Another Kind of Urban Music

If I wasn't a TV producer, I might be an urban planner. I've spent a good deal of time lately listening to The Suburbs by Arcade Fire, and since I've recently moved to the suburbs, I've also given a lot of thought to urban design and what makes a good place.

Turns out, I'm not the only one. Aside from the aforementioned Arcade Fire, here are some other great songs that are essentially about urban planning.

"My City Was Gone" - The Pretenders
Probably my favorite Pretenders song -- not saying too much as I'm not a fan of the band generally. But this one has that great bassline as Chrissie Hynde sings about how she went back to Ohio only to find her hometown of Akron was unrecognizable -- with a missing downtown and farms paved over for shopping malls.

"Council Houses" - Denim
Quick -- name another song that laments mid-century tower blocks conceived by the likes of Le Corbusier and Mies Van Der Rohe. You can't. That's why this 1996 song is so great. "Council houses/In the city/Who would want to pay the rent on this concrete slum imprisonment?" Denim were a glam band formed after the dissolution of the British indie band Felt, but this song makes the projects -- and their architecture -- anything but glamorous.

"London's Burning" - The Clash
How about an entire verse about London's highways? "I'm up and down the Westway/In and out the lights/What a great traffic system -- it's so bright!/I can't think of a better way to spend the night/Than speeding around underneath the yellow lights."

"Cities" - Talking Heads
David Byrne sings of checking out cities to live in -- London, Birmingham, even El Paso. Turns out, Byrne is a real urban planning guy -- check out his book "Bicycle Diaries".

"Sprawl II (Mountains Beyond Mountains)"
The inspiration for this post -- made all too real as I hurtle down Route 3 in suburban New Jersey. The shopping malls around here really do rise like mountains beyond mountains.