when a mayor has the mic.
New York just elected a rapper as mayor. Maybe it’s worth asking what that means for our playlists.
Music is political. That’s always been the case. But at the risk of my geriatric millennialness showing, it feels like the local music community is suffering something not unlike what’s happened to the city’s press corps: a steady decline in coverage of New York City politics.
Just a few years ago, A Tribe Called Quest asked the late David Dinkins to “please be my mayor.”
Le Tigre called Rudy Giuliani “a fucking jerk.”
LCD Soundsystem sighed about our “mild billionaire mayor” Michael Bloomberg.
These songs weren’t just about New York; they were of New York. But then things, as they inevitably do, change. Part of it was probably the internet — once Spotify and SoundCloud separated sound from place, geography likely mattered less.
The last truly cohesive “New York scene” I can think of is the post-9/11-Meet-Me-in-the-Bathroom era — the Lower East Side bands that captured the attention of my 18-year-old imagination. Underage, I wanted to hang out at Brownies and Mars Bar and Lit Lounge while The Strokes’ “New York City Cops” might play in the background.
But the thing that flattened the 1,628 miles between me and Avenue A also flattened the need for distinctiveness. The decentralization of music made space for anyone from anywhere, but it also weakened the impulse toward localness. In New York, the city’s creative pulse became less of a scene and more of a feed. Like politics, it all started to feel more national, if not global.
A rapper-turned-mayor could change that. Maybe we’ll see an upswing in songs that capture the political and cultural moment New Yorkers are living through — shouting, or better yet, calling out the person calling the shots from City Hall.
Maybe we should aspire for more; a lot of things rhyme with “comptroller.” Admittedly, fewer with “public advocate.”
If all politics is local, there’s no better time for music to sound local again. A new mayor with a mic might not create a new music scene. But Mr. Cardamom might inspire folks to.
Playlist: Mmayoral Mmentions
Bonus song: ICYMI, Joe Jackson’s “20-0-3,” a protest song against Bloomberg’s indoor smoking ban.
