Living for the City (Official Trailer): Premieres May 13th!
4/29/20261 min
Before Detroit gave the world Motown, techno, and hip-hop, it gave the world something harder to name: a feeling that music made in basements and backrooms and borrowed spaces could become the soundtrack to an entire generation's life. That is the story Living for the City is here to tell, and nobody alive is better equipped to tell it than Hanif Abdurraqib. MacArthur Fellow. New York Times bestselling author. The most gifted writer working at the intersection of music, memory, and American identity today. Hanif brings his singular voice to a new video podcast series that goes inside the streets, venues, and neighborhoods where iconic sounds are born, talking with the artists, DJs, producers, and community architects who built these movements from the ground up. Season One is Detroit. Eight episodes. The full arc of how one city became the unlikely origin point for some of the most influential music ever made, told by the people who were actually there, and the writer who understands better than anyone what it meant. This is not a music history lesson. This is a front-row seat to the moments that mattered. Living for the City premieres May 13th, with new episodes dropping weekly. Subscribe now on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Transcript
12 sentencesHanif Abdurraqib· Host0:00
[upbeat music] Everyone knows what Detroit gave the world: Motown, techno, the sound that became hip hop. But the people who made it, the DJs, the producers, the ones who stayed when everyone else left, their stories never got told, until now. I'm Hanif Abdurraqib, host of the upcoming podcast, Living For The City. I am an essayist, a poet, and a cultural critic, and what I know more than anything is that music comes from somewhere. I came to Detroit to understand something, how one city keeps changing the sound of everything, and why so much of the future seems to start here.
Speaker 1· Soundbite0:41
In Detroit, music is the currency here.
Speaker 2· Soundbite0:44
We were trying to outdo each other for the sake of it.
Speaker 3· Soundbite0:47
That was like a religion, going to the Music Institute.
Hanif Abdurraqib· Host0:50
Detroit keeps making sounds that change the world. This is the story of the people who made them and the city that made them possible.
Speaker 4· Soundbite0:58
I'm living in the world. Living for the city.