The Sound of New York

There were, of course, several cool things about Cs—meeting old friends and making new ones, seeing some cool panels, actually feeling surprised that people came to ours—but the following was actually the coolest…

My friend Corey and I escaped the conference for a little on Friday afternoon and went down to a village bookshop, where I found Jeff Chang’s *Can’t Stop, Won’t Stop: A History of the Hip-Hop Generation*. As we left, I was flipping through the book and Corey tells me that the book was written by the cousin of a friend of ours. How cool?! But that’s not actually what I was getting at.

I flew out on Saturday afternoon. And after I met up with the woman who let us rent her unused east village apartment, I had some time before I had to meet my fellow cab-ride-splitters. So I walked to the park and started reading. The first section of the book is about Moses’ famed urban planning, specifically the construction of the Cross-Bronx Expressway (straight through several Bronx neighborhoods) and the way it re-divided those neighborhoods, killed local businesses, and, perhaps most importantly, posed the question: now that the Bronx has been re-divided and economically sucker-punched, what do we do with the people whose neighborhoods and businesses have been displaced? Well, apparently we build filing cabinets (surrounded by a block of park) to stack 170,000 apartments (per building!) on top of each other. Part of Chang’s project looks at how these re-divisions created slums in the south Bronx, how that led to gang culture, and how gang culture begins to find a voice in hip-hop. I’m really flattening his argument here, but immediately after reading this section of his book, I had the opportunity to actually fly directly over the Bronx on our way out of New York and get the bird’s eye view of the places he was talking about. Of course, it really makes you wonder what New York would look like if Moses’ urban planning had been a collaboration with the neighborhoods he sliced up. But I couldn't help thinking about what it would *sound* like.