleep in bed when the cameras showed up? The whole house is so unprepared for a cribs episode--it is too perfect not to be fake. Yet Redman explains: "They were supposed to come at a certain time, like noon, and they showed up at 8 in the morning." In the same vein, why does Redman have any house, let alone a shitty one, in Staten Island? Isn't there a house in Brick City, perennially full of bitches and blunts? The answer, unsurprisingly, is that Redman is out there grinding. "So, I do real estate quietly, and that was one of my first projects, which is why it was like that."

- Cass Luskin