We Thought We’d All Live Forever

Lauryn Hill “Every Ghetto, Every City”

“Every Ghetto, Every City” is a song of proud, unapologetic nostalgia. It’s specifically about Lauryn Hill’s youth in the northern New Jersey of the 1980s, and it gets into enough vivid concrete details to make a very particular experience seem universal. You don’t need to have adolescent memories of beef patties and coco bread, doing the wop, or the fireworks at Martin Stadium to plug into the sentiment of this song, which is as more about our need to build a mythology out of our memories than it is about one woman’s life. You recognize the moments, and you fill in your own references to all the little things that made up your childhood, and served as the foundation for your experience as an adult. We all have our origin stories, so they may as well be iconic, at least in our own mind.

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