From Broadway to The Bronx: New York City’s History through Song

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:
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 That Helped Define aA 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 Disneyland Theme Parks – Middle-Class Kingdoms (Intellect, 2021), the (co)editor of, among other volumes, Fighting for the Future – Essays on Star Trek: Discovery (Liverpool University Press, 2020), The Routledge Handbook of Star Trek (2022) and Fan Phenomena: Disney (Intellect, 2022). Her research on theme parks, film and television has also been published in several collections and journals, such as the Journal of Popular Culture and Science Fiction Film and Television. Veronika Keller is a research associate at the institute for musicology and music pedagogy at the University of Kobenz, Germany. Her research interests include (classical) music in different media and popular music in the late 20th and early 21st, mainly in the USA, Germany and South Korea as well as its transcontinental exchanges.