Every summer has a theme tune, and for me this year it's Jay-Z's epic paean to New York, Empire State of Mind. From the cars inching their way through the rush-hour traffic to the stereos of teenagers playing football on the local estates, it's thumping crackle bursts out from tiny speakers as if it's bigger than anything they were built for: I even heard it on the beach in Majorca.
The song – a gliding tour of the places he grew up in as if seen from the back of a stretch limo – is sent soaring upwards by Alicia Keys's chorus. "These streets will make you feel brand new / The lights will inspire you / Let's hear it for New York, New York, New York." In trying to nail the essence of a city that defines itself by ceaseless change and reinvention, Empire State of Mind becomes a hymn to modernity itself. Perhaps that's why so many non-New Yorkers are keen to claim it as their own. Newport State of Mind, a jokey take-off that pays tribute to the south Wales city, attracted millions of viewers on YouTube until EMI's copyright lawyers had the song removed.
This summer has seen the reissue of another love letter to New York. Marshall Berman's 1982 book, All That Is Solid Melts Into Air is an exhilarating history of the idea of modernism reflected in the writings of novelists and intellectuals who have been influenced by it. Like Jay-Z's song, however, Berman's book is also a deeply personal ode to his native city. He takes us on a tour of his favourite New Yorkers, the places they came from and the streets they hung out on; he shows us the Bronx where he grew up before it was bulldozed to make space for a motorway. To be fully modern, says Berman, is to be at home in this perpetual disintegration and renewal that brings everyone and everything together even as it throws them into disarray.
Berman's story ends at a time when the engine of modernity was breaking down and giving way to austerity. Now, in this new era of fiscal austerity, the reins of power have passed to a government of charming, well-mannered New Tories who seem to relish the language of retrenchment: of fixed limits on public spending projects, of caps on immigration. In all their talk of not getting ahead of ourselves, it often sounds as if they'd like us to know our place.
If there's one thing that distinguishes modernity, however, it's not its vitality or its diversity but its refusal to know its place. "I'm the new Sinatra," says Jay-Z, "and since I can make it here / I can make it anywhere / Yeah they love me everywhere." Jay-Z's career has neatly tracked the progress of the genre from gangsta rap to respectability: Empire State of Mind tells the story of his progress from Brooklyn housing estates to fashionable New York neighbourhoods like Tribeca. What unites Jay-Z and Berman is their lack of nostalgia, their insistence on movement and mobility. It hurts Berman to say it, but even if the Bronx had been left untouched by development, he wouldn't have stayed. "For the Bronx of my youth was possessed, inspired, by the great modern dream of mobility. To live well meant to move up socially, and this in turn meant to move out physically; to live one's life close to home was not to be alive at all."
It's a little scary for some, but this modernist vision is the most generous and democratic one that we have. What this rapper and this Marxist seem to share is a conviction that cities and societies that stop moving forward, that don't open themselves to perpetual flux and that are not constantly on the move, are as good as dead.
