[0:14]Grace Pay at, one of the great New York writers, has a story written early 70s South Bronx. And one of the characters who's like a community organizer there, says the buildings are burning down on one side of the street and the kids are trying to put something together on the other. And this could be a parable of one of the great achievements of that period from a lot of the neighborhoods that were most devastated in New York. The earliest form in which most people who weren't part of that neighborhood saw it were the graffiti that appeared on the subways in the 70s. And this was on a very rickety, decaying generation of grey trains. They painted enormously exuberant, colored names and reliefs and mottos. And you can see many films now, a grey day, a grey neighborhood, an L train and suddenly the L train is like a rainbow. And it's thrilling. The next incarnation was rap. The earliest form that people saw would be they would be one kid rapping with small speakers and a drum track in the subway. You know with a hat open for money.
[1:33]And you know these are parables of a city that's being ruined, that's being destroyed, and that's saying we can rise again. We come from ruins but we are not ruined. And I mean, in 15 years, it's become the basic form of world music. So it's a thrill but it's important to understand that it came from totally burnt out, ruined districts and that's where it was born and it was born out of this suffering and misery. And that a lot of the creativity that New York has always had has come from the sellers, from the ruins, from how the other half lives. So an important part of sharing space and living city life is being able to live through the ways in which the city itself is torn down and is consumed and is destroyed, but also consumes itself. You know, if you can do that, you can become more human and more alive than you've been before.
