Context makes for the most singular mural in Chilltown
And why this is just a glimpse
Jersey City has a mural program, but this piece is not a commentary on any of the murals in it. What it is, is a commentary on a mural not on that program’s map. Chilltown Blues doesn’t know its creator (though of course we tried to find out and, regardless, give all due deference to them), but between writing about it in this particular commentary-based way and hiding all but a portion of it, we don’t need to; and some of the unknowns, of it being “off-map,” is part of the point.
A thing the JC’s mural program’s website says of the work under its umbrella is that they (or at least a portion of them, one would surmise) tell Jersey City’s stories.
There’s a lot of murals under that umbrella, but none that ever seemed to tell the kind of story this mural does.
On the exterior wall of a garage on the city’s south side, in the historically redlined section known as the Hill, where Bergen Lafayette gives way to Greenville, a mural features a depiction of a streetscape through a pair of glasses. There’s the world as seen through the glasses, and the world outside of it at the edges, along with the words, “We Woke.” There’s flames around the border of the glasses but also in the lens — as if the messages of some signs — a few of which are seen in the above picture that shows a portion of them: “WORSHIP MONEY,” “CONSUME,” “OBEY,” and “VOTE FOR US — are par for the course of this metaphorical fire.
There’s a car window on the bottom left, and here, we wonder, where a tag is written that features what looks like a stick-man in a design, if it’s by the mural’s creator; or if it was the only blank space someone who wanted to throw up some graffiitti decided to put their tag on. If the latter were the case, then they gave the rest of the mural due defference. That particular tag was not up in a past photo of the mural we’ve seen that may go back further than the onset of the COVID pandemic, nor was some of the other graffiti presently on adjacent shutter gates.
This mural is also a few stone’s throws from one of the city’s newest municipal buildings — the Public Safety Headquarters.
The inspiration for the mural likely comes from the 1988 John Carpenter film, “They Live.” In it, a drifter discovers that a specific kind of sunglasses allows him to see the opressive and/or stupefying subliminal messages in advertising and signs everywhere. With these glasses, a wearer can also see the aliens behind these messages — members of a collective who appear to be some of the most respectable members of society.
This movie’s plot came just at the end of eight years of the U.S. under Reagan, during which various policies and defunding of social programs further accelerated infrastructural and educational decay in places like the very neighborhood this mural is in — historically redlined — further bolstering the neoliberal “free market” system that largely rewards people the more luck they already had and eventually the more they can monopolize it.
In January of 2017, Carpenter tweeted: “THEY LIVE is about yuppies and unrestrained capitalism.” Carpenter did so to dispell ridiculous conspiracy theories about the movie’s plot that fringe groups embraced — ideas able to prosper more when unrestrained capitalism allows people to literally sell conspiracy theories as news (or “info-tainment”) and commodify them as much as anything else.
The “We Woke” mural asks the viewer to see the world through not by the most face-value standards of their given society … but a desconstructing lens.
That’s the essence of what being “woke” is. Maybe it seems destructive when your sense of worth feels so tied to what when deconstructed is not so great anymore, but that’s not the problem of the people who live in metaphorical and — historically, anyway — sometimes literal fire. Without being “woke,” how is anyone in a redlined area supposed to even know anything’s distressed … that the behavior a distressed neighborhood allows counts as consuming and obeying. And “VOTE FOR US”? Well, the further gutting of public education and low expectations for politicians in general made it harder for people to meaningfully respond with “WHY?” (and even for some voters who mean to, depending on where you are, there’s gutting voter registries).
When the status quo doesn’t help people’s quality of life by societal, and not hyper-local standards, that same system is part of the bedrock for more people to be susceptible to some “rogue”’s “counter-cultural” messaging.
Despite the relatively close public safety HQ, there’s weight in the air where this “We Woke” mural is — a lot of weight, depending block by nearby block. It all flickers in and out, out and in. But if a local redlined resident were to take off any rose-tinted glasses and put on the desconstructing ones, maybe they would acutely feel as much as weight as all the litter in the area — the most common being liquor bottles — would weigh collectively. And seeing this mural, knowing of its existence, might at least help that resident know that feeling all that weight is actually clearminded, and that in or away from such a place, they shouldn’t be alone in carrying it.