Attention Journalists: “Brooklyn Is Musical Hotbed” May Not Be That Original Of An Angle

According to a tipster with perhaps a little too much time on his hands, yesterday’s New York Times piece “All Hail Brooklyn: Alt-Rock Thrives In Alt-Borough”–in which the Times-reading populace is informed that there may, in fact, be bands making “dense and challenging” music residing in the borough right now, although thanks to always-rising real estate prices they live in Bed-Stuy instead of Williamsburg these days–had an all-too-similar angle to an MTV News piece two months back that also covered the depthless creativity of the borough. While both pieces do name-check artists like Yeasayer, Dirty Projectors, and Grizzly Bear, and both pieces do in fact continue the slightly nauseating trend of turning the opinion that Brooklyn is a heaving mass of everything that is awesome into journalistic fact, I would like to point out that this particular angle cannot really be one that anyone calls “first” on unless they somehow take a time machine back to 2002. (NB to anyone who might be able to do this: Please bring me along so I can lock in a super-cheap apartment.) Video of the MTV News piece after the jump.

A Queens resident’s postscript: Isn’t Brooklyn’s “alt-anything” status sort of played by now? I mean, anyone who wants to really go against the alt-monoculture grain knows that the place to go isn’t Brooklyn, but Staten Island.

All Hail Brooklyn: Alt-Rock Thrives In Alt-Borough [NYT] [Photo via brooklyn-usa.org]