goes without saying
patron never had to tempt me
hatchback cottage grove
lowered motion like sentry
augmented custom venting
welded over intake
you thought you could restructure
cultural engraving unnoticed
like midjourney inpaint
vandal squad eta
they think we on a ride along
same way big bro used to copy keys
subway slugs and hi-vis garments
connector tunnels under platform
rewrite your name backward
german vinyl tip showcase
will revise your moniker on transit placard
now how's that for interactive
way before substrate variable statements
retraced your montessori stalwart gathering
handwritten signs for the enamoring
sincerity for the pandering
if you don't know the wheel well
that's awkward handling
signifier for the scribing
like what's in a name
she said they try to line him
but he was out of trace
alabaster commandants
piloted the building like we weren't wheeling
is like reclaiming bin laden buildings
but your origin was in wheeling
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Hatchbacks, Camouflage, and The Dutchmaster's Gospel
The memories slip in again, unannounced, weaving through Hyde Park and Grand Crossing, the streets familiar, the routes muscle memory. A hatchback, chassis lowered, kissing the pavement as it rolls past storefronts and viaducts, past the remnants of old murals, old wars, old messages left in spray paint and marker ink.
The city has always been a place where people learn to fit into spaces, where they learn to maneuver, to blend.
But now?
Now he sees rappers using "in-painting" the way Midjourney does—artificially extending themselves, contorting their style, stretching to fill a space they were never meant for.
The method isn't new, just the tools.
Back then, it was about camouflage.
Portraying yourself as an unassuming kid, a regular degular youth, just another face in the city— so you could ride along with CTA transit workers, blend in with the mechanics, and slip into the back offices where the Vandal Squad kept their wanted lists.
Pre-internet. Pre-social media. Before faces were tagged in databases and metadata betrayed every move.
Back then, if you wanted to know who was getting hunted, you had to get the intel yourself.
And if there was a disagreement?
You settled it in graffiti.
No Instagram diss posts, no Twitter subtweets—you took it to the walls, the tunnels, the steel of the train cars.
The city spoke in layers, in throwies and fill-ins and cross-outs.
The scent of the Red Line/Blue Line connector tunnel still lingers in his mind, a mix of rubber and damp metal, of human sweat and spilled beer, the ghost of something chemical in the air.
That's when The Dutchmaster appears.
A rapper, a businessman, a voice from Chicago's PASTELLE RECORDS.
The Dutchmaster moves with calculated precision. He speaks in blueprints, in logistics, in reality rap—not the glorified fiction of street tales, but the real work that comes with making music, with sustaining a movement, with keeping a studio running while everything around you is designed to make you fail.
He talks about solidarity—how undervaluing yourself is how they get you.
About how women won't deter him from his day or from "caking".
About how the most important people in Chicago—the ones running the city, the ones signing the deals, the ones making decisions that ripple through the neighborhoods—don't always wear designer, don't always sit in VIP sections, don't always flaunt their power.
Sometimes they're just standing next to you.
Sometimes you don't even realize who they are until they're on the couch like Tom Cruise was, doing the Yung Joc dance.
And in a city where the unseen holds more weight than the obvious, where history is written in the margins and not the headlines,
That knowledge is everything.