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April 21, 2021
Thomas Dyja's Playlist for His Book "New York, New York, New York: Four Decades of Success, Excess, and Transformation"
In the Book Notes series, authors create and discuss a music playlist that relates in some way to their recently published book.
Previous contributors include Jesmyn Ward, Lauren Groff, Bret Easton Ellis, Celeste Ng, T.C. Boyle, Dana Spiotta, Amy Bloom, Aimee Bender, Roxane Gay, and many others.
Thomas Dyja's New York, New York, New York is an engaging and illuminating account of New York City's past forty years.
The New York Times wrote of the book:
"[A] tour de force, a work of astonishing breadth and depth that encompasses seminal changes in New York’s government and economy, along with deep dives into hip-hop, the AIDS crisis, the visual arts, housing, architecture and finance..... [Dyja has] in this outstanding work, done all that a historian can do to light the way forward, by so vividly illuminating the past."
In his words, here is Thomas Dyja's Book Notes music playlist for his book New York, New York, New York:
NYCx3 is as much about the evolution of culture in the city as it is about policy and economics, so over my eight years of work on it, music was always playing somewhere, as it has my forty plus years of living here. I’m tempted to offer some kind of all-encompassing list of music in NYC through that entire span, but there’d be so much that it would be meaningless and from my days of making mix tapes, there’s nothing so annoying as that one song that’s there because of an idea, not the groove. So some of the things you won’t find here—love them as I do—are Afrika Bambaata, Kurtis Blow, Bobby Short, the Talking Heads, Jay Z and Alicia Keys and Empire State of Mind, Sonic Youth, Phillip Glass, or "Rhapsody in Blue" exploding with the fireworks in the opening montage of Woody Allen’s Manhattan which you can’t watch now anyway. Though I enjoy a Broadway musical now and then, this isn’t the place for Cats or Hamilton. What’s here skews early, but it was all cooking together in New York then. These are the sounds and moments that made me a New Yorker.
Voices of East Harlem/New York Lightning
This was recorded in 1970, long before the book starts, but it’s maybe my favorite song on the list, a secular gospel number sung by a group of kids between 12-20 who’d go on to sing on the cast album of Free To Be You And Me. This is New York in a bottle; every July evening when the hydrant’s empty but it’s still hot and the night’s out there waiting. It’s edgy and proud and strong and the chorus blast makes me want to sing out the window. I have a fantasy that someday the Knicks will use this for their entrance music….
Willie Colon and Ruben Blades/Plastico
Salsa is a New York creation, and the Fania label, built by Johnny Pacheco and Jerry Masucci and based here, was the home of Salsa, a mash-up of various Latin American styles all connected by their African roots. In 1980, I moved to the Upper West Side, which had a large Puerto Rican population then, pushed up from the blocks leveled for Lincoln Center, the locations for West Side Story, and salsa was everywhere—the bodegas, the bars, the playground on Amsterdam where breakdancing got its second wind. The quick beats, the horns, the strings, and the voices of people like Hector Lavoe, Celia Cruz and here, Ruben Blades asserted the Latin American presence in another neighborhood about to turn over on top of them, and especially so in this song from Siembra, released in 1978 and one of the high water marks of salsa. Plastico begins with forty seconds of goopy Saturday Night Fever-style disco that suddenly sharpens into a sophisticated dance of layered rhythms, Colon’s brass and Blades’s prescient lyrics warning about a “plastic city” destroying Latin identity in New York.
Television/Marquee Moon
Tom Verlaine and Richard Hell’s band was a fixture at CBGB, at the tail end of New York punk, or maybe just on the other side of it. If “punk” just conjures for you the Ramones and safety pins and Brits in mohawks goobering on the crowd, then this is a taste of its sharp, cerebral side that later influenced bands like The Strokes. In my head, this is what Downtown sounded like when it was very late, very dark and very empty, and you went out searching for whatever it was you needed….
Rammellzee—Beat Bop
So why out of the entire history of early Hip Hop in New York have I chosen this oddity? Because it touches a weird, brilliant place that much of early Hip Hop doesn’t, surpassing even Afrika Bambaata’s "Planet Rock" as it plays with all the possibilities on offer when you can make music electronically by layering beats with samples of other songs and sounds. Because Rammellzee basically blows open the final concert scene of Charlie Ahearn’s movie Wild Style, the Rosetta Stone of Hip Hop, as the legendary graffiti artist Lee Quinones climbs up the bandshell of the East River Park Amphitheater. Because it’s also featured in the other great film about graffiti art, Style Wars. Because Fab Five Freddy directed it and Jean-Michel Basquiat produced it and did the cover art. And mostly because it’s just sneaky, snaky, trippy fun.
Loleatta Holloway/The Greatest Performance of My Life
Paradise Garage was a dance club on King Street that became a kind of temple for gay men like Keith Haring, who spent entire weekends there, and especially men of color. DJ Larry Levan reigned over it all, with mixes that often featured high diva numbers like this fabulous, swirling, over the top tribute to keeping up appearances in the face of pain. No matter how many times New York kicks you in the teeth, you have to keep dancing.
The Amoco Renegades/Pan in A Minor
Steel drum bands came to NY in the '50s and the West Indian Labor Day Parade became a showcase for them, and for Trinidadian cultural and political power in Brooklyn. Unfortunately most recordings of steel pan music just don’t capture the experience of the bands rolling, rollicking down Eastern Boulevard, two story structures swaying and bouncing as they’re pulled along. It’s not pina colada music; it’s for dancing—for hours and hours—as the pans bubble together into wild crescendos. The Amoco Renegades aren’t a Brooklyn outfit, but they’re one of the oldest steel drum bands around and this is a classic pan number. If you don’t move something while you listen, you’re actually dead.
King Sunny Ade/Ja Funmi
The greatest concert I ever went to was February 1983, when King Sunny Ade made his American debut at the Savoy. Nigerian Juju music is a dense fabric of percussion that just keeps rolling and rolling as the guitars skip over it for as long as the palm wine lasts; King Sunny was famous for playing weddings in Nigeria that went on through the night and into the next day. Well, the lights didn’t go down at the Savoy until midnight. A spotlight hit a single talking drum on the stage; after a minute or so, another two or three joined in. Then another wave of larger drums. Rhythms were added drum by drum, then guitars, dancers. And then after maybe ten minutes BAM! Out came King Sunny Ade, truly resplendent in his coat of every color and the whole place just went up for grabs. There’d been Hugh Masekela and Manu Dibango before, among other great African musicians, but at this moment of cultural realization, King Sunny Ade’s arrival was part of an embrace of global music that would bring African and Brazilian sounds into our daily lives.
Madonna/Holiday
For much of the city, that summer was all "Uptown Girl" and "Karma Chameleon." In the East Village, though, Madonna embodied everything that was going on: She was sexy, messy, young and multicultural, dancing with People of Color, not just in front of them. Listening to this now isn’t much of a revelation and considering what else was going on in the South Bronx and the boroughs, it might even feel like thin pop soup, but hearing it throws me right back to that summer before crack and AIDS and Warhol and money blew it all away….
Lou Reed/Halloween Parade
Every song on New York could be on this list; as a whole it’s a snapshot of the city in the late '80s, pissed off, dangerous, reeling from the coke and money and spray paint fumes that preceded the Wall Street crash on Black Monday. Most of the songs are angry, especially "There is No Time," which for about a day and a half was the working title of NYCx3 until cooler heads prevailed; still, it’s a reminder that we’ve been on the brink before. "Halloween Parade" on the other hand is small and sweet and sad, a song to someone lost, probably to AIDS, as Reed describes that year’s Greenwich Village Halloween Parade. This song reminds me of the empty, end of the world feeling of watching friends, colleagues, lovers, slipping away and taking so much of what could have been our future with them.
Astor Piazzolla—Milonga del Angel
Tango is the music of Argentina, but it draws from the same Afro-Atlantic well as much of the rest of this list. Piazzolla, who turned tango into high art as nuevo tango, lived for a while when he was a boy in Greenwich Village and in fact learned to play the bandoneon there. In the mid-'80s, a Broadway show called Tango Argentino brought a motley collection of tango dancers (and I can say that because that motleyness, the slicked back hair and worn heels of dignity in the face of bad times, is what gives tango its integrity). Just out of college, I worked at the talent agency representing them and I loved their silk scarves, their hard-earned wrinkles and kindness. For its run they lived in New York as the toast of the town and then returned just as suddenly to San Telmo and La Boca. So back to Piazzolla. In 1987, tango still in the air, he gave a concert in Central Park that produced maybe the single best distillation of nuevo tango— moody sophistication, wilting sensuality, the air of something gone.
Public Enemy/Fight the Power
New York was crackling in the summer of 1989, a truly long, hot summer with a mayoral election going on between Dinkins and Guiliani and racial tensions boiling over. It was tense. The Koch years had produced a remarkable spate of police violence and hate crimes along with the escalating crime rate, and now in the middle of all this Spike Lee dropped his masterpiece Do the Right Thing, with this song for the opening credits. With Flava Flav smirking away, Chuck D. delivered his truth and even said shit about Elvis and the whole package scared the hell out of White New Yorkers. There have been lots controversial songs, but this one dropped like a literal bomb.
Nas/The World Is Yours
I’m not going to tell you anything you don’t know about Nas and Illmatic, but it has to be here and I chose the cut that’s always struck me as the one with the most light and hope because that’s what we need right now—optimism built on hard truth.
Bonus Technical Cut
Glenn Gould/Bach’s Keyboard Concerto #1
Books can have their own stories, and part of this one is that its first draft was more than twice the size of what the book ended up being. But what was I supposed to cut from something that was trying to embrace pretty much everything that happened in New York over some 35 years? With the help of my brilliant editor Eamon Dolan, I began to whack away at it, but then in passing I heard this. I love classical music but I fess that Bach had never done anything for me until this point; it felt so heady and unemotional. But listen to this with headphones and it becomes the world. Or better yet drive with it on loud—there’s a reason they use it in car commercials. NYCx3 owes everything to these 9 or so minutes, which stood as a model of something stripped down and entirely about forward propulsion. It’s loud, it’s soft, it’s fast, it’s slow, but it’s always going forward, always being beautiful, always making your heart beat in unexpected ways. New York City was already a hundred years old when Bach wrote this, and he certainly never visited, but this feels to me like its score, down to the back beat.
Thomas Dyja is the author of the award-winning The Third Coast: When Chicago Built the American Dream, as well as three novels. He lives on the Upper West Side of Manhattan.
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