New Living for the City Podcast Series Goes Back to Where the Music Started
Every music revolution has a zip code.
Before a sound travels the world, it starts somewhere specific.
A basement. A record shop. A neighborhood club. A block people return to night after night until something new begins to take shape.
Living for the City is a new video podcast series hosted by Hanif Abdurraqib, the MacArthur Fellow and New York Times bestselling author whose work explores the relationship between music and place. Each season traces how global music movements grow out of the neighborhoods, venues, and communities that shaped them. Season one begins in Detroit.
Explore the story behind the sound.
Inside the movements
It is easy to talk about genres as if they appeared fully formed. In reality, every movement starts locally before it becomes global.
Detroit makes that clear. Motown reshaped popular music worldwide. Techno transformed electronic culture across continents. Hip hop evolved alongside the city’s industrial rhythms and creative communities. Each sound traveled far beyond the streets where it began, but those streets still matter.
Living for the City returns to those origins and the people who made them possible.
“I am someone who has a deep investment in not just sounds, but the roots of the sounds, the hands and hearts that went into making the sounds, the places that help shape and define the sounds. I am thankful for a project that lets me explore these stories and these people.”
Hanif Abdurraqib, host of Living for the City
Few cities have influenced as many generations of music as deeply as Detroit. Its legacy stretches from Berry Gordy’s Motown assembly line to the underground spaces that helped define techno’s future.
But the series is not only about history. It is about continuity. The conversations in Living for the City connect past innovators with the artists and voices shaping Detroit today.
The result feels less like a timeline and more like a living map of how music moves through a city and out into the world.
The first chapter of something bigger
Detroit is only the beginning.
Future seasons will travel to other cities where local movements reshaped global sound, continuing the series’ central idea that every revolution starts somewhere.
The first episode of Living for the City premieres May 13, kicking off an eight-episode season released weekly on YouTube, Spotify and Apple Music. Subscribe on Youtube to follow along as the series moves through the neighborhoods, voices, and stories behind the sounds that changed music
