Another Kind of Currency: The Broad Street Riots of 1837
October 29, 2014
I’m going to be doing something slightly different for this week’s column. No, don’t worry, I’m not completely changing my column or anything, but this week, instead of looking for the meanings behind the lyrics as you would in an English class, but instead as you would in a history class. The song up this week is a lesser-known song from ska-core legends The Mighty Mighty Bosstones. We’ll be looking at “Riot on Broad Street” this week, off of their 1998 record Pay Attention.
The first notable thing about this song is that it relies less on the ska-core sound that made the Bosstones famous on their previous LP, Let’s Face It. Instead they eschewed that for a more celtic punk sound, reminiscent of a less-harsh Dropkick Murphys. The song begins spinning a tale of an event that occurred in Boston, the band’s town of origin:
My father once told this to me
Boston’s gritty history
Another useless battle
In a useless holy war
Handed down discrepancies
And tensions that’ll never ease
One afternoon on Broad Street
It blew up down there for sure
Courtesy of Wheaton College.
Minor history lesson here. In the 19th century, mostly due to its large seaport, Boston was a common place for immigrants to arrive and make their new home. However, immigrants came from, among many other places, England and Ireland. Needless to say, the Catholic Irish and the Protestant English were not very fond of each other; these are the “tensions that’ll never ease” and which “blew up” on Broad Street on June 11, 1837.
The song then details the events of that fateful morning, but a few artistic licenses are taken with the story to make it sound a bit more dramatic:
The Boston firefighting volunteers
On their way to fight a fire somewhere
Met with a funeral procession
proceeding way too slow
“A brownstone burns out of control!”
“We need to lay to rest this soul!Û
Loggerheads on Broad Street
Eye to eye and toe to toe
In fact, while both an Irish Catholic funeral procession and an English firefighting company were involved in the ordeal, the fire truck was returning from a fire, not going to one. However, even with this minor factual change, the song retains the general point of the riots and the account does not differ much as a result of this change.
Courtesy of Live Nation.
Also, this verse makes it clear that the Bosstones are not taking sides here. In calling the people involved in the riots “Loggerheads,” it is being stated that they are fools and idiots. The riot was not the way to handle these religious tensions, the Bosstones imply. The tensions are explored further in the pre-chorus and the chorus that follow this verse:
Broad street’s just not broad enough
And you just don’t love God enough
And if that isn’t odd enough
We’ve taken too much crap
You’ve pushed us round the sod enough
We’ve scrapped and rapped and jawed enough
Poked, provoked and prod enough
Something’s gonna snap
Riot down on Broad street
Hand me a brick, a stick, a picket
Bottle, axe, or cobblestone
Riot down on Broad Street
And if I’m going down
Hell, I’m not going down alone
I won’t go down alone!
The tensions snapped. People were attacked, projectiles were thrown. The differences between Irish and the English caused such a great tension that all it took was a minor altercation to set off an incredibly bloody riot. June 11, 1837 was a day that religious tensions in Boston reached their breaking point.
Tensions between races where the differences are beyond just religions are emphasized heavily, but religious tensions between Protestants and Catholics are not. But as the events of the Broad Street Riots and the actions of the Irish Republican Army in the 1900’s make clear, these tensions have had deadly consequences, and in Northern Ireland there is still segregation between Catholics and Protestants, especially in education. In creating a piece of art — in this case, a song — about the riots, the Mighty Mighty Bosstones were able to draw attention to something that is not part of common knowledge.