![]() State of Mind” are important because they plug in to a side of a city tourist guides can’t show you. Nas starts the song by saying “I don’t even know how to start this” before laying down one of the greatest verses ever, capturing the unnerving uncertainty we all share as we go about life in the city. ![]() ![]() The drums are sparse and big like towering skyscrapers in Manhattan, a Joe Chambers piano loop creeps throughout the song like trains do New York, and a metallic bleep in the background drifts in and out of the song like a glitch in the matrix. State of Mind” (1994) is perhaps the most obvious example of a Hip-Hop record capturing the aura of a city on wax. And that underclass, it turns out, has had incredibly important stuff to say for almost fifty years now. At its core, it makes makeshift news anchors out of an otherwise-forgotten underclass. Like no other culture before it, it gives voice to the voiceless and power to the powerless. Caught somewhere between streets of rubble and Hard Times, Hip-Hop burst out of pavement crevices like a broken fire hydrant, giving voice to a generation of inner-city survivors across the world. The art form – now the global art norm – was born from crumbling concrete and Baby Huey records in the early 70s Bronx, a place where things were falling apart, not coming together. Hip-Hop and The City have always been intrinsically linked.
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