Specifically, song titles that mention/reference anything smaller than the city itself and bigger than an individual building. ie suburbs, roads, parks, bridges etc. I can think of many for London but not many for elsewhere. There must be heaps:
**London: ** A bomb in Wardour Street (The Jam)
Baker Street (Gerry Rafferty)
(I don’t want to go to) Chelsea (Elvis Costello)
Croydon (Capt Sensible)
Dagenham Dave (The Stranglers)
Flames of Brixton (Angelic Upstarts)
Guns of Brixton (The Clash)
Piccadilly Circus (Stiff Little Fingers)
Plaistow Patricia (Ian Dury & the Blockheads)
Portobello (Lords of the New Church)
Telegraph Road (Dire Straits)
Waterloo sunset (The Kinks)
West One (The Ruts)
White man in Hammersmith Palais (The Clash)
**New York: ** No sleep till Brooklyn (Beastie Boys)
Rockaway Beach (The Ramones)
**New York & London: ** Brooklyn 2 Brixton (Freq Nasty)
**LA: ** Hollywood (Red Hot Chili Peppers)
Hollywood Babylon (Killing Joke)
Santa Monica (Fatboy Slim)
Some Toronto ones: Spadina Bus by The Shuffle Demons YYZ by Rush (YYZ being the code for Pearson airport in Toronto) Scarborough Town Centre by, um, someone I can’t remember and can’t seem to google.
Telephone Road – Steve Earle (Houston)
There are a lot of Houston references in Houston rap, but it is mostly obscure. South Park Mexican, now in prison for pedophilia, gets his name from the South Park neighborhood of Houston. For that matter Linkin Park (from Chicago). I wonder if there is really an E Street, though.
“Harlem Nocture” is a jazz standard done by just about everyone. “Harlem Air Shaft” is by Duke Ellington.
Solsbury Hill (Peter Gabriel) IIRC is in Somerset, in England.
Death Cab For Cutie has a song “Coney Island” off of “The Photo Album”
One of my least favorite Pavement songs is “Embassy Row” about Embassy Row in Washington, DC.
Beth Orton has a song called “Mount Washington”, but that’s not really part of a city.
I wonder if Bob Dylan’s “Positively 4th Street” is inspired by any 4th street in particular. Bruce Springsteen has a bunch too which are presumably about NYC or NJ: “Does this bus stop at 82nd street”, “Tenth Avenue Freezeout”, “Incident on 57th Street” and of course “E Street Shuffle” off the top of my head.
And the new Beastie Boys’ “To The 5 Boroughs” although that is an album title. May as well stick “Abbey Road” in this category too. And “Highway 61 Revisted.”
Midnight in Harlem (NY) by the Derek Trucks Band. A song I know I’m the only person here to have heard, since they’ve never played it and it’s not out yet.
It doesn’t exactly fit the conditions of the OP, but Bruce Cockburn’s “Coldest Night of the Year” contains a lot of Toronto references in such lines as:
“I took in Yonge Street at a glance…”
“Now the sun is lurking just beyond the Scarborough horizon…”
It also referred to The All Night Show, an local overnight TV show (mostly reruns of classic TV shows, hosted by a character known as Chuck the Security Guard) that was airing in Toronto when Cockburn’s song was written.
YES! I’m the first to do Minneapolis!
The Replacements- Skyway
Tom Waits- 9th and Hennepin
Husker Du- [a good portion of the album Zen Arcade]
Atmosphere- That one hidden track on one of their albums
Maybe you’re standing on the corner of 17th and Wazee Streets, yeah.
Out in front of the Terminal bar there’s a Thunderbird moving in muscatel sky. You’ve been drinking cleaning products all night. Open for suggestions.
Tom Waits, Nighthawks At The Diner
Denver’s Terminal Bar used to be in the Union Station neighborhood, and it was an end-of-the-line bar. It’s name referred to the train terminal, but mostly it was known as the booze terminal. It is probably the last place you are going to be doing your drinking that has a roof over it.
This neighborhood is now the Coors Field neighborhood (baseball stadium) and is a trendy area with lofts, restaurants, and galleries. I think the spot the Terminal used to be on is now a Wahoo’s Fish Tacos.
