Last week, catastrophic storms battered Southern California, the strong winds dragging heavy rain and snow over the city of Los Angeles. The fires of last year, that ravaged the homes of the rich and influential, cooled. The smoke lingered and formed storm clouds. The mythical city was pounded by the elements, so much so that an uprooted tree was thrown onto the San Diego Freeway.

The same open road OJ Simpson careered down in a white Bronco 32 years ago, as live pictures from newscasts flooded TV screens all over the world.

And in 1991, almost 35 years ago today, there were floods of people chasing out onto the street to set light to a city they understood was adversarial to them, after Rodney King was filmed being beaten half to death by the LAPD.

An eternal land refracted onto screens and into the global consciousness, at war with itself, so chaotic and far from the natural world that the elements themselves are striving to destroy it.

As James Ferraro once put it: “A psychic battlefield”.

“Skid Row started as a collection of poems, it came first as words, then grew into becoming the lyrics of Skid Row… I was writing about the state of the world around me, living on what feels like the brink of societal collapse while also seeing high excess everywhere. All the sounds of the streets crept in, the blood and tears on the street, the echoing sirens in the early morning fog, soaked into the poetry and it became evident that LA is a hyper America.” - James Ferraro

“Although city leaders periodically essay schemes for removing indigents en masse… such ‘final solutions’ have been blocked by council members fearful of the displacement of the homeless into their districts. Instead the city, self-consciously adopting the idiom of urban cold war, promotes the ‘containment’ (official term) of the homeless in Skid Row along Fifth Street east of the Broadway, systematically transforming the neighbourhood into an outdoor poorhouse.” – Mike Davis

“You live in a dumpster?” – Bart Simpson

Los Angeles, 500 square miles in the golden state of California condensed into a triptych of plastic palm tree orchards and syringe-bathed sidewalks, crowned with a bullet-riddled HOLLYWOOD sign, which when folded in reveals a poster of William Friedkin’s 1995 thriller To Live and Die in LA. A zone that balances between the fault lines of its own mythology and fate. A dizzying mural where stars are born through self-mutilation, and snuffed out by an overdose.

Yet there’s something so familiar and even human in this rather extreme over-saturation of tragedy, success, and the Faustian spirit. Ferraro has always had this incredible ability to weave conceptual opposites into a singular confrontation that sinks us into the present state of affairs, and on Skid Row he dresses up this marriage of two conflicts in the context of the history and hype of LA. Disposable identities, racial segregation, drug abuse, crime, poverty, and interpassivity are all collaged into a set of 13 alternative R&B tracks that archive the city’s inner experience in the twilight through Ferraro’s eyes.

The real Skid Row’s story begins in the 20th century as a refuge for the alcoholic and financially disenfranchised victims of the Great Depression, as well as a community of railroad and agricultural workers that formed around the tracks that passed through the area. It was designed over time through a series of local policies (the 1970s Blue Book Plan, among them) into an active containment zone by concentrating vagrants into the region and preventing their dispersion into the wealthier districts of the city. Occupied today by broken veterans, schmeckers, and undocumented immigrants, it is kept afloat by shelters and rehabilitated hotels now scattered across over 50 blocks, holding one of the most concentrated homeless populations in the entire country.

Barrel-shaped benches, randomised sprinkler systems, bright unpleasant lighting at the periphery, and the demolition of its public toilets are a product of the city’s intention to brutalise and contain its “undesirable” population through cruel infrastructure (and in recent years, gentrification), with the area’s sea of zombie tents and shopping carts standing in stark contrast to the city’s projected global image of the promised land (courtesy of Hollywood’s allure and the endless ocean of vlogging content romanticising its affluence). Social media has unveiled it as a deformed hybrid of two fronts; a place glanced in the background of hypebeast diaries and livestreams, or viral videos of the impoverished slowly passing beneath an effigy of venture capital.

“America is not so much a nightmare as a non-dream. The American non-dream is precisely a move to wipe the dream out of existence. The dream is a spontaneous happening and therefore dangerous to a control system set up by the non-dreamers.”  – William Burroughs

Ferraro’s diagnosis displays the city’s deformed limbs, found trailing alongside its tall buildings and celebrity neighbourhoods, not to depress (in spite of the horrors and evils that continue define the dark side of its legacy), but rather to sober the listener into a removed state of observance and reflection (a numbness to the place ironically felt by many of the locals). Los Angeles’ glamour and blight are symptoms of an affliction, and it is Skid Row’sturbulent past and present that are placed onto glass slides for the listener to ponder upon and piece together for themselves.

Gated housing / Desert highway / Track housing / Gardener / Sprinkler system / Drought…

“Los Angeles gives one the feeling of the future more strongly than any city I know of. A bad future, too, like something out of Fritz Lang’s feeble imagination.” – Henry Miller

The opening track Burning Prius (for the World) is a heightened reflection on the absurdity of the city’s warped power structures, pop surrealism, and ends with a grim foreboding of the themes of racial violence to come, expressed in momentous events like the Rodney King incident, and in the enduring marginalisation of the city’s homeless population and drug-affected Black youth. The opening text-to-speech descriptions of a surveillance-heavy gated society, mixed in with sirens and overlapping news clips (largely sampled from segments around the time of the LA riots) sets up a loungeful paranoia that defines the personality of the tracks that follow. The image of a Prius devoured in flames exploits the vehicle’s image of “clean” progress as a metaphor for the city’s malfunctioning buoyancy in the century of rising sea levels and escalating social insanity, a rousing prologue, drenched in Ferraro’s mellow captioning of the events inhabiting the haze of blue LED lighting that bejewels LA.

money and law / a freak scene / freedom of speech (********)

Ferraro holds our hands throughout the experience like a shamanic guide, pointing at artefacts lying bare on the highways, hiding in the highrise buildings, and hovering in the very atmosphere above Sunset Boulevard, as he takes us down the 405 into White Bronco, a reference to the infamous OJ Simpson chase. Calamity and blockbuster television all taking place outside on the streets, and buzzing through the air waves, the repetition of “Live TV” and sampling of news reports and police radios on this song (and elsewhere on the album) are used to great effect with their intercession into the blunt descriptions of brutality, glamour, and control, reinforcing the breakdown of the spectacle and the event. A place and time where a double homicide is overlooked for a glimpse of Ron Perlman as a mythical man-lion in the filming of an updated Beauty and the Beast episode nearby. Why view the naked savagery of the street in HEAT (1995) when daylight executions occur a block away?

LA the city that raised me / ain’t a damn soul gonna phase me

From the polyethene Eden of the track Pollution, our day-tripping gaze then turns towards the inhabitants of the city on Street Freaks, a kaleidoscopic view into the many characters that populate the pavements and alleyways, from single mothers, prostitutes, and businessmen, to abandoned war veterans and insomniac junkies. The observations of this urban heteroglossia are complemented by some neat guitars and a saxophone. Portrayals of destitution, hedonism, and gore paired with cold yet beautiful instrumentation impresses a vision of a bedazzled inflatable castle regurgitating its light-walleted patrons into a lake of boiling chrome.

The media engages with these traumatised characters on our behalf, with the infinite cop car coverage and broadcast of news creating a sensation of engagement, while structurally preventing it. We are moved, therefore, we need not act, and it is from here that Ferraro’s high-fidelity elegies for the city morph into a medium for a deeper reflection into the dispassion of its residents towards the third world status of some of the city’s pocket regions.

“The most basic aspiration of the boer state is the dissociation of politics from economic relations, so that … the black African population can be suspended in a condition of simultaneous political distance and economic proximity vis-a-vis the white metropolis.” – Nick Land

In the artist’s interview/documentary, Welcome to Candyland, Ferraro stops by the infamous #879 residence where Nicole Brown and Ronald Goldman were murdered, labelling the place as one of the key spots in the history of virtual reality. This sentiment of an effective character that delineates the living experience in LA in particular carries momentum in the context of its 24/7 bombardment of news coverage, and it being home to the American film industry, is something that provides a certain immediacy to one of Adorno’s insights into the role of media in breaking down the distinction between the real and the unreal. The hyperreality of television that so closely emulates our day-to-day experiences and conceptions of what the system is opens the door to convincingly creating a narrative of the present that is incompatible with the actual, and the more insistent and firm it is, the greater the misrecognition impairs our ability to perceive, reason, and empathise on any meaningful level. It is this vision of the virtual that Ferraro utilises to enunciate what he observes in the market of identity (both personal and collective) in the city, and it is this weight that looms over the album like an anvil held by kite strings.

“Paramount reality [studio], this is where nightmares are created” – James Ferraro

Yuppy believers sleeping in the sewers / big suit dreamers packing the cleaners

The portable radio scanner we’ve carried along zeroes in on the sludge-rock of Thrash and Escalate, with LA’s mushrooming contradictions reaching a fever pitch, a ripping apart and sublimation of the city’s tectonic plates heard in the slashing reversed cymbals and chrome viscera, and Ferraro framing the multitude of urban personas birthed by economic spatial policing. Those at the oasis of this desert are the pre-eminent figures of power in the area, from celebrities, cult messianic figures (wink-wink L. Ron Hubbard), and arcane institutions. Its vision of heaven is one filled with a smog of anaesthetic chemicals and engrams, with the remaining pepper noise tracing out a faint crucifix, one which a squinting Ferraro keeps centre stage in the floodlights of LA’s decadence.

“You’re not real. If you were, you’d have some status among the nations of the world. So we’re both myths. I do not come to you as reality. I come to you as the myth because that’s what Black people are, myths.” – Sun Ra

With all the sentimental burnout raining down while in the middle of a convenience store during a supply run, the submerged mixing and hazed vocals of the title track are where the album’s depressed swagger is knocked a little by bloody wheezes and coughs. After emptying out the Slurpee machine, Ferraro passes over liminal skyscrapers as emotive strings and glitches irradiate his state of suspended living. Romanticised sulphur clouds shroud an anthropomorphised LA – the object of phantom regret (and yearning) – that are both hit by cooling ethereal notes that see us to the end.

Southern California / Walking in the rain / Only just the homeless walking in LA

Upon setting the GPS to the ascension cemetery, fatigue finally sets in on Rhinestones with the preceding concrete safari having drained our psychic battery. The sparkly keys and icy synths are a canvas, while wax poetic fingers point to the drug use here as both indulgence and as an internal mechanism to cope with the breakneck shifts of the city. Bodies are turned into sites of commodification and investment, inoculated with stimulants just to keep pace with LA, and to dampen out the very real but nearly inaudible hurt of those it speeds past. The name of the track itself sheds light on the cheap glamour of life in the city, value mimicry whose modest asking price is our humanity.

“Los Angeles is surrounded by these imaginary stations [Disneyland, Marine World, Enchanted Village] that feed reality, the energy of the real to a city whose mystery is precisely that of no longer being anything but a network of incessant, unreal circulation-a city of incredible proportions but without space, without dimension.” – Jean Baudrillard

Angel tears sparkling under city lights / took a limo to Skid Row for that no good Hollywood

The numb buzz of narcotics drives us towards the nearest doorway, and away from burning cars and helicopter cams, into the infectiously groovy interior of Doctor Hollywood, with the song’s opening refrains serving as a sort of repetitive prayer for self-immolation and rebirth into a botox vessel. No cheekbone is spared in the consumerist self-mythologising of one’s destiny in this city. Doctor Hollywood’s Midas touch gives everyone a golden ratio of features, a chance to wear the face of another as the song drifts towards a confession of one slowly losing their mind when confronted with the elite stardom L.A’s cosmetic hominids promise to those who book an appointment with the best plastic surgeons in Beverly Hills.

On the instrumental bridge that is 1992, we’re greeted with a beautiful composition of piano and strings interlaced with Rodney King’s televised plea to stop the rioting that saw the city burn for nearly a week. This appeal for coexistence and understanding however is soon approached by a uniformed spectre in the following track.

Psycho cop in LA / media violence up in his brain / Has a pistol and a blank check / And he taking out stress on your neck

We are abruptly pulled out of our rented bronco for suspicious driving behaviour on Sentinel Beast, with Ferraro narrating the culture of police brutality from afar and with a tempered caution. In a space of weakly enforced accountability, an abstraction of the LA police functions inside a performative power-tripping state of existence, wearing a silhouette of the city like a badge, and viewing himself as a spaghetti western gun slinger as he enforces his personal sense of order on his own terms. The spectacles the officer consumes (and through his employer’s brutal counterinsurgency tactics, helped produce) defines him entirely, with anxieties and paranoias steering every overreaction, protection superseded by self-righteous venting. Adrenaline and entitlement fuel our officers of the law, and it is their violence and dog squads that paradoxically keep the citadel clean. Paradise isn’t evenly distributed, it is produced through asymmetry, and the impoverishment of Skid Row isn’t accidental juxtaposition; it’s functionally linked, and it persists so that the Pacific Palisades remain immaculate.

Ferraro’s exercise in urban pathology on this album culminates in one of his finest hours of music, functioning like a spiritual sibling album to NYC, Hell 3:00 AM, Skid Row is a cold, ethereal, and grotesque exhibition of LA, played through platinum cold beats and jaded singing that at times borders on spoken word. Drawing upon and performing an eversion of key signifiers in the American way of life (guns, air conditioned gyms, buccal fat removal, and cadillac escalades), Ferraro taps into the delicate yet harsh zeitgeist of a city he feels both a native and a stranger to. A masterclass in allusive social commentary and conceptual sampling, this project is quite possibly the most unceremonious exposition of the American dream.