HenryTDobson said: "After a few weeks of listening to this album, I've really come to enjoy it as well. It's fun and the performances are top notch. A Light or Something is LMM at his finest and Same Train Home is gorgeous. There are many great moments throughout.
My biggest quibble is the finale and just overall theme of the piece. Maybe it's the fault of the original movie, but the message of the story is unclear to me. LMM's finales typically wrap everything up so well, so I was disappointed by this ending that just sortof....ended. Happy to hear other thoughts on this though. I've never seen the movie so maybe I'm missing something."
For me, the primary overall theme is a pretty traditional musical theatre theme: the power of community can strengthen us all as individuals and give us hope for the future. As for the finale:
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I interpret it as a reinforcement of this primary theme. The Warriors have (mostly) survived the night, only because they stuck together and had each others' backs. They made the journey to the Bronx in the first place because they believed in the power of the truce and how it could improve everyone's lives. That belief was shattered, but now that they've made it home, their journey has restored their hope for what comes next. They can continue dreaming of a day when they are living, not just surviving. The last bit of music is the Warriors doing their little chant, back home on Coney Island, which really drives home the "strength of community" message.
Having read a bit more of the background for the piece, I think there are also illusions to the birth of hip-hop and how it ultimately gave way for gangs to engage in cultural battles through music, dance, etc. and less in actual turf wars and violence. I think the last line, "This is the sound of something being born" is very much about this.
My quibble is more with the conflicting morality of the piece. We're supposed to root for the Warriors because they were in favor of the truce and seem to want to stop all the violence between gangs, and they often talk about Cyrus as this great peacemaker. But that sort of ignores the fact that the reason for the truce is so that the gangs can essentially form one big gang that will outnumber the police 3:1. And throughout the album, the police are always the bad guys. So are we rooting for a world in which New York is run by one giant gang and the police are powerless? And are we to believe that these gangs are only committing acts of violence against each other, and there are no actual victims that the police are trying to protect? I haven't seen the movie, so maybe I'm missing something, but the story seems to operate in a parallel (somewhat sci-fi?) universe where the police are oppressors, the gangs are mostly good guys if they can just stop fighting with each other, and average citizens are non-existent or irrelevant.
