April 24, 2008
Marshall Berman on New York in the 1970s
Last autumn, Dissent magazine published an edited version of Marshall Berman's introduction to New York Calling: From Blackout to Bloomberg, an anthology he edited with Brian Berger. Here's an excerpt:
There will be more to say about rap as time goes by. I only want to say one thing now. “The Message” (1982), the first international rap hit, by Grandmaster Flash and the Furious Five, has a provocative quatrain that’s in tune with my overall theme. People often miss this quatrain, which seems to drop from the sky: They pushed a girl in front of a train, / Took her to the doctor, sewed her arm on again. / Stabbed a man right through the heart, / Gave him a transplant and a brand new start.
Hegel says that “spirit is a power only by looking the negative in the face and living with it.” “Living with it is the magical power that converts the negative into being.” Well, that’s the message. In New York in the 1970s, this meant that social disintegration and existential desperation could be sources of life and creative renewal. A whole generation of kids from America’s worst neighborhoods broke out of poverty, violence, and ghetto isolation, and became sophisticated New Yorkers with horizons as wide as the world. As the Clash in “London Calling” in 1979 affirmed that “London is drowning, I live by the river,” these kids from the Bronx could tell the world not only that “We come from ruins, but we are not ruined,” but that “We shall overcome.” Their voices became the voice of New York Calling. Their capacity for soul-making in the midst of horror gave the whole city a brand new aura.
New York feels like a very different place today.
The introduction is informal, personal in tone. The book contains over two hundred photographs and essays by Berman, Berger, Edmund Berrigan, Anthony Haden-Guest, Jim Knipfel, Margaret Morton, Tom Robbins, Luc Sante, Robert Sietsema, Brandon Stosuy, John Yau, and others.