New York City has a mayor who used to rap. Let that sit for a second. Zohran Mamdani went by Mr. Cardamom back in the day, puts Nas in his top five rappers of all time, and today he dropped a short documentary of the two of them sitting in a park under the Queensboro Bridge talking about where hip hop goes from here.
The sit down is about more than a photo op. Earlier this month the Bronx opened the Bronx School of Hip Hop, a public high school with an inaugural freshman class of about a hundred kids learning regular subjects through the culture. MCing teaches English and communication. DJing teaches math and technology. Graffiti covers design and literacy. Breakdancing handles science and health. The fifth element, knowledge of self, is about critical thinking.
Nas put it plain. “Hip-hop unveils the truth. Hip-hop tells you exactly what your city looks like, sounds like, feels like,” he said. “It was an outcry from people who demanded things to change and to tell the world what we were going through.” He talked about growing up around people with real potential and nothing showing them a different way, and what a school like this could have meant.
The founding principal, Jason Reyes, said the quiet part out loud. “It validates that our culture is great and that our culture means something,” he said. “Who would ever thought that hip-hop would make it this far?”
Mamdani closed the film with the line everybody is quoting. “We can’t be content with having been the birthplace of hip-hop. We want it to still be the home,” he said. He also made the case that artists have to be able to afford living in the city if the culture is going to keep living there.
The documentary also stops by the school itself, with Melle Mel and Fat Joe in the mix. Fifty three years after DJ Kool Herc’s back to school party in the Bronx started all of this, the city is teaching it in classrooms. The full film is up top.