#10 - new york
You can skip to this week’s playlist on Spotify or scroll to the end.
The songs on this week’s playlist all reference New York City or one of its boroughs or neighborhoods in some way, whether it’s in the title or lyrics. Most songs just happen to be set somewhere in the city or make a reference to it, while others are more explicitly about New York. Way too many great songs fit these criteria, but here’s 10 of them.
This newsletter is also the first I send from outside New York.
Leaving my first full-ish year back in NYC prompted some reflection I suppose. I sometimes tell friends that New York is the city of exaggerations, so many people feel entitled to very strong opinions about the city, positive or negative (often to the frustration of its natives). Calling New York “the city that never sleeps” or talking about its traffic in singular ways, for example, can seem absurd when you’re from Cairo. But somehow, despite my skeptical-nuance-loving-graduate-student self, I can’t help but admit that NYC sometimes lends itself to exaggerations. It lends itself to grandiosity and emotion and an often polarizing sense of belonging or alienation.
When I look back at my year in NYC, it feels like everything, everywhere, all at once. The unparalleled beauty and liveliness in the relief of a beautiful sunny day in between colder, gloomier ones, bringing out all sorts of people to Washington Square Park. Having no idea what’s going on, but embracing the joy and chaos that fills the park on your lunch break between classes. A live crowd being just as excited to see their new favorite artist as the artist is to finally get to play Webster Hall or Brooklyn Steel. Skateboarding for hours in whichever street or skatepark or pocket of the city you can, sharing cheers and laughs and falls and ‘ouch’es with whoever’s on a board. Spending the last hours of the night in Ramadan praying, eating, and praying again with the ICNYU community, then taking in the East Village sunrise in the first minutes of the morning.
It was also days replaying these moments, over and over, to remind myself, convince myself, of how fun and vibrant and blissful New York City can be. On days when this backdrop made the contrast to day-to-day mediocrity more jarring.* Record-breakingly late assignments and the struggle to find scattered scraps of motivation left here or there, in an empty Word document or along the East River. Knowing there are universes of possibilities at your doorstep but the impossibility of leaving your bed feeling large enough to fill all of them.
But eventually you do, eventually you get up, and you go to a skate event, or read an interesting paper in the park, or walk through the city with friends, or make it only a little late to the concert, and slowly or all at once, New York, or perhaps just life, is a boundless gift again.
10 songs
(Spotify)
Brooklyn Bridge to Chorus - The Strokes
Brooklyn - Patrick Droney
girl in new york - ROLE MODEL
White Sky - Vampire Weekend
Harlem - Bill Withers
C.R.E.A.M. (Cash Rules Everything Around Me) - Wu-Tang Clan
New York, I Love You but You’re Bringing Me Down - LCD Soundsystem
Snow is Falling in Manhattan - Purple Mountains
Guard Down - Claud
So Far Around the Bend - The National
* I almost made a reference to apartment hunting in New York, but oh that’s a whole other newsletter.