His Pioneers

His Pioneers aims to account for cycles of displacement and renewal which frontman Joshua Gachette has seen as a lifelong New Yorker. Under the auspices of “His Pioneers” Gachette sardonically situates Manhattan as the center of the city and the “outer boroughs” as the frontier. The conflicts that results pits native against settler, renter against owner, environment against man…

Country music is a shocking vehicle for this conversation, seeing as to how the cowboy archetype is one of the USA's most withstanding yet misunderstood cultural exports. Many of the original cowboys were formerly enslaved. Cowboys didn’t own land. They were disenfranchised, unlike the “cattlemen" who did. Cowboys were among the backbone of Leftist labor organizing in the West. But that radical, heterogenous history has been erased and corportaized. In effect, the cattle baron has co-opted the cowboy’s mantle. 

Americans in the Old West, birthplace of the cowboy, parried between industrial, agrarian, Mexican, indigenous, Yankee, free and slave modalities. When in the 1970s American cities' experiment with globalism led to criminality, a professional middle caste consisting of newspapermen and realtors used Wild West symbolism to diagnose the goings on. In kind they prescribed: criminals became Indians, police became sheriffs, and gentrifiers were pioneers. Each was dealt with accordingly. His Pioneers carries that leitmotif to twenty-first century NYC amid Big Tech and ecological collapse.