Bruce Tantum

Like movies and books centered around the Big Apple, the best New York songs are by artists who understand the things that make NYC great and horrifying are one and the same. A great New York song is tapped into the rhythms of the city and well aware of the incredible wealth of human experience happening simultaneously across its expanse. They are songs of triumph and heartache, success and failure, love and loss. They celebrate that iconic skyline, but aren’t afraid to descend to the gutter.  There are thousands of songs about New York, but only a select few are timeless. Here we collect our favorite odes to the Big Apple. You’ll find anthems by New York icons ranging from Lou Reed to Jay-Z. There are broadway showstoppers and dispatches from the birth of hip-hop. You’ll find disco, hardcore, pop, punk, jazz and folk penned by outsiders and lifers alike. And if sticking all those genres and personalities together on one list about the same city seems a bit scattershot, well, you’ve clearly never taken a rush-hour subway across town. Written by Sophie Harris, Adam Feldman, Steve Smith, Hank Shteamer, Marley Lynch, Andy Kryza, Sharon Steel and Jesse Serwer Listen to these songs on Amazon Music RECOMMENDED:🏙 The best songs about London, LA and Chicago🎶 The best ’80s songs🎉 The best party songs ever made🎸 The best classic rock songs🕺 The best pop songs of all time

House music has been around for three decades now, and over the course of that time, we’d conservatively estimate that there have been approximately 100,000 professional DJs specializing in the genre. Let’s say that one percent of those jocks qualify as really good; that still leaves us with a thousand four-to-the-floor champs. How on earth can you narrow that down to a 10-best house music DJs list? To ease the process, we’ve given ourselves a few guidelines. First, and most obviously, our winners have to spin predominantly from the house genre. Sure, DJ Harvey, Danny Krivit, François K, Mr. Ties and Prosumer are among the world’s best dance music spinners, but their wide-ranging tastes take them out of the running. Similarly, a pioneer like Bruce Forest is certainly a top-tier talent and was an early adopter of the house sound, but as a DJ, he’s probably known more for his pre-house prowess as his post-house chops. Also, our choices need to have stood the test of time, which is why our 10 faves are all clubland lifers: Ask us again in a decade, and you might find the likes of the Black Madonna, Motor City Drum Ensemble, Kim Ann Foxman and other NYC nightlife regulars on this list. Finally—and most importantly—these DJs need to have that something special, that ineffable quality that turns a good DJ into a great one. They’re able to transport us—to make us laugh, make us cry, and make us fall in love with house all over again. Honorable mentions include David Morales, Justin

Whether you want to ring in New Year's Eve with some trippy Black Sabbath edits, rave through Christmas in New York with a stack of hard-hitting techno or just stash away hours of worthy music for a rainy day, look no further than our list of the best DJ mixes of 2017. You'll find house music compilations, extended funk workouts, pulsating techno songs and more, selected by our expert mix-diggers. RECOMMENDED: Full guide to the best of 2017

We asked three music and nightlife editors, each with varying musical tastes, to tackle our list of the best DJ mixes of 2016. What results is a collection which includes plenty of dance music fit for the best clubs in NYC, as well as a couple podcasts that fall neither strictly under house music nor techno songs. From Detroit electro veteran DJ Stingray to young Bristol-based DJ, producer and label boss Batu, here are our favorite DJ mixes of the year. RECOMMENDED: See the best of 2016

It’s safe to say that without Frankie Knuckles—who unexpectedly passed away on Monday afternoon from complications from type 2 diabetes—clubland would be a very different place than it is today. For one thing, house music very likely wouldn’t be called house music, since most accounts of the term’s birth credit Knuckles’s seminal deejaying stint at Chicago Warehouse from the late '70s through early ’80s, when he would play beat-box-enhanced edits of disco and postdisco cuts deep into the night. But the beloved figure was actually a New Yorker. Born in the Bronx, he (along with buddy Larry Levan, later to become the DJ at Paradise Garage) was a regular at the Loft and the Gallery in modern-day nightlife’s formative early-’70s era. He cut his deejaying teeth at the Continental Baths, and later returned to Gotham as a resident of the East Village club the World in the late ’80s, alongside his Def Mix Productions partner David Morales. He also recorded some of the genres most-loved tunes, including the beautiful “Your Love,” the luscious “Tears” (produced with Satoshi Tomiie) and one of the most ubiquitous house cuts ever committed to vinyl, “The Whistle Song.” Knuckles was more than a hugely influential artist, however; he was also one of the nicest, most gracious guys in the business, and he positively glowed with love for the music and for the scene. Far from being a relic from dance music’s history, he was still an active participant in that scene. Despite his sometimes fragi

Walk down a dark block in an industrial stretch of Ridgewood, Queens, enter an unmarked warehouse building, walk up a few stairs, and open a door to a room swirling with rhythm. Sounds like the start of your typical underground dance party, right? Not even close. For one thing, the song that’s playing is “Juicy Fruit,” an 11-minute Coleman Hawkins jazz classic from 1957 that features one of the creamiest trumpet solos (courtesy of Idrees Sulieman) you’ve ever heard. For another, that crowd, for the most part, is horizontal, laying down on an array of blankets and intently concentrating on the music. Cell phones are off, by request, and alcohol, which is BYO, is far from the focus.  You’ve just walked into Planetarium, the latest venture from Eamon Harkin and Justin Carter of Mister Saturday Night/Mister Sunday fame. The event—more of a happening than a party—sprang to life last summer and is now held monthly in a private loft space. “We realized that there was this distinction between the music we play at Mister Saturday Night and the music that we play at home,” says Harkin. “We’re both pretty voracious collectors of records, and we have all this stuff we wouldn’t play at the party—and we were looking for an outlet for that.”  "Back when a Beatles album would come out, you would all gather at a friend's place...I think people miss that" That search led the pair to the idea of a “communal listening” experience. “It’s not really that groundbreaking of an idea,” admits Harkin.

“Even when I was 12 years old, I wanted to be a record producer,” Patrick Adams says, his voice full of enthusiasm even as his career reaches the half-century mark. “I wasn’t actually sure what a record producer did, but I had this burning desire to be one. So I practiced all my instruments—guitar, bass, drums, keyboards—and wrote as many songs as I could. Between the time I was 12 and 17, I probably wrote 200 songs—not that any of them were spectacular, but practice makes perfect!” RECOMMENDED: best acts at the Red Bull Music Academy Festival 2017 In his case, it certainly does: Adams, a songwriter, arranger, producer and musician, is one of the most talented and prolific studio savants of the ’70s and ’80s, possessing a book-length discography that boasts some of the most soul-stirring music committed to vinyl. There’s the creamy R&B of Black Ivory and Inner Life; the disco strut of the Universal Robot Band and Cloud One; the playful funk of Fonda Rae and Phreek, the genre-defining hip-hop of Eric B. & Rakim—Adams’s work overflows with an emotion and musicality that few can match. Even productions that in other hands would be, at best, novelty hits—Bumblebee Unlimited’s “Lady Bug” or Musique’s “In the Bush,” for instance—have entered the canon of dance-music classics. Yet Adams, a godlike figure to those who obsessively scour album credits, remains something of an unknown entity to the casual listener. That’s, at least in part, by design: The Harlem native (“I’ve lived the