NYC Cacophony: The Voices that Command Us

When you have a city of more than 8.5 million people, you're going to have a lot of different voices speaking in a lot of different languages. (In fact there are 637 languages spoken in NYC, as blogged about here). Anywho, for all the different tongues and babble that occurs simultaneously every day in this town, very few voices get the honor of being amplified above the din, of being given the chance to rise and communicate with the rest of the city.

Those voices are the few, the happy few.

Some of these chosen voices are obvious: politicians get a big public voice, as do radio and TV broadcasters, as well as rich and famous and notable people around town. They get the honor and the rare chance to talk directly to us, to share their ideas and opinions to the rest of us, to influence how this town thinks and feels about things, to permeate the consciousness of the city.

A few offbeat exampples:

It was just announced by the MTA that a variety of NYC celebrities like Jerry Seinfeld, Whoopi Goldberg, Awkwafina, even Judakiss (!) and several others will start making the routine announcements you hear on the subways and buses every day -- but with a funky, distinct, NYC personality-driven twist. This is a big, new, fun project to lighten up and uplift the citizens of NYC as they commute from place to place. These are a bunch of creative NYC voices that will be telling us to do routine things like watch our step, stand clear of the closing doors, socially distance, etc. 

Then there are the politicians: did you know that NYC has a cable channel and livestream devoted to the City Council? You can watch Councilmembers speak on the floor of the Council at City Hall or watch their hearings all day, every day. These are the voices that make the laws that we all live under, the voices that decide how much and on what the city's monies get spent. These are the real voices that command us -- and, if you so choose, you can listen in.

But not all the voices that command us do so to tell us what to do or what they are going to do to us. Sometimes the voices that command us do so by moving our spirit, inspiring our souls. For example, Allison Steele, the late great briliant radio DJ that I've blogged about several times. You can just go and listen to some of her old clips, from back in the days when she ruled the overnight NYC airwaves, and her gorgeous voices married to her kind words and gentle messages, forced people, in a good way, to feel better about themselves and their fellow human beings. Now that is a part of the NYC cacophony that we should cherish, always and forever. 

These are but a very select few examples of the NYC cacophony, the voices that command us but that can also inform, help, educate, and sometimes even soothe us.

Shakespeare wrote in Hamlet, "Perchance to dream." In NYC there is no greater honor than "Perchance to speak, perchance to be heard."

P.S. I'm not really using the word "cacophony" correctly here (it means a mixture of harsh, discordant sounds) but it's one of those fancy sounding SAT words that I learned in days of yore so I'm shamelessly using it here.