That reality flies in the face of popular hip-hop-head logic, which suggests that New York City “fell off” as comeuppance for years of downplaying southern rap and only returned to glory as artists here embraced sounds from further down shore, and while it’s not an entirely untruecorrelation, the truer story is that 20 years of pressure from two Republican mayors with lofty dreams of stamping out crime, coupled withuneven policies that hit communities of color hard throughout the ’90s and 2000s, had a demonstrable financial effect on the culture. It’s a problem we’re still dealing with.The city didn’t fall; it was pushed.