From Broadway to The Bronx

New York City’s History through Song

Veronika Keller, Sabrina Mittermeier

• Publisher: Intellect Books
• Year: 2024
• Print ISBN: 9781789389906
• eBook ISBN: 9781789389913
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

The depiction of New York City in song across a variety of different genres, focusing on jazz genres, as well as the work of both New York born artists like Billy Joel or Lin-Manuel Miranda and artists living most of their life in New York City like Shinehead or Debbie Harry, that are intimately connected with the city.

The book analyzes songs written about New York City, and engage with the depiction of the city within them, but mainly use it as a way to deal with several musical genres that the city has been home to, and instrumental in developing. These include the musical theatre scene on Broadway and beyond, but also early 20th century sheet music, hip hop, disco, punk, dancehall, jazz, swing, rock or pop music. The collection includes essays from authors with a cultural studies, media studies, cultural history or musicology background, making possible a far-ranging treatment of the interconnection of the city space and its musical history.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• 1. New York's Tin Pan Alley in Two and a Half Songs: Immigrants and the New York Music Industry between the 1890s and 1910s
• 2. ‘The Milkman's on His Way’: ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ and the Illusion of New York
• 3. Sweet Charity, Musical Cosmopolitanism and New York City
• 4. Of Promises and Prisons: Ambivalent Visions of the Big Apple in The Last Poets’ ‘On the Subway’ and ‘New York, New York’
• 5. ‘I, Too, Sing New York’: Gil Scott-Heron from ‘New York City’ to ‘New York Is Killing Me’
• 6. ‘An Atmosphere Where Anything Is Allowed’: Patti Smith's Horses and 1970s New York Punk
• 7. No Place Like New York: Diana Ross's ‘Home’ (1978) from The Wiz
• 8. The Vibe, Vocality and Vitality of Billy Joel's ‘New York State Of Mind’
• 9. The Lights Are Out on the Mean Streets: Lou Reed's ‘Dirty Blvd.’ and Inequality in New York City
• 10. Anthrax and Public Enemy ‘Bring the Noise’: The Musical Collaboration That Helped Define a New New York Sound
• 11. Forgotten No Longer: Staten Island, ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ and the Emergence of the Wu-Tang Clan
• 12. Shinehead's ‘Jamaican in New York’: The Circularity of Jamaican and African American Cultural Practice and Reggae's Resonance in Hip Hop from The Bronx to Brooklyn, and Beyond
• 13. ‘A Different Kind of Apple Now’: David Rudder's ‘The Immigrants’ and ‘Forty-One Bullets’
• 14. ‘It Tells the Truth, and Things That Tell the Truth Tend to Last’: Anthony Rapp on Jonathan Larson's RENT
• 15. ‘Life's Ill, Sometimes Life Might Kill’: Cannibal Ox's The Cold Vein
• 16. ‘North of 96th Street’: Latinx Class Mobility and In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes
• 17. ‘Lighters Up’: Lil’ Kim's Ode to Brooklyn: ‘In the Concrete Jungle, the Strong Stand and Rumble’
• 18. Citing the Past as a Political Resource against Donald Trump: Performing Punk and Queer Feminism in Blondie's Music Video Doom or Destiny
• Notes on Contributors
• Index