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Ice Cube (driving) as Doughboy in the 1991 film Boyz N The Hood.
Ice Cube (driving) in the 1991 film Boyz N the Hood. His track It Was a Good Day makes our list of best city songs. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex
Ice Cube (driving) in the 1991 film Boyz N the Hood. His track It Was a Good Day makes our list of best city songs. Photograph: Moviestore Collection/Rex

The best songs about cities: the money, the sex, the skylines …

This article is more than 9 years old

From Liverpool to Nairobi and Ice Cube to Sinatra, our music critics take you on a world tour of their favourite urban tracks – focusing on cityscapes, romance, politics and life on the streets

Songs about cityscapes …

Madame George – Van Morrison

Morrison is an exquisite painter of cities — much of the joy of Astral Weeks lies in the way he captures the sensory impact of Belfast. Here on Madame George he’s mingling past and present, stirring memory with a bombardment of sights and scents and sounds. It’s there in the “clicking-clacking of the high-heeled shoe” and in the “smell of sweet perfume”; it’s cool night air and collecting bottle tops, the wind and the rain and the backstreets. Over nearly 10 minutes Morrison conjures his nostalgia for the city where he was raised, winding around us, until it becomes that great untangleable knot of affection: “the love that loves to love.” LB

Station Approach – Elbow

You could argue that the majority of Elbow’s output has been an extended paen to the grey skies and red bricked walkways of Manchester, but it’s their 2009 single –which details the emotions triggered by a train pulling into the station after spending months on tour – that truly captures the dulcet, northern romance of the city. A slow burning, softly burgeoning song that breaks into a cacophony of homesick harmonies, it epitomises Garvey’s ability to turn the unspoken subtitles of the city into a triumphant epiphany. HG

Dead Loss Angeles – The Stranglers

Countless artists have eulogised California’s City of Angels, but punk’s enfant terribles are not among them. From 1979’s The Raven, Dead Loss Angeles combines one of Jean-Jacques Burnel’s most insistent basslines with singer Hugh Cornwell’s litany of grumbles about the otherwise sunny metropolis: “the plastic peaches there, on concrete beaches there”, the “shit” in the La Brea tar pits and the way “shallow, android Americans live in the ruins there.” Never shy of an outrage, the band cheerily performed the song at the city’s Whisky A Go Go venue the following year. DS

Sheffield Shanty – Monkey Swallows the Universe

Sheffield’s streets have been unusually well-mapped by Pulp and the Arctic Monkeys, but Monkey Swallows the Universe might be the only ones to give the place a magical realist treatment. Sheffield Shanty is a dream-like vision from 2006 of the city inundated by a biblical deluge until “the seven hills become seven seas”. Singer Nat Johnson turns her house into a boat and sails the urban ocean, where the likes of Don Valley and Broomhill become exotic destinations. The song’s subtle beauty makes a potentially twee conceit entrancing. A year after its release, spookily, heavy rain caused the River Don to flood parts of Sheffield. DL

4th of July, Asbury Park (Sandy) – Bruce Springsteen

Springsteen hailed from Freehold, New Jersey, but it was Asbury Park – a down-at-heel Jersey Shore resort 15 miles east – that exerted the biggest influence on his early songwriting. 4th of July, Asbury Park captured the look, feel and smell of the place in the early 1970s, with no detail too small to be enshrined in his prose/poem lyric. It was an ode to a woman, and a way of life. Boardwalk denizens like Madam Marie the fortune-teller, the greasers who sleep on the beach and the waitress who works in “that joint under the boardwalk” ring with accuracy – you can practically smell that Jersey Shore delicacy, saltwater taffy. CS

Yearning for home ... Alicia Keys in New York in 2001. Photograph: Jim Cooper/AP

Empire State of Mind – Jay Z feat Alicia Keys

How to celebrate the city that never sleeps? Keep it up with a bombastic hip-hop epic armed with a chorus from Keys that bellows from the Brooklyn basements to the tip of the Manhattan skyline. Penned by singer-songwriter Angela Hunte along with Jane’t Sewell-Ulepic – later picked up by Jay Z – the track was born from a yearning for the streets and subways of their hometown during a trip to the supposedly subordinate city of London. Whether you’re from Swindon or Slovakia, for four minutes and 40 seconds you’re a globe-conquering, cwaffee guzzling, wise-cracking New York native. HG

House of the Rising Sun – The Animals

Recordings of this possibly-18th-century folk song go back to the 1930s, but The Animals’ wracked version put both song and band on the map. The famous first line – “There is a house in New Orleans they call the Rising Sun” – created an impression of the Crescent City that, when I first heard it, I took as gospel. The narrator was mired in depravity, but was inexorably pulled back to the house, which could have been a brothel or a prison – at any rate, when he got there, he was doomed to a life of “sin and misery”. Even 50 years after release, the song feels thrillingly sinister, and by extension so does New Orleans. CS

Edinburgh Man – The Fall

Although Mark E Smith is synonymous with Salford, this untypically tender Fall song derives from a period he spent in exile in the beautiful Scottish city between 1988 and 1991. “It’s springtime but I still miss the streets at dawn. And in the morning walking your bridges home,” he sings. If that sounds too poetic and almost romantic for The Fall, Smith later helpfully explained that his favourite location in the city was the Scotch Malt Whisky Society on Queen Street, and that he eventually had to leave the city because “I liked it too bloody much.” DS

Frank Sinatra in 1967. Photograph: Pierluigi Praturlon/Rex Features

Chicago (That Toddlin’ Town) – Frank Sinatra

If Sinatra was the master of anything, it was toddlin’, and he threw himself into this song, which celebrated Chicago’s reputation as a place so hard-toddlin’ that even the pro-temperance evangelist Billy Sunday couldn’t shut it down. It’s hard to disentwine the singer from the song: though Chicago was 30 years old when Sinatra recorded it, his is the version everyone knows, and it endowed the city with an indelible rakishness. “On State Street, that great street, I just want to say, they do things they don’t do on Broadway” captures Chicago’s riproaring soul. CS

Cities – Talking Heads

This furiously funky fourth single from the Heads’ mighty 1979 album Fear of Music actually sounds like the bustle of an urban environment. The song finds singer David Byrne even twitchier – and more humourous – than normal, as he ponders finding a city home. He considers London, “a small city”, then decides that despite Birmingham’s rich people and ghosts, its dry ice factory is “a good place to get some thinking done”. Memphis, the “home of Elvis and the ancient Greeks”, seems to offer the tempting smell of home cooking but, alas for our would-be urban dweller, “it’s only the river”. DS

Lonely Financial Zone - Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers

Writing about the parts of life that often lie unnoticed is one of Richman’s great themes, and he displays a particular affection for any detail that embodies modernity. This stupendous track sees him walking under the moon and the stars through an unpopulated part of Boston and down towards the harbour. It has a stately Velvet Underground pace as he admires the “skyscrapers’ dark majesty,” the “gulls on the pier” and tells of how he has “stood in awe so silently, under the buzzing electric light.” LB

The Apple Stretching – Grace Jones

Melvin Van Peebles crafted this vivid panorama of New York at dawn for his play Waltz of the Stork in 1992. It’s packed with arresting images like commuters “breathing bagels and pollution” and the sun “swaggering across the harbour”, while characters sketched in a couple of lines seem to live and breathe. It’s even better when knowingly narrated by Grace Jones over a languid groove that sounds like a slow awakening. The chorus pokes fun at the apocalyptic rhetoric surrounding the city at the time. “No, it ain’t World War Four,” Jones assures. “It’s just the apple stretching and yawning/Just morning.” DL

Chicago – Sufjan Stevens

Stevens’ 50 States Project, to write an album for every US state, has been on hiatus for some while, but his tributes to Michigan and Illinois offer some wonderful accounts of Midwestern cities. This track gives a glorious sense of the sheer wonder of the city – Chicago and also New York. While the lyrics tell of a kind of desperation – tears and mistakes, selling clothes and sleeping in vans – the music carries a towering, skyscrapered gleam, all the cacophony of a city, of a mass of people, a hive of activity, and the sense of liberation that can bring. “If I was crying,” he sings, “ … it was for freedom, from myself and from the land.” LB

Sex and the city …

K’Naan – Fire in Freetown

K’Naan – Fire in Freetown

For much of his career, on account of his personal narrative of life in war-torn Mogadishu on both his first two albums, K’naan became pop culture’s default talking head for the unrest in Somalia. On his second album Troubadour, K’naan chooses a different city to reference on this song, a relatively unsung favourite among fans and critics alike inspired by Somali folk singer Fatima Abdillahi Mandeeq. The tension builds and builds without respite with his love interest’s sadistic teasing, which he likens to the Sierra Leone’s mineral-fuelled civil war punctuated by a series of false hope for ceasefire throughout its 10-year tenure. PO

Sheffield Sex City – Pulp

The likes of the Human League, ABC, Def Leppard and Arctic Monkeys have given the steel city its deserved reputation as a northern pop powerhouse. It’s not immediately the sort of place you think of as being synonymous with sex. Step forward Pulp, and this remarkable 1992 epic aural encyclopedia of racy goings on in unsexily named areas such as Catcliffe and Attercliffe. While Jarvis Cocker moans authentically as he documents events such as “dogs doing it in central reservations, causing multiple pile-ups in the centre of town”, keyboardist Candida Doyle relates a bizarre incident from her childhood, when she heard an entire block of flats going at it. “I mean, have you ever heard other people fucking?” she asks. “And really enjoying it? It’s a marvellous sound.” DS

New York City – They Might Be Giants

In this ebullient 1996 song, originally recorded by Vancouver band Cub, we see New York through the eyes of a young man anticipating a rendezvous with his girlfriend: so magical and transformative that it enables you to be your ideal self. Amid a ticker-tape of tourist attractions, from the Staten Island ferry to “the Empire State where Dylan lived”, there’s one sly acknowledgement of the narrator’s rose-tinted spectacles. Sure, “everything looks beautiful when you’re young and pretty,” but what if you’re neither? Ultimately, though, the song is too sweet to think of raining on his parade. “The best thing about New York City is you and me.” DL

Corcovado – Stan Getz and Joao Gilberto

Bossa nova pioneer Antonio Carlos Jobim’s biggest hit, The Girl From Ipanema, described watching an unattainable beauty walk past a café in a hip seaside neighbourhood of Rio de Janeiro. On Corcovado he turned his gaze towards one of the mountains that looms over Rio and its famous statue of Jesus, Cristo Redentor. To the grateful lover who can see it from his apartment window (as Gilberto could in real life), it’s a symbol of contentment and gratitude. The English version, Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars, adds sea and streams to the tableau but this is already evocative enough. DL

The Aspidistra Flies – Stars

This song has always struck me as a perfect account of how it feels to be in love in a city – in this case London. Buoyed by piano and brass, it captures the joy that blooms on to the streets, the giddiness that spins out across St James’ Square, the Thames, the doves, the grey skies, the blue, the darkening, the lights. And the rain, of course, the endless rain: “All the umbrellas in London,” runs the refrain, “couldn’t hide my love for you.” LB

Atlantic City – Bruce Springsteen

Atlantic City is a perfect example of what Springsteen does so well: sonnets, of a sort, songs that remind us of our mortality through the naming of heavy responsibilities and familiar streets, then seduce us with a great gust of freedom: escape, a fast car, love. Here, all the swell and promise of the big city are bound up in this homage to a seaside resort on the New Jersey shore. That it is in truth a small-town tale of crime, bad debts, a bus out of town and trouble on their tail only increases the sense of desperation. “Put your make-up on, put your hair up pretty,” he begs, hoarse and a little wild, “and meet me tonight in Atlantic City.” LB

Chelsea Hotel #2 – Leonard Cohen

This solemn account of a brief, amorous encounter (rumoured to have been with Janis Joplin) at a legendary New York hotel, suggests the way that a city can press people together, a desire for human contact amid all the concrete and downcast eyes. “Those were the reasons, and that was New York,” he sings, “we were running for the money and the flesh.” What always strikes me about this song is how profoundly it belongs to a place and a moment, how it seems to cast its own light. And is there any more big-citied line than the gloriously seedy recollection: “Giving me head on an unmade bed while the limousines wait in the street?” LB

City life …

James Murphy DJs at the 2013 CBGB festival in Times Square, New York. Photograph: Gaelle Beri/Getty

New York, I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down – LCD Soundsystem

James Murphy, Brooklyn’s hipster prince in 2005, waxes bittersweet about a city in flux under the stewardship of its “mild billionaire mayor” Michael Bloomberg. He wonders whether a cleaner, safer city is a duller one and, therefore, if the place he once fell for “still exists”. But he’s smart enough to realise that he’s also wrestling with his own disillusionment and impending middle age. Perhaps for new arrivals, New York still glitters and thrills like it always has. Unable to quite let go, he reaffirms his loyalty in ambivalent terms: “You’re still the one pool where I’d happily drown.” DL

London Belongs to Me – Saint Etienne

Saint Etienne’s metropolitan reverie opens with directions: take the tube to Camden Town, walk down Parkway and settle down under a willow tree in Regent’s Park. The trio were new arrivals to north London in 1991 and the area glowed with spring-like promise. To be in the park with someone you love under a benign sky is to feel that “today London loves us only”. Named after Norman Collins’ 1945 novel about a Kennington lodging-house, this blissfully unhurried song captures the feeling you get when you’re perfectly attuned to the capital’s laziest rhythms and an ordinary day becomes idyllic. DL

It Was a Good Day – Ice Cube

The gangsta rap pioneer plays with his own reputation as the driving force behind NWA’s high-drama Straight Outta Compton by narrating a perfect day in South Central Los Angeles while DJ Pooh’s amiable beat epitomises the thick, warm funk that defined the city in the early 90s. Simple pleasures are heightened by Cube’s awareness of all the terrible things that could have happened, and might happen tomorrow. Life is precarious and peace elusive, so he snaps back to reality at the very end, returning to an album, The Predator, in which if something can go wrong in LA, then it will. DL

Alec Lomami: Kinshasa

Kinshasa (Chllngr remix) – Alec Lomami

Danish producer CHLLNGR took the tempo down a couple notches for his wistful remix of Congolese artist Alec Lomami’s 2011 break-out single Kinshasa. “It’s about growing up in Kinshasa and being eager to leave to come to America and play basketball,” he explained in one interview. Born in Belgium and raised in the DRC capital, a visit to the US in 1998 was unexpectedly extended when Lomami was forced to seek political asylum as war broke out in his home country. Nowadays he lives in South Africa, where he part owns a fledgling record label and makes up one third of The Black Hearts Club along with two other US-based artists. PO

Living for the City – Stevie Wonder

The city of the title is New York, which is portrayed by the hard-up young African-American narrator first as the promised land (“New York! Just like I pictured it – skyscrapers, and everything!”), then as a nightmare. Wonder’s 1973 hit shows the hardscrabble underside of the metropolis, populated by drug dealers – who dupe the narrator into carrying drugs, resulting in his arrest – and racist prison guards. Its bleakness contrasted starkly with the optimism that tended to feature in songs about New York (eg Take the A-Train), and it has barely dated: the sentiment would fit neatly into a modern protest song. CS

The Guns of Brixton – The Clash

The 1981 Brixton riots were 16 months away when Clash bassist Paul Simonon wrote this song; the percolating tension of its reggae bassline and Simonon’s bleak vocal seemed to prefigure the unrest. “You can crush us, you can bruise us, but you’ll have to answer to the guns of Brixton,” he sang, but it came across not as a motivational klaxon but an oath of hopelessness. Thirty-five years later, Brixton is an uneasy mix of deprivation and gentrification, and the track feels as ominous as ever. CS

Liverpool Lullaby – Cilla Black

Although this improbably lovely ballad contains some archaic references – the Lune Laundry was demolished in the 80s, and few now get rich on the Littlewoods pools – the social problems it describes are as real as they were when Cilla Black recorded it in 1969. The young inner-city mother, her boozy husband and their tearaway son are lovingly rendered, as is the vein of Scouse optimism running through it. Yet some things do change. When Cilla sang it on TV in 2013, she decided that the line “You’ll get a belt from your da” was inappropriate, and substituted “You’ll get told off by your da”. CS

West End Girls – Pet Shop Boys

Inspired by two very different multi-character cityscapes – the Furious Five’s The Message and TS Eliot’s The Waste Land – the Pet Shop Boys’ first hit perceived London as a babble of voices, collaging mysterious fragments of myriad conversations. Watching people from all over the capital drink and flirt around Leicester Square in 1985 got singer Neil Tennant thinking about class differences and a shared desire for escapism. Although universal enough to become an international hit, West End Girls is rooted in specific streets. The Dive Bar was a Chinatown drinking den while the urban bustle in the intro was taped near Advision Studios, just off Great Portland Street. DL

Meet Me in St Louis – Judy Garland

Meet Me in St Louis – written in 1904, and used as the title of a 1944 Judy Garland musical – was about the experience of going to the St Louis World’s Fair, a major exposition whose high-minded aim was the promotion of history and architecture. But Garland’s rendition is the essence of romantic abandon: at the fair, she’ll dance the hootchie-kootchie, and even – prudish types, look away now - be your tootsie-wootsie. It sounds impossibly innocent today, but it’s worth searching out the extra verses, which weren’t in Garland’s version. They make it clear that, of the hordes who attended the fair, quite a few were the sort who’d turn up on Crimewatch today. CS

Moskow Diskow – Telex

If Kraftwerk had been raised in Belgium and drunk a lot of Belgian beer, they’d have sounded like these Brussels madcaps, who played synths, wore masks and made brilliant, deadpan electronic pop. Presumably, they got about a bit, as this 1979 single pays dry tribute to the clubland in the Russian capital. When the sound of electronic “new music” causes people to flee the dancefloor, Telex happily polish off everybody’s cocktails. DS

Pyramids – Frank Ocean

Nothing conjures the seedy underbelly of Las Vegas’ neon lit strip club culture than Frank Ocean’s sprawling 10-minute malaise of trance and slow jam taken from Channel Orange. Although some claim it symbolises the treatment of black women throughout history, the track’s libidinous exchange between pimp and client - as described by Frank - evokes the hedonistic highs and squalid lows of the city; dazzling with chandeliers, champagne and a lurking sense of the macabre. HG

David Bowie in 1969, three years after The London Boys. Photograph: Ray Stevenson/Rex

The London Boys – David Bowie

Although the former David Jones’ fascinating pre-fame period is most often associated with The Laughing Gnome, this eerie, melancholic 1966 B-side is arguably the Brixton-born star’s first really great song. The song’s (possibly gay) male protagonist leaves home for the bright lights of Mod-era Swinging London, but finds druggy loneliness and despair: “You’ve got it made with the rest of the toys, Now you wish you’d never left your home/You’ve got what you wanted but you’re on your own, with the London boys.” DS

Angeles – Elliott Smith

This short, fragile song captures all the sweet-talk of Los Angeles, the promise of money and fame and wishes that come true. There’s a shimmer to its tune, as if the city stands like something of a mirage, with Smith sounding thirsty and muddled before it: half-charmed, you sense, by the idea of his picture on a hundred-dollar bill, and then repelled by the gamble of it all. LB

Nakei Nairobi – Mbilia Bel

There can’t be that many East or Central African-born 80s baby who doesn’t remember at least one version of this song – the first one sang in Lingala or its subsequent Kiswahili version. Mbilia Bel was prolific: as a solo artist, and more so in unison with the late Tabu Ley to whom she was a musical muse and eventually married. In the dying days of its three-decade reign on the region they were two of Congolese Rumba’s most recognisable names. When Congo’s economy nose-dived and Kinshasa’s once thriving music industry fell to ruin as a result, many of its music performers and producers emigrated to cities like Nairobi where the demand for Congolese bands was high, as were the prospects for a decent living. The original version of Nakei Nairobi reminisces about Mbilia’s childhood friend Duni, who had relocated to the Kenyan capital but had fallen on hard times. In its Kiswahili reincarnation (Twende Nairobi) she shouts out the former president of Kenya, Daniel Arap Moi, who then lifted a ban he had placed on foreign music being played on Kenyan radio. PO

Desperados Under the Eaves – Warren Zevon

Zevon’s account of a slow slide into alcoholism in Los Angeles, gives us a man half-drowning in the city itself as much as “all the salty margaritas in LA” he intends to drink up. Tracing a hazy route from the air-conditioned hum of the Hollywood Hawaiian Hotel and down to Gower Avenue, he shows all the loneliness and misplaced dreams of life in this city – there in its angry sun, in the shaking hands of each morning’s waking, and in the yearning to find someone to understand. LB

Free Fallin’ - Tom Petty

There is a kind of exuberance that Los Angeles does particularly well, and here Petty captures it in all its simple joy. It’s a song about a boy playing hooky, skipping out on his life and his girl to go driving through the city – taking in the freeway, Ventura Boulevard, the Valley. “Wanna glide down over Mulholland,” he sings, “I wanna write her name in the sky.” There is no great revelation, but he gives us the light, the gleam, the sheer liberation of looking down upon a city pressed between broad skies and wide, blue ocean. LB

The Junkie Song – The Be Good Tanyas

Songs about a city’s more seamy side are often uncomfortably cloying, but here it’s done with such delicate despair that it appears human. Telling of a 2am walk that finds the streets full of “junkies and homeless” its response holds a still-reeling honesty: the shame at not being able to meet the need or the want, the acknowledgement that in a city we often fail to look the most vulnerable in the eye, the admission that we all “hover between apathy and compassion”. And then a final appeal for empathy, because after all, “we all live here, don’t we?” LB

City politics …

Randy Newman. Photograph: Linda Nylind

Baltimore – Randy Newman

Twenty-five years before The Wire, Baltimore was already a symbol of urban blight. Newman sounds as weary and hollowed-out as this “hard town by the sea”, one of many American cities sinking fast in the 1970s. In deft strokes, he depicts two of Baltimore’s victims, who “hide their eyes ‘cause the city’s dying and they don’t know why,” and the narrator’s fed-up family, packing their bags for the country. But the most powerful image of civic aspiration gone to ruin is the one that opens the song: a “beat-up little seagull on a marble stair”. In Newman’s Baltimore, even the birds are depressed. DL

Dead Cities – The Exploited

Although The Exploited are mostly remembered by wistful old punks, few watching could forget their infamous 1981 Top of the Pops appearance, which saw them invade unsuspecting TV screens with this furious blast about council housing and urban decay. “I’m filled up with aggression, want to smash your television,” began red mohicaned singer Walter “Wattie” Buchan, over the sort of racket that would make a nation’s hair stand on end. DS

Johannesburg – Gil Scott-Heron

When street poet musician Gil Scott-Heron wrote this song in 1974, most of America (and the rest of the world) had no idea who Nelson Mandela was, let alone that he had already been serving 12 years of a life sentence by then. It was the lead song for his album From South Africa to South Carolina and was the first of his singles to chart. PO

Streets of New York – Kool G Rap & DJ Polo

“You know how many dudes around me did shit, killed people and got killed?” says Kool G Rap last year. “I wasn’t detached from the streets at all.” The rapper drew on the horrors he witnessed growing up in 1970s Queens for this tough, jazzy ghetto travelogue from 1990, teeming with drug dealers, pimps, bag ladies and junkies. The song’s litany of urban miseries recalls Grandmaster Flash & the Furious Five’s landmark single The Message but where that record was pained and humane, Streets of New York conveys a certain voyeuristic excitement. It’s about drama as much as protest. DL

Galveston – Glen Campbell

To the dismay of composer Jimmy Webb, who wrote it as an anti-war lament, Campbell put an upbeat, patriotic spin on Galveston (though the line “I am so afraid of dying” made Webb’s intentions clear). Either way, what you take away from the song is a poignant picture of the Texas coastal town: sea winds, crashing waves and seabirds flying in the sun. This bucolic depiction fails to mention the industrial side of what’s actually a major port city, but who wants to hear about that? In a way, Galveston could be about any beach town, but, somehow, it’s romantically Texan. CS

Handsworth Revolution – Steel Pulse

Steel Pulse became infamous for bravely baiting the National Front by performing anti-Nazi single Ku Klux Klan while wearing KKK-type hoods. However, their Top 10 1978 debut album marked a seminal moment in British reggae. Written to protest at the poverty and racial tensions in their Handsworth district of hometown Birmingham, the timeless title track will surely have blared out of a few cars and windows when the community rioted in 1981, 1985 and 2011. DS

We Almost Lost Detroit – Gil Scott-Heron

Sharing a title with a 1975 John G Fuller book, We Almost Lost Detroit also recounts the tale of the nuclear meltdown at the Enrico Fermi generating station near Monroe, Michigan, in 1966. However, Gil Scott-Heron probably didn’t imagine that his 1977 song would take on another meaning when the Motor City’s subsequent post-industrial decline left the major American city’s downtown areas looking like a post-disaster landscape. DS

... and a few from leftfield

A clip from Coz Ov Moni 2

Tema – Fokn Bois

Coz Ov Moni II (Fokn Revenge) is the sequel to Coz Ov Moni, the ingenious concept album and short film produced by Ghana’s controversial, innovative hip-hop pair Fokn Bois. It’s a musical in pidgin, which starts with M3nsa and Wanlov the Kubolor collecting a debt to pay for a night out in Accra, only to be ambushed, robbed and left for dead. Fokn Revenge is the duo’s journey east of the capital to Tema, as they seek to get back at their attackers. You can watch the full 45-minute humorous slice of Ghanaian life here. PO

Leeds United – Luke Haines

The title of the former Auteur’s 2007 single suggests a homage to Leeds United FC, but is actually a blackly comic reminiscence about the bleak, David Peace-type environment he remembers from the 1970s: a city of swift pints in red light areas, terraced houses, clapped-out Ford Cortinas, Jimmy Savile and Peter Sutcliffe. “The starting point was the hunt for the Ripper,” the singer once explained. “There’s a reference to a ‘13-nil defeat’ – Leeds fans used to chant ‘Ripper 13, Police nil’. Sensitive guys, these Leeds fans.” DS

Winnipeg Is a Frozen Shithole – Venetian Snares

We couldn’t very well have a list of best city songs without an honorary shout out to the best-named tune in the business. Winnipeggers, we trust you won’t take this one lying down: the comments are below.

What have we forgotten? Share your favourite city songs in the comments below and we’ll round up the best suggestions later in the week

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