The Bush Tetras, "Too Many Creeps," and New York City

Abstract

In the 1970s, America's most emblematic modern city, New York, experienced series of widely publicized fiscal and social crises, narrowly avoiding bankruptcy in 1975. It became national and international symbol of the failure of the modern city. Yet the 1970s and early 1980s in New York were also, in the words of historian Josh Kun, a watershed period in American popular music that witnessed the convergences of Anglo punk and new wave and African American and Latino/a disco, salsa, and hip-hop.1 New music and musical styles were created in neighborhoods where the previous decades' physical and social disintegration had taken the greatest toll, areas of New York ignored or even discarded by the city's leaders. For residents of this New York in 1980 those living in neighborhoods like the South Bronx and the Lower East Side this explosive convergence of musical styles was part and parcel of the discordant soundscape of their city. One local band was frequently mentioned in reviews and concert announcements as capturing well the sound and feel of the Lower East Side during this moment: the Bush Tetras. In the early 1980s many found the music of the Bush