By: Sofie Huntington
This past August, when I discovered the album Linger Awhile by Samara Joy, I was immediately hooked. As a student residing in the Bronx, I became all the more obsessed when I discovered she was from the Bronx — but I was nowhere near surprised when I read she had won the Grammy Award for Best New Artist earlier this year.
It was early in September when I heard that Ice Spice had just won an award for being a Best New Artist. Now, doesn’t that sound familiar…
Luckily, one of my close friends, who is slightly more well-versed in pop culture than I am, quickly informed me that, no, these are different awards. Still, I couldn’t help but notice an intriguing pattern: Two music artists, two Best New Artist awards, and most notably, two Bronx natives.
On September 12th, 2023, Ice Spice walked up to the VMA stage as her song “Princess Diana” played under the roar of the audience. On top of her white, lacey ensemble, she sported a glistening cross necklace and a variety of other chunky jewelry pieces, a classic for her look. In a way that was comfortingly relatable for those of us who are not celebrities, the first thing she said was, “Oh my god, this is so cool,” which she followed with, “Shout out the Bronx! Period!”
Twenty-three-year-old Isis Naija Gaston won the MTV Video Music Award for Best New Artist of 2023. Born in the Bronx and raised on Fordham Road, the hip-hop artist is now more popularly known as Ice Spice since she started her music career in 2021. She gained traction in late 2022 with her drill track “Munch (Feelin’ U),” which went viral on Tik Tok. Then, a few months later, she scored her first U.S. Billboard Hot 100 chart placement with her song “Gangsta Boo” featuring Lil Tjay, another rapper raised in the Bronx. She is known for her more laid-back style of rap that boasts confidence and success. While she only recently entered the music industry, she took a liking to hip-hop at a very young age, which is unsurprising since the Bronx is credited with the birth of hip-hop.
According to New York City Tourism, hip-hop was born in the South Bronx during the 1970s by local DJs throughout the music scene, particularly in the Mott Haven, Melrose, Port Morris, and Concourse neighborhoods. However, the development and influence of hip-hop are not limited to any particular region of the Bronx. These DJs began to experiment with beats and mixing at bars, parties, and dance clubs, over time building up the foundation for what we consider hip hop. Many of hip-hop’s most influential artists came out of the Bronx, like Fat Joe, Remy Ma, their crew, the Terror Squad, Grandmaster Flash, Slick Rick, and Swizz Beats.
About six months earlier, on February 5th, 2023, Samara Joy walked up to the Grammy stage to her cover of “Guess Who I Saw Today.” In her bright red long-sleeve dress, she looked all the more stunning holding her gold-plated gramophone. Tears welled up in her eyes, and in the eyes of everyone who was watching (or at least in mine) as she said, “I’ve been watching y’all on TV for, like, so long, so to be here with you all, born and raised in the Bronx, New York…”
Samara Joy McLendon, also twenty-three years old, won the Grammy Award for the Best New Artist of 2023. She was raised in the Castle Hill neighborhood of the Bronx, living in a family that already had its own extensive history of musical involvement. During her Grammy speech, she shared, “I’ve been singing all my life, [like] my grandparents, my father, my mother…” Samara followed in her parents’ footsteps by getting involved in the music scene at a young age, attending Fordham High School for the Arts, where she performed in its jazz band. She began to pursue jazz more seriously after high school, enrolling in a jazz program at SUNY Purchase College. In September 2022, she released her album Linger Awhile, which led to her Best New Artist award and the award for Best Jazz Vocal Album.
Although Samara Joy began her jazz career in the Bronx, there is not as much recorded history of the influence of jazz in the Bronx as there is for hip-hop. According to the Bronx Music Heritage Center, this is more likely to be due to the lack of a detailed record of Bronx music history overall than it is because jazz music wasn’t present. What is known, almost entirely through stories of Bronx natives, is that the jazz scene in the Bronx was most active in the 1930s-60s within jazz clubs along Boston Road like Blue Morocco or others of similar aesthetics like Club 845 on Prospect Avenue in Morrisania, which held Sunday afternoon jazz concerts from the late 1950s to early 60s.
Ice Spice and Samara Joy may seem very different when we only think to evaluate their genres of music. But, when we look at the diversity of music makes up Bronx music culture and the lives of the Bronx community, it is no surprise that two talented young women from the Bronx have invested their lives into creating music, and they are most deserving of the titles of Best New Artists.
