Nas and New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani sat down in a park beside the Queensbridge Houses, the projects that raised him, and talked hip hop the way New York talks it: history first, money second, the future always. The conversation is the whole point of the four-minute film the Mayor’s Office released on September 30, and it has already cleared 625,000 views. Mamdani, 34, the city’s first Muslim and South Asian mayor, once recorded rap as Mr. Cardamom. Nas wore a vintage Darryl Strawberry Mets jersey and looked completely at home.
What they actually said is the story. “Hip hop unveils the truth. Hip hop tells you exactly what your city looks like, sounds like, feels like,” Nas says in the film, before calling the culture “an outcry from people who demanded things to change and to tell the world what we were going through. And that came from a city that was going through a whole lot.” The mayor answers in the same key, calling New York “a melting pot of color, of creed, of style, of indifference and difference” where people “figure it out and create from nothing.” Two men, one borough’s invention, five decades apart in age.
The talk keeps circling one question: who gets to own what the culture became? The film cuts from the conversation to the Bronx School of Hip-Hop in the Claremont section, the first of its kind in the country, where a TATS Cru mural and a classic boom box greet students on day one. “Everyone hears about the first party that Kool Herc threw,” one voice says over the rec room where it happened. “It was in this community room on the other side of this gate.” Fifty-three years later, the city put a school behind a different door.
The students get the last word on that. “Today was my first day and I got to see how we are supposed to learn,” one says, describing class through “the elements of hip hop.” Another: the school “shouldn’t just be known as culture but it should also be known as history.” Fat Joe turns up in a cameo. Principal Jason Reyes admits the whole thing feels “surreal,” then lands the line: “Who would have ever thought that hip hop would make it this far?”
The future part of the conversation is really about staying. The film asks straight out how a city keeps the neighborhoods that made the artists livable for the artists who made it. Mamdani took the same answer to Billboard: the city cannot be content with being the birthplace, it has to be the home, and that means artists who create here can afford to live here. “If we allow New York to become such an expensive city that art becomes a luxury good, then we are depriving future generations from the magic of art,” he said. He has already traded public shots with 50 Cent over taxes, and the GOAT debates never leave borough lines anyway. The film closes on the mayor’s own bookend: “We have to forever be hungry. We can’t be content with having been the birthplace of hip hop. We want it to still be the home.” For the record, the 255,000-dollar offers to leave say somebody disagrees. New York says otherwise.
