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 Content
Introduction
Veronika Keller and Sabrina Mittermeier
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
Veronika Keller
2. ‘The Milkman’s on His Way’: ‘Lullaby of Broadway’ and the Illusion of New York
Chris Flinterman
3. Sweet Charity, Musical Cosmopolitanism, and New York City
Nick Braae
4. Of Promises and Prisons: Ambivalent Visions of the Big Apple in The Last Poets’ ‘On the Subway’ and ‘New York, New York’
Martin Butler and Marek Jeziński
5. ‘I, Too, Sing New York’: Gil Scott-Heron from ‘New York City’ to ‘New York is Is Killing Me’
Justin Patch
6. ‘An Atmosphere Where Anything Is Allowed’: Patti Smith’s Horses and 1970s New York Punk
Ryan Donovan Purcell
7. No Place Like New York: Diana Ross’s ‘Home’ (1978) from The Wiz
Jaap Kooijman
8. The Vibe, Vocality and Vitality of Billy Joel’s ‘New York State Of Mind’
Diane Hughes
9. The Lights Are Out on the Mean Streets: Lou Reed’s ‘Dirty Blvd.’ and Inequality in New York City
Stephen Petrus
10. Anthrax and Public Enemy ‘Bring the Noise’: The Musical Collaboration Tthat Helped Define a A New New York Sound
Ben Quail
11. Forgotten No Longer: Staten Island, ‘C.R.E.A.M.’ and the Emergence of the Wu-Tang Clan
Brianna Quade
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
James Barber
13. ‘A Different Kind of Apple Now’: David Rudder’s ‘The Immigrants’ and ‘Forty- One Bullets’
Alison Mc Letchie
14. ‘It Tells the Truth, and Things That Tell the Truth Tend to Last’: Anthony Rapp on Jonathan Larson’s RENT
Sabrina Mittermeier and Anthony Rapp
15. ‘Life’s Ill, Sometimes Life Might Kill’: Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein
Alex de Lacey
16. ‘North of 96th Street’: Latinx Class Mobility and In the Heights by Lin-Manuel Miranda and Quiara Alegría Hudes
Elena Machado Sáez
17. ‘Lighters Up’: Lil’ Kim’s Ode to Brooklyn: ‘In the Concrete 181 Jungle, the Strong Stand and Rumble’
Emma Horrex
18. Citing the Past as a Political Resource against Donald Trump: Performing Punk and Queer Feminism in Blondie’s Music Video Doom or Destiny
Lene Annette Karpp
Notes on Contributors
Index
About the author
Sabrina Mittermeier is a postdoctoral researcher and lecturer in British and North American history at the University of Kassel, Germany. She is the author of A Cultural History of the Disneyland Theme Parks: Middle-Class Kingdoms (Intellect and University of Chicago Press, 2021), the (co-)editor of Fighting for the Future: Essays on Star Trek: Discovery (Liverpool University Press, 2020), The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek (Routledge, 2022) and Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect, 2023). Her research on theme parks, fan tourism, film and television has also been published in several volumes and journals, such as The Journal of Popular Culture, Queer Studies in Media & Popular Culture and Science Fiction Film and Television. She is currently working on a second book on Unmade Queer Television and plans on hosting a podcast on the television series Ted Lasso in 2022.Contact: Universität Kassel, Fachbereich 05 Gesellschaftswissenschaften, Nora-Platiel-Str. 1, 34109 Kassel, Germany.
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