{"id":19243,"date":"2019-11-04T09:18:49","date_gmt":"2019-11-04T17:18:49","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.pbs.org\/independentlens\/?post_type=blog&p=19243"},"modified":"2023-09-19T14:21:37","modified_gmt":"2023-09-19T21:21:37","slug":"how-the-burning-of-the-bronx-led-to-the-birth-of-hip-hop","status":"publish","type":"blog","link":"https:\/\/dipsy.pbs.org\/independentlens\/blog\/how-the-burning-of-the-bronx-led-to-the-birth-of-hip-hop\/","title":{"rendered":"How the Burning of the Bronx Led to the Birth of Hip-Hop"},"content":{"rendered":"

Joshua Jelly-Schapiro<\/strong>,\u00a0a geographer and writer who co-edited, with Rebecca Solnit<\/strong>, the remarkable, fascinating book Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas, helped us create a playlist to accompany both\u00a0Decade of Fire<\/strong><\/a> and a key map in his book: “Burning Down and Rising Up: The Bronx in the 1970s.” That map puts a geographic spin on a musical history, how hip-hop music rose from the ashes of the Bronx’s decade of fire.<\/em><\/p>\n

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By Joshua Jelly-Schapiro<\/strong><\/p>\n

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\u201cWe were in a place where we just needed an outlet, where we just needed something to make a day normal.\u201d That\u2019s how Melle Mel<\/strong>\u2014legendary MC, founding member of the Furious Five<\/strong>, lead vocalist on the history-making hip-hop classic “The Message”\u2014describes growing up in the Bronx in the 1970s. New York City was bankrupt. And across broad swaths of the South Bronx, landlords were paying arsonists to torch their buildings for insurance money as the city\u2014advised by the RAND Corporation to close fire stations and let its poorest areas burn\u2014let it happen.<\/p>\n

But if those fires, and the larger urban decline they signaled, defined the ’70s in the Bronx, so, too, were those years marked by the \u201coutlet\u201d that Melle Mel describes. That outlet was hip-hop: a complex of culture comprised of music (rapping, DJ’ing), dance (breaking) and art (graffiti) that remains a vital lingua franca of youth culture, around the globe, four decades later.<\/p>\n

\"Bronx<\/a>

From “Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas”<\/p><\/div>\n

How can it be that this awful era, when a major American city came to resemble the bombed-out burghs of Europe after World War II, also comprised the seedbed for what\u2019s arguably New York\u2019s most potent and lasting contribution to contemporary culture?<\/p>\n

That was the question behind \u201cBurning Down and Rising Up,\u201d one of 26 maps that my collaborator Rebecca Solnit and I, along with a brilliant crew of designers and artists and scribes, created for\u00a0Nonstop Metropolis: A New York City Atlas.\u00a0<\/i>That book, the third in a trilogy of atlases of iconic American cities, was predicated on the idea that all cities contain at least as many ways to be mapped as they do people; that beautiful paper maps may remain an unexcelled technology, even in our digital age, for organizing information and telling stories about place; that such maps possess a unique power to surface hidden histories, and draw connections, that help us see our homes in fresh ways.<\/p>\n

It was in this spirit that we sought, in this map of the Bronx\u2019s darkest decade, to also chart a remarkable flourishing of culture, from the ruins of the fires.<\/p>\n