In any place,

at a given time,

you find a rhythm.

The year, 2010. The channel, HBO. The show, How to Make It in America. What a title for a series based in New York City. Playing into the famous phrase, if you can make it there, you'll make it anywhere. 

I watched every episode of How To Make It in America because it was about obstacles, opportunities, and opposition. It was about hustle, homies, and hard work. It was about clothes, cool, and creation. 

If How To Make It in America was based in a different city, maybe the show wouldn't  captivate me the way it does, but I always loved how New York, of anywhere in America, embodied survival. A place where you could not be weak, you could not be timid, and you could not be slow, because it was for the strong, the confident, the fast. 

Watching the main characters, Ben Epstein and Cam Calderon, figure their lives out was like watching the life of two artists build a bridge between their ideas and reality. They went through the motions and had to find the self-belief to push through every time the world pushed back. 

Although far from a perfect representation of “making it,” How To Make It in America encouraged unconventional thinkers with creative impulses and innovative ideas that other options were out there. I like to think it spoke to the same part of the millennial consciousness as Kanye’s College Dropout. 

Kanye wasn’t the best rapper when he made College Dropout, How To Make It in America wasn’t the best show on HBO, but they both left an impression because they were inspiring at a time when artists needed inspiration. They spoke the dreamer’s language and lived the dreamer’s life. 

New York Summer, the latest Rap Portrait documentary, is about New York as seen by a quiet observer curious about the first real summer since the pandemic started. What you see is what they saw, viewing the way time passes in places where the ticking of the clocks wasn’t louder than feet stomping, hands clapping, and drums breaking. 

The sight of New York won’t be the New York of a native, no, this is the eyes of a newcomer learning about the active scenes, arriving where history was made, and seeing who may make history next. The score doesn’t sound like New York, but the sound of music that’s muted, meditative, and mystic. It’s like a beat tape for your eyes, scored by vacay. 

It’s also a reminder for how summer was, what happened, and the reflection that comes now that it’s over. Leaving us with moving images of a season in full swing. View it the way you would going back through your camera roll, remembering where you were and who you were with. The dancing you did, the ecstasy you felt, the escape that was realized. 

New York Summer is quieter than previous Rap Portraits. A silent film of sights. Although it takes me back to watching How To Make It In America, New York Summer also reminds me of something David Bowie wrote in an open letter about his time living as a New Yorker. 

“In London, the saying goes, life takes place behind doors. Here it’s on the street.”

-Yoh