About the Exhibit
While The Bronx is universally recognized as an epicenter for hip hop, salsa, doo-wop, jazz, reggaeton, and many other popular music genres, our borough is ignored in popular narratives about hard rock, heavy metal, and punk rock. Through photos, flyers, fanzines, newspaper clippings, memorabilia, and band merchandise as well as oral histories, sound recordings, and archival videos, Uptown Rumble: Heavy Music in The Bronx invites you to engage with The Bronx’s unsung but critical role in the creation, evolution, performance, and enjoyment of heavy music.
With its mass of items from neighborhoods around The Bronx, the exhibit challenges common stereotypes about who listens to, plays, and has shaped these genres—not only alienated suburban white kids but African Americans, Dominicans, Puerto Ricans, Jews, Italians, Mexicans, Irish, and other urban youth and adults from working-class backgrounds, and arguably in more organic and innovative ways.
Growing up in a sonic atmosphere filled with the syncopated rhythms of hip hop, funk, soul, salsa, merengue, bachata, and other dance-driven genres, Bronx musicians incorporated an innate sense of groove into the most distorted of rock genres. The Bronx has tended to produce heavy music you can “shake your ass and bang your head” to, as 24-7 Spyz guitarist Jimi Hazel puts it.
Bronx bands and musicians also pioneered multilingual and women-led heavy music. From their start in the ’90s, Bronx hardcore band Billy Club Sandwich made it a point to write lyrics in Spanish and English, something very few heavy bands were doing at the time. Also, whether with early punk rock (sisters Tish and Snooky), heavy metal (vocalist Maryann Scandiffio of Blacklace), hardcore (the Cano sisters), or death metal (Aiyisha Centeno), Bronx women have been fronting heavy music acts for decades.
Bronx hardcore punk band Crazy Eddie performing with Bronxite Drew Stone of The High and the Mighty, Antidote, and Incendiary Device at Bridge and Tunnel Brewery for the book release party of Freddy Alva’s Urban Styles, May 12, 2019. Courtesy of Michelle Mennona.
Still, because venues showcasing this kind of music in The Bronx have typically been short-lived, when they have existed at all, our borough’s heavy musicians have often worked in relative isolation, with varying degrees of inclusion in the wider New York scene. This lack of infrastructure, while a challenge for a borough-specific heavy music scene, also generates a clear uniqueness and individuality of sound among Bronx bands and musicians.
“Bronx heavy” ranges from iconic and rhythm-forward hard rock, heavy metal, and punk to highly innovative interpretations of these genres that, to use the example of godfathers of Bronx hardcore District 9, marry jazz guitar chords and hip-hop vocal delivery with metal-infused hardcore punk.
From the fuzzy psychedelic rock of the ’60s, to the explosion of punk rock in the ’70s followed by its street-tough New York hardcore offspring, to the early rumblings of thrash and death metal in the ’80s, the Boogie Down has thrown down with heavy music’s best.
The Bronx histories spotlighted in this exhibit are ongoing, and we invite you to share your own adventures in heavy music with us. Even better: create new ones, tapping into the rich legacies of hard rock, heavy metal, and punk that our most musical borough continues to foster.