TV on the Radio’s Guide to Pre-Gentrification Williamsburg
In which the era-defining Brooklyn band learns you really can go home again—it just might be an Apple Store now.
It’s Saturday evening in late October, and TV on the Radio are getting sprayed with a pungent blend of coconut and jojoba oils. “I just want you to try this,” says the shopkeeper at Soap Cherie, a bath and body store on Bedford Avenue in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, a half-block away from a Whole Foods, an Equinox, and branches of at least two major banks. Tunde Adebimpe, Kyp Malone, and Jaleel Bunton dutifully extend their palms toward the bespectacled man, who glows with a gregarious, RuPaul-like energy. They silently rub the oil into their hands and take a whiff. “You can use it in your hair, my friend,” the salesman suggests to Malone, who proceeds to work the concoction into his glorious Rip Van Winkle beard.
This pitch happens on the sidewalk in front of the store, where TVOTR are peering through the window with a mix of nostalgia and horror. With the band playing their first shows in five years this month, and with a 20th anniversary reissue of their debut album, Desperate Youth, Blood Thirsty Babes, out next week, they’re graciously guiding me on a tour of their old haunts. Or, more accurately, a tour of the locations where their old haunts used to be.
