📑 The Unlikely Survival of the Godfather of Rap | The New Yorker

Annotated New York Is Killing Me by Alec Wilkinson (The New Yorker)

“It’s the death of the vertical,” he went on. “They have taken all this time to stand up straight so that they can say ‘I.’ They’re very proud of that. The way you get to know yourself is by the expressions on other people’s faces, because that’s the only thing that you can see, unless you carry a mirror about. But if you keep saying ‘I’ and they’re saying ‘I,’ you don’t get much out of it. They’re not really into you, or we, or they; they’re into I. That makes conversation slow.  ❧
— Gil Scott-Heron