I recently finished a small project on how we create meaning in a place. I chose to analyze cognitive maps drawn by friends who all experience roughly the same area on a daily basis. These maps were incredibly effective at detailing how we perceive the spaces around us.

That experience was fresh on my mind when my iPod chose one of my favorite songs, “Respiration” by Black Star and Common. In it, Mos Def, Talib Kweli, and Common detail experiences in New York and Chicago, and through their lyrics paint a picture of what these cities mean to them. For example, this is taken from the first verse by Mos Def:

The indisputable, we New York the narcotic
Strength in metal and fiber optics
Where mercenaries is paid to trade hot stock tips
For profits, thirsty criminals take pockets
Hard knuckles on the second hands of working class watches
Skyscrapers is colossus, the cost of living
Is preposterous, stay alive, you play or die, no options

Through these lyrics we can see how someone from Bedford-Stuyvesant in Brooklyn constructs the city of New York. It’s metal and wire, its larger-than-life, and most of all it moves fast, where working-class people have to struggle to keep pace.

Nas and 2pac in “Thugz Mansion” also describe the place they know:

To fly like doves over the streets watchin' many things
Kids walkin' home from school on drug block missionaries
Pass out papers that read: Love God
See faces, cases, judges, juries, masons, lawyers and cops

Lyrics like these, as well as those from “Respiration” give us vivid descriptions of place, and how those places are given meaning. Also, much in the way a cognitive map only includes those landmarks that have particular meaning to the cartographer, these songs represent only those experiences and places that have particular meaning to the artist.

Through their lyrics they create a place and assign it meaning. These examples (and many, many more) show (I think very clearly) the intersection of hip-hop and the discipline of human geography.

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Which of your favorite songs, not necessarily hip-hop, assign meaning to a place?