Sometime in the 1980s, New York City slice pizza began sucking. It was an open secret that the mob was forcing everyone to buy their supplies - gluey, tasteless cheese and sweet, pasty sauce. Or else.
A very few bastions enjoyed exemptions for various reasons. Others bought the crap ingredients and threw them away so they could use proper fixings (explaining the puzzlingly high prices in, ahem, certain beloved pizzerias). There sprung up a profusion of "brick oven" places ("no slices!") desperate to work around the monopoly.
No one, to my knowledge, has ever mentioned this in print since a couple brave souls mumbled a few things in the early 1980s (and no one's ever made that last connection, ever). In fact, there was a time when I'd have taken a substantial risk in writing this. You can scour the Internet, and mum's pretty much the word. Which leaves me seeming like a raving paranoid loony.
Because, at this point, the company, which still dominates NYC slice pizza supplies, is considered terrific by foodies who know none of this history. Their crap ingredients are widely considered the good stuff. The serious providers from the 1970s, of course, are all long gone and forgotten.
I feel gaslit. So many of us watched, forlorn, as quality sharply dropped, but, decades later, all is well, and foodies far and wide crow about how FANTASTIC New York City slice pizza is.
When Wynton Marsalis first came to prominence in the early 1980s, nearly the entire jazz community despised his playing. Despite his connection to a father (Ellis Marsalis) with impeccable jazz credentials, Wynton played like, well, a conservatory-trained white dude. Slick and superficial. No soul. No swing. Remarkable virtuosic chops (technique), for sure, but jazz is about feel, not the showing off of instrumental skills. I remember when Wynton began to pretend to miss notes - intentionally - in order to sound less slick. Yikes. He fooled audiences, but certainly not musicians.
Wynton went on to attain a position of such pivotal power that few musicians and writers would bad-talk him. You can find rather strident anti- commentary from the 1980s (and this fabulous on-the-money analysis by Keith Jarrett), but criticism went suddenly silent around 1996 when Wynton assumed leadership of Lincoln Center Jazz. In fact, I sound weirdly cranky saying any of this. What sort of jazz lover dislikes Wynton Marsalis?
Wynton never got any better. But, at this point, most people both inside and outside the music view him as the consummate jazz musician. Irreproachable. The real deal.
If you don't like New York City slice pizza, you don't like pizza. And if you don't like Wynton Marsalis, you don't like jazz. It's "category" stuff, and there's logic there. When your baseline is nonexistent, the relevence of your opinion is zero.
I'm the one out of synch! I like so few NYC slices, and so little jazz, that I'm barely an edge case in either realm...despite loving both as fervently as any human alive.
Why does every cultivated and refined film critic occasionally single out a mass market movie or two to champion? Because if you hate them all, that means you hate movies, and no one will hire a film critic who hates everything but a weak stream of foreign and indie productions hardly anyone knows about.
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