are you really going to listen to their new album?

I'll admit, I got excited after seeing the announcement that Echo & the Bunnymen are performing their first two albums, Crocodiles and Heaven Up Here, in their entirety on an upcoming North American tour.  Ocean Rain is fine; they played that whole album on tour awhile ago anyway.  For my money, though, the gloomy garage rock—“Going Up,” “Over The Wall,” etc.—that I know and love the Bunnymen for is best found on those two albums.  

More to the point, I’m not above an album-in-its-entirety concert experience. Hardly. Sometimes this performance genre overlaps its close cousin, the reunite-the-original-band tour.  I saw Killing Joke do that with their second album a couple of years back; it’s not my favorite record of theirs, but it was the only chance I got to see the original line-up. More often, it seems a band uses the album-in-its-entirety concept to drum up interest in a tour featuring just one or two original musicians; thus, I went to see Richard and Tim Butler plus whoever is playing with them do the Psychedelic Furs’ Talk Talk Talk last year. It’s astonishing to see how many bands are doing this now; just type “perform album in its entirety” into Google and see what comes up.

Many bands play all the songs off an album when they play live; that’s often the modus operandi whenever a group “tours the new album.”  What distinguishes the album-in-its-entirety performance genre is its focus on an old album, one that audiences have come to love over the years, or that may be due a critical reappraisal after years of neglect. Some groups don’t stop with one album; even an entire back catalogue can get a much-needed reappraisal. (Sparks probably holds the record: 21 albums in 21 shows. Man, I wish I could have been there!)

What makes for a good album-in-its-entirety concert? For some, the answer centers on the band’s motivations.  Is it to satisfy audience demand (i.e., for the money)?  That seems to be the case for the Pixies, who’ve been touring for the last 6 years and have recorded maybe one new original song in 20 years; not too many people seem to mind. In other cases it’s the commercial payoff for having put out a new, unsolicited and frankly uninteresting album. Having apparently demonstrated their artistic integrity, they give their audiences what they really want (which certainly isn't the new album) and get handsomely rewarded in the process. (By this criterion, I think Elvis Costello should give himself the license to play a series of concerts recreating his early, Nick Lowe-produced albums. Just nothing that ever had T-Bone Burnett on it, okay?)

I'd never begrudge a band drawing on its old repertoire. It’s exhilarating when they’re able to rearrange the song or otherwise indicate that they too have reevaluated their own songs (again, search for “Sparks 21x21” on YouTube for some remarkable reinventions of their back catalogue). In any case, a band’s old music is rightfully theirs to return to. No one ever complains when Pete Seeger plays “Waist Deep in the Big Muddy”; why should it be different for a rock band?  Still, the deliberate adherence to the structure of an old album is a different beast, a little too uncanny. By playing songs in the album’s original sequence, these performances invariably refer to a musical experience that audiences know in a different context: listening to recorded music, often (and over time increasingly, unless there’s been a rash of Pinkerton parties that I’m not aware of) in solitary isolation. Like an unearthed outtake or maybe some really good drugs, an album-in-its-entirety concert recasts and reanimates an experience that’s been frozen in time. That can be really exciting, but ultimately the album in your head demands your attention, distracting from the performance that’s directly on stage in front of you.

Here’s a random association: Is there an urban counterpart to the album-in-its-entirety tour?  Is it the historically preserved city that’s been carefully themed and sustained by local policy: Venice with its canals, Bruges with its lace? Or the model New Urbanist community: Seaside, Celebration?  Why is it so easy to accuse these places of bad faith, of trying to hold on to a moment of glory that has “rightfully” passed into history, in the same way we might criticize a band for performing an old album in its entirety? 

What informs the implied, unspoken idea of authenticity that we adhere to in this criticism?  Cities, we’re told by urbanists of the classic persuasion, are social and economic centers of remarkable dynamism and change.  But from at least Max Weber’s The City on, we also know that cities are social constellations for and material expressions of elite interests. Granted, the neomarxian perspective tends to emphasize the destabilizing consequences of these interests (the “growth machine,” for example), but by this day and age not all urban elites promote the ceaseless transformation of urban environments. Why as urbanists should we necessarily impute that agenda and our criticism of it to cities? If city users come to local consensus, and if they have a realistic strategy to accommodate the tides of capitalist dynamism outside city limits — two big “ifs” that go well beyond the scope of this post — then shouldn’t we just say good luck and God bless to you guys?

Of course this is a silly comparison.  At worst, an album-in-its-entirety concert is just bad, lifeless art. No gentrification, no reneging on the promise of new jobs, no regressive redistribution of wealth ever comes about when an 80s band trots out an album for eager listeners. (Well… a young band looking to get signed and pass the extortion threshold of a Concert Nation contract might beg to differ.) Our judgment of music is aesthetic; however, our judgement of urban policy is ultimately made on moral grounds.  Right?

Or, in the left criticism of historical preservation and New Urbanism, do we also sneak in a modernist aesthetic that obligates cities to continual innovation and the authentic expression of “our times”?  Is that really appropriate? Does that strike a blow for social justice, or just aesthetic snobbery?

out of the valley of the Dolls

Since we’re talking about Legs McNeil and Gilliam McCain’s Please Kill Me: The Uncensored Oral History of Punk, one of the most colorful quotes in a book chock full of them comes from Peter Jordan, the oft-forgotten replacement for bassist Arthur Kane in the New York Dolls. Jordan describes the 1971-74 milieu in which Kane fell in Connie Gripp (who later went on to greater notoriety as Dee Dee Ramone’s girlfriend and inspiration for “Glad To See You Go”):

             Arthur had a thing for tall girls. He always found these fucking enormous fucking tall girls, and the nuttier the better. He was very tall himself, maybe six foot two, and he liked to walk around at night. He’d roam through Times Square at four in the morning—he just loved roaming around the street—where he’d meet these enormous women. He had a knack for it.

            Arthur came up with a tremendous succession of Amazons. It was incredible. I couldn’t believe that there was so many spaced-out fucking chicks with dyed hair and torn black stockings in every city in the United States.

            Where did they come from? A million of them—all enormous and with similar characteristics—all about six foot one, would drink fucking whiskey out of the bottle, and be the kind of girls who would have a broken heel on their shoe. And Arthur would find them everywhere.

            Connie was one of them. She was pretty big—big butt, big tits, big laugh. She was hooking at that point, so Connie was the kind of girl who’d carry a knife, because she was peddling her ass and probably need one for protection. Also, she and Arthur were not the type of people to have a kitchen. So she didn’t go to the fucking kitchen and get a knife out of the goddamn drawer—she had to have a fucking knife in her bag. [pp. 147-8]

Jordan describes a way of life for denizens of an inner-city zone of vice that, in some respects, could have been ripped from the pages of a Chicago School ethnography circa 1930.  The imagery and symbolism are updated to the pre-punk 70s: a low-budget androgyny of used clothing and stringy long hair for the men, unironic torn black stockings for the women. However, the portrait of personally disorganized individuals leading deviant lives in socially disorganized neighborhoods is very much the same.  And, to borrow from contemporary ethnographer (and Chicago School devotee) Mitchell Duneier, the Bowery and the Lower East Side provide a “sustaining habitat” of clubs and bars, drug dealers and shooting galleries, thrift stores (not today’s vintage clothing boutiques) and low-rent/no-rent apartments, and a backdrop of urban crime and shocking violence that provides an uneasy shelter from mainstream surveillance. 

If I can use just a little bit more sociological jargon, the characters that populate Please Kill Me are very much failures of class reproduction. Hailing from working-class and lower-middle-class families at the onset of a bleak post-industrial transition, they seem to have no place to go but down—that is, downtown NYC, where they strike up marginal livings as junkies and prostitutes.  (The substantial coverage of female groupies and scenesters in Please Kill Me, more extensive and less sentimental than in most other rock books, should be read in this way.) Junkies, prostitutes, rock musicians—specifically, rock musicians seeking an uncommon alternative to the technically proficient stadium rock of the day—all of these vocations consign them to the bottom of the social hierarchy. It’s no coincidence “punk” has similar status connotations in prison slang. Of course, the final destination for these individuals is an early grave, as the lurid body count in Please Kill Me attests.

This view of NYC’s rock underground further informs the remarkable contrast with today’s indie-rock enclaves that I discussed in the last post. The stringy hair, drug habits and recycled clothes can still be seen in the Williamsburgs of today. However, they now signpost an increasingly organized (if still long-shot) route to musical recognition and economic success—blogger adulation, end-of-year “best of” lists, magazine covers, licensing and film soundtrack deals, a shout-out by Jay-Z— that was unimaginable in the heyday of the Dolls.  

How the capitalist consolidation of the urban underground came to pass is the subject of a vibrant academic debate around what could be called (with irony, of course) hipster studies.  Unlike the mainstream disdain experienced by NYC’s first generation of punk rockers, hipsters today are rewarded symbolically and (their dream) economically for the refined tastes and status distinctions they display as consumers and low-wage service workers. Urban sociologist (and—full disclosure—my good friend) Richard Lloyd gets us closer to the urban context when he emphasizes the post-Fordist neighborhood he calls neo-bohemia, where the symbolic income of hipster cachet allows the young and artful to be underpaid and overworked in and around the creative/service sectors of the global city.

I think there’s still more to say about the historical origins that I’ve emphasized in the last two posts. Bohemianism is a starting point for understanding the NYC 70s origins of punk rock that Please Kill Me documents, but for that matter so too is the world evoked by "Taxi Driver" where arty dilettantes need not apply. From this vantage point, the revalorization of musical and urban deviance over the last four decades is a shift of immense magnitude—a veritable contrast of night and day.

please skill me: the growing credentialism of NYC's rock underground

Using an admittedly unscientific sample of 38 indie-rock groups from Brooklyn, I poked around the bands’ Wikipedia pages and their underlying sources to look for any members’ college affiliations. In no time at all [update: and with further information from my sources; see below], I found information for 26 groups. Even if we assume the remaining 12 bands had no members with a college education, which seems really unlikely to me, this list is remarkable:

1. Dirty Projectors: Yale

2. Grizzly Bear: New York University

3. MGMT: Wesleyan

4. LCD Soundsystem: NYU, Bard

5. TV On The Radio: NYU

6. Gang Gang Dance

7. Vivian Girls: Pratt Institute

8. Vampire Weekend: Columbia

9. Yeasayer: Penn

10. Animal Collective: Boston University, Brandeis, NYU, Columbia

11. Hercules and Love Affair: Sarah Lawrence, Bard

12. The Pains Of Being Pure At Heart

13. Das Racist: Wesleyan

14. Crystal Stilts

15. Telepathe

16. Chairlift: University of Colorado

17. A Place To Bury Strangers

18. The Drums

19. Sharon Jones & The Dap-Kings: NYU

20. Suckers

21. Grizzly Bear (see #2)

22. Matt And Kim

23. Neon Indian: University of North Texas

24. St. Vincent: Berklee College of Music

25. Amazing Baby: Wesleyan, Bard

26. The National: University of Cincinatti

27. Panda Bear (also in Animal Collective): Boston University

28. The Antlers

29. Black Dice: Rhode Island School of Design

30. Antibalas: University of Michigan

31. Ninjasonik

32. Miles Benjamin Anthony Robinson: NYU

33. Class Actress: UC Berkeley

34. Japanther: Pratt

35. White Rabbit: University of Missouri

36. Bishop Allen: Harvard

37. Apache Beat

38. Here We Go Magic: School of the Museum of Fine Arts

39. Oakley Hall

40. Light Asylum

Of the 26 bands that I found information for, 20 have at least one member who came from a private institution. (Note that this list doesn’t account for whether anyone dropped out of college.) Public or private, there are an awful lot of highly exclusive institutions on this list. Interestingly, only one of these bands (actually, a solo performer) came from a music college, although obviously all kinds of colleges and universities offer formal music training. Still, if the latter isn’t what most band members took away from their college education, then we’re left with a lot of unnecessary schooling—a substantial degree of educational “credentialism,” as the academics call it.

Now let’s compare this to a different list: college affiliations for the nine bands featured most prominently in Legs McNeil and Gilliam McCain’s history of punk rock, Please Kill Me. This time I just looked at the Wikipedia pages, so the lack of information could mean I should have dug deeper. On the other hand, these musicians are far better known than anyone from Brooklyn’s current indie-rock ranks (certainly their Wikipedia pages are larger).

Velvet Underground

Lou Reed: Syracuse University

John Cale: Goldsmith College (University of London)

Sterling Morrison: Syracuse University, and later a Ph.D. at UT-Austin

Mo Tucker

The Stooges

Iggy Pop: dropped out of University of Michigan

Ron Asheton

Dave Alexander

Scott Asheton

James Williamson: Cal Poly Pomona (post-Stooges)

MC5

Fred “Sonic” Smith”

Wayne Kramer

Dennis Thompson

Rob Tyner

Michael Davis

New York Dolls

Billy Murcia

Arthur Kane: Pratt Institute

Johnny Thunders

David Johansen

Syl Sylvain

Patti Smith Group

Patti Smith: Glassboro State College

Lenny Kaye: Rutgers University

Ivan Kral: Geneseo College

Jay Dee Dougherty

Richard Sohl

The Heartbreakers

Richard Hell

Johnny Thunders

Walter Lure

Jerry Nolan

The Ramones

Dee Dee Ramone

Joey Ramone

Tommy Ramone

Johnny Ramone

Dead Boys

Cheetah Chrome

Jimmy Zero

Stiv Bators

Johnny Blitz

Television

Richard Lloyd

Tom Verlaine

Billy Ficca

Fred Smith

The Voidoids
Richard Hell
Robert Quine: Earlham College, J.D. from Washington University (St. Louis)
Ivan Julian
Marc Bell

This list isn't totally NYC-centric, but adding the Stooges and MC5 doesn’t doesn’t significantly boost the educational attainments of America’s punk-rock pioneers. The VU and the Patti Smith Group are pretty much it for the college bands. Adding two more CBGBs pioneers, albeit of questionable punk pedigree:

Blondie

Debbie Harry: Centenary College

Chris Stein

Clem Burke

Jimmy Destri

Talking Heads

David Byrne: RISD

Tina Weymouth: RISD

Chris Frantz: RISD

Jerry Harrison: Harvard

This comparative method is crude but, I think, highly suggestive. It indicates how musicians associated with NYC’s rock underground have become considerably more college educated in the last 40 years or so. Furthermore, they now tend to come from highly prestigious institutions. Talking Heads, not the Patti Smith Group (much less the Ramones), represents the norm of educational attainment for indie musicians today.

Needless to say, by no means should we conclude that today’s bands are more intelligent, more artful, or more creative than the original punk rock groups. For the purposes of this argument, let’s presume today’s bands are less so—less intelligent, less artful, less creative. That’s not a totally absurd proposition, considering how much more difficult the social, cultural, and economic milieu for punk rock music in this country was in the early 1970s. The question then is: what does the increase in the level of/prestige associated with underground musicians’ college education mean?

First, let me discuss three possible objections to my argument:

1. I’m comparing apples and oranges in comparing 1970s punk rock to today’s indie music. Rock’s subterranean jungle has been quite fertile since punk rock, and in addition to the trajectory of college-radio/alternative/indie rock (I can’t keep those distinctions straight anymore), we could just as well have looked at hardcore punk, DIY punk, or the crossover/metal genre. Not to imply any sense of inferiority, but presumably these latter genres would reveal educational backgrounds closer to the 1970s pattern.

That’s a fair criticism. First, I’ve compared these two different historical scenes to keep geography constant, in keeping with the creative city thesis that places with high degrees of artistic specialization and agglomeration retain these competitive distinctions over time, regardless of what technology or markets make possible. If NYC is indeed the model of a “Warhol economy”—the name of a book by Elizabeth Currid, just one of many, that makes such an argument—then let’s stay focused on NYC. Second, one could argue that both 70s punk rock and millennial indie rock carry the torch for a modernist aesthetic of innovation and social revolt. That’s a complicated argument to sustain, perhaps, considering how much bands like the Ramones and the Heartbreakers looked to earlier times for musical inspiration. (Where’s Jon Savage when you need him?)

2. In fact, educational attainment at the level of college and beyond has risen across the board in the U.S. over the 40-some years between these two periods. Even more, the growth of educational attainment in New York City has outpaced the U.S. as a whole. (The table below, which I constructed from easily accessed U.S. Census data, only goes back to 1990, but the increases it shows probably extend back further.) The pattern revealed by comparing the two lists is just one manifestation of similar trends across American cities, or at least creative cities, as a whole.

That’s true. I certainly don’t mean to imply this educational shift is unique to New York City. As an anecdote, I know of at least two recent graduates from the exclusive liberal arts college where I teach who have gone on to make a living with their indie-rock bands. They’re doing it in cities, but not in New York City.

3. In this same time period, educational attainment has increased within creative-economy sectors. Similar patterns of skill intensification could be found in the industries of technological innovation, film and television, design, publishing, and so on.

I don’t have data on this, but I suspect it’s true. Still, I think skill intensification means something entirely different for rock music than it does for, say, computer engineering.  Consider again how few of these highly educated bands, so far as I can tell, are educated in musical composition or performance; that’s probably not what they went to college to do. And really, does it require a higher level of musical proficiency to play indie rock than it does punk rock? Grizzly Bear certainly plays their instruments better than the Ramones did, in a technical sense at least—but better than Television?

In truth, these so-called objections don’t explain away the change I purport to have shown. Instead, they just point to broader contexts in which the changes in NYC’s rock underground have taken place. The question remains: what does all this academic credentialism mean for the world of rock music? 

[Update 1/21/11: an anonymous source embedded in the Brooklyn indie-rock world gave me information for #4, 7, 9, 11 and 25. Rob Cardenaz says the bassist for the Dap-Kings went to NYU.]

 

heavy metal before subculture

Anyone who went to an American high school in the 1980s or later, when black t-shirts displaying stylized band logos were a common sight, is likely to be confused by what “heavy metal” meant in the prior decade. I’m still unsure, frankly. Today, the consensus is that in the 1970s, heavy metal was whatever Black Sabbath and Judas Priest were playing out of the gate (their first albums appeared in 1970 and 1974, respectively). However, that ignores how broadly the term was applied in this decade to bands across the spectrum of acid rock, boogie and progressive rock. Using Google, I found a 1973 concert review in Billboard Magazine of Blue Öyster Cult (mustn’t forget that umlaut!) lauds their “quintessential heavy metal style.” Who today recognizes the Cult as heavy metal pioneers?

By the late 1970s, things were further complicated by that other heavy metal that teenage guys might obsess about: the soft-porn illustrated sci-fi/fantasy magazine originating out of France. The first American issue of Heavy Metal came out in 1977; four years later, “Heavy Metal” the animated feature film became a midnight movie staple. You might expect by this point that its soundtrack would borrow liberally from the identically-named genre. You would be wrong, of course. A Dio-era Black Sabbath track (the ripping “Mob Rules”) pretty much exhausts what today we’d consider heavy metal on that double album. Okay, Sammy Hagar’s title track is pretty rocking, too, but the other title track that got bigger play came from Eagles guitarist Don Felder; needless to say, no way was that metal. And Devo? Donald Fagen? Stevie Nicks?

I’m thinking it was the “New Wave of British Heavy Metal” that established heavy metal as a musical style or genre that bands could be categorically associated with. But NWOBHM didn’t happen until the late 70s, and probably none of those bands made a dent on American popular culture before the 1980 debut album by Iron Maiden (the ultimate black t-shirt band). This argument is supported by an internet search of “heavy metal” in the Google Book archives. In the 1970s, this term almost entirely calls up geology and chemistry publications; by the 1980s, the music books and magazine articles rise to the top.

Rather than a musical style or genre, heavy metal in the 1970s seemed to refer to a musical aesthetic, even a dynamic, that a group might use on particular songs. Deep Purple and Led Zeppelin are perennially identified as two heavy metal groups, but really neither band was easily confined to the label. Just to focus on Zeppelin, the driving riffs of “Whole Lotta Love” certainly qualifies that song as proto-metal, but would you call their sock-hop slow-dance anthem “Stairway to Heaven” metal?  Compare this to the case of Metallica: when they recorded their first ballad, “Fade to Black,” for their second album in 1984, no one would doubt it was a heavy metal ballad.

What was this heavy metal aesthetic of the 1970s? Wikipedia’s entry on “heavy metal” states, “In 1979, lead New York Times popular music critic John Rockwell described what he called ‘heavy-metal rock’ as ‘brutally aggressive music played mostly for minds clouded by drugs,’ and, in a different article, as ‘a crude exaggeration of rock basics that appeals to white teenagers.’” That's pretty good; come to think of it, that’s not too bad a characterization of what the illustrated Heavy Metal magazine was striving for in its approach to sci-fi/fantasy, either. But for sheer poetry, I prefer the opening passage of Chuck Eddy’s Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe:

The turbulence that calls itself “heavy metal,” or the best of it anyway, is a triumph of vulgarity, velocity, verbal directness, violent apathy, conceptual simplicity, pissed-off punkitude, adolescent overeating. Once upon a time, for years and years and years, it was the one place financially and familially and fornicatively frustrated post-pube brats (musically inclined or otherwise)could turn to vent their drunken distress or hear others approximate the same. (Misery loves company.) Best of all, metallic heaviosity had NO REDEEMING SOCIAL VALUE, and it was real loud about it and funny too, and sometimes (once in a while) it still is.

(Chuck Eddy is, of course, no conventional music critic. With this criterion, he undertakes possibly the most idiosyncratic ranking ever in the name of heavy metal: the New York Dolls’ debut comes in at #6, [R.I.P.] Teena Marie’s Emerald City at #9 [!!!!], etc. Still, it’s seems significant that he identifies himself as “a seventies snob.”)

I’ve been thinking about what heavy metal meant in the 1970s as I re-read Will Straw’s 1984 article, “Characterizing Rock Culture: The Case of Heavy Metal.” Examining the pre-punk, pre-disco era “from 1969-70 to 1974-6,” Straw identifies important context for the teenage wasteland that Eddy rhapsodizes about:

Suburban life is incompatible for a number of reasons with regular attendance at clubs where one may hear records or live performers; its main sources of music are radio, retail chain record stores (usually in shopping centres), and occasional large concerts (most frequently in the nearest municipal stadium)…  [T]his institutional network… in conjunction with suburban lifestyles, […] defined a form of involvement in rock culture, discouraging subcultural activity of the degree associated with disco or punk, for example. Heavy metal culture may be characterized in part by the absence of a strong middle stratum between the listener and the fully professional group… Observation suggests that heavy metal listeners rarely become record collectors to a significant extent, that they are not characterized by what might be called ‘secondary involvement’ in music: the hunting down of rare tracks, the reading of music-oriented magazines, the high recognition of record labels or producers. To the extent that a heavy metal ‘archive’ exists, it consists of albums from the 1970s on major labels, kept in print constantly and easily available in chain record stores.

Upon reading these claims, maybe your first impulse is to shake your head in disbelief and state the obvious: he’s wrong. I know that’s what I did. As everyone knows, heavy metal as established by NWOBHM and then the American thrash scene—think of all those black t-shirts for Metallica, Slayer, Megadeth, Anthrax, Exodus, Testament, and on and on and on—is associated with a subculture of demo cassettes, import zines, bootleg videos, independent record labels, and specialty record stores. And cities have been at the heart of this subculture: London, the Bay Area of California, New York/Long Island, and so on. This counterargument, however, adopts today’s revisionist, 80s-centric viewpoint. History may have proved Will Straw wrong (he concedes as much in the 1993 second edition of The Cultural Studies Reader that I have), but that doesn’t mean he was wrong for the 1970s. So again, I ask: What was “heavy metal” in the 1970s?

Finally, it’s worth noting the theoretical binary that Straw’s argument leaves us with: urban/subculture versus suburban/mass culture. This is a framework deserving of further scrutiny. Are cities the ideal platform for that “strong middle stratum between the listener and the fully professional group”? Are they the only such platform? And, perhaps most importantly, what role do cities play still now that the internet disembodies so much of the DIY institutional networks that musical subcultures thrive upon?

making the scene in the creative city

In exploring how cities sustain musical creativity, you eventually get around to the creative city thesis. This is most commonly associated with Richard Florida, the regional planning professor and urban consultant who contends in books like The Rise of the Creative Class that the most prosperous cities and regions are the ones with the highest density of creative class members: artists, writers, scientists, scholars, designers, architects, and others who innovate new forms and new uses, plus the professionals (doctors, lawyers, accountants, etc.) who exercise discretionary judgment as part of their work. Places that draw this creative workforce, he argues, do so because they offer the lifestyles, amenities, and social ambiance that this population seeks; in turn, the employers, industrial activity, and regional competitiveness follow the creative class.

Florida has taken heat for some of his policy implications, his consulting side business, and—let’s be frank—the wide attention his ideas have received. In truth, his argument isn’t as revolutionary as it’s sometimes portrayed. Most geographers studying the economy’s cutting edges have long recognized the general importance of clustering skilled workers (see, for instance, the work of Allan J. Scott).  

Personally, I’ve met Richard Florida, he blurbed my first book, and I’m happy to credit him with synthesizing an often jargon-filled scholarship (again, see the work of Allan J. Scott!), backing it up with catchy data (his “Gay Index” will have to be the subject of another post), and clearly explaining it to a broad non-academic audience. I make finer distinctions, different conceptualizations, and certain counterclaims when responding to his work as an academic, but I think he and many other scholars are on-the-money in rejecting old wisdoms about creativity, technical, artistic, or otherwise. For instance, think about how we might associate these claims to high-tech engineers but not rock musicians:

1. Creativity results from individual talent.
2. Creative talent is independent of locational setting or social networks.
3. With the proverbial punch of the clock, creative talent can be turned on, continuously exercised, rationally managed, and then turned off.
4. Creative workers care less about lifestyle opportunities or supportive cultures and more about low taxes, cheap real estate, and good schools for the kids.

 
In fact high-tech engineers and rock musicians, it turns out, aren’t so different in how they relate to the people they work with, the populations and neighborhoods they live among, and the locational amenities they can take advantage of—which is positively, interactively, and synergistically. Much of the “revolutionary” impact of Florida’s creative city thesis can be understood by this generalizing sweep.  

This provides a moment to consider the multidisciplinarity of this blog’s perspective on musical urbanism. In many ways, I share the generalizing approach illustrated by Florida’s creative city thesis. After all, this is what the social sciences are about (or at least, for the eggheads among you, the structuralist and nomothetic traditions in the social sciences). Beneath the individuality of human biography and the novelty of day-to-day life, social life is organized by broader patterns, shared contexts, and common forces. These can be helpfully understood through universal, abstract descriptions of social life—the stuff of hypothesis-testing, theory-building, and other intellectual activities that scientists care deeply about. An abstract, generalized view of social life is also intrinsic to any discussion of policy proposals. If the lessons of, say, New York City couldn’t be understood in universal, abstract terms, then they’d have no relevance to, say, Cleveland or Barcelona.
 
Music enchants us with its particularity—a melody like no other, an especially tantalizing arrangement or production, a song that we associate with a specific time and place in our lives. Arguably cities work the same way, or at least “great cities” do (is there a musical equivalent to the concern for placelessness?). It can seem odd or even antithetical to consider music through an abstracting, universalizing lens as ethnomusicologists or cognitive psychologists are wont to do.  Richard Florida doesn’t tackle music this way, but he does think about the setting for musical creativity in such a manner:

Scenes are basically vehicles for producing, consuming and improving products – and they’re responsible for creating experiences too. They represent “modes of organizing cultural production and consumption,” according to Terry Clark and his associates at the University of Chicago.
 
The real key to understanding a scene, he argues, lies in the way “collections of amenities and people serve to foster certain shared values and tastes, certain ways of relating to one another and legitimating what one is doing or not doing.”  

Scenes are to music what Silicon Valley is to the high-tech industry—a vehicle for bringing together highly skilled talent, sophisticated consumers, cultural gatekeepers who identify new trends, economic infrastructure such as state-of-the-art recording studios and leading venues, and business moguls who take those trends to market in a concentrated physical and geographic space.

Putting the definition of “scenes” or other concepts aside, there’s nothing wrong with a universalizing approach to music or cities. It goes against the grain of how we listen to music and how we inhabit cities, to be sure. It’s the reason why Richard Florida’s idea that Detroit should use the music of the Stooges to brand itselfcan seem a little absurd. But when we assert that punk rock or hip hop constitute social movements (as a thousand undergraduate papers have), we draw on this universalizing approach. I don’t think it can be dismissed out of hand. But if we’re to understand musical urbanism in its particularity as well, and further to understand the general relevance of its particularity, then we’ll need to articulate a multidisciplinary epistemology and methodology for such an undertaking. At its most ambitious, that’s a key project for this blog.  

the urban ethos on a Saturday night

My considerations of musical urbanism owe a good deal to the work of Adam Krims, particularly his book Music and Urban Geography. Like much scholarly work on popular music, at times it’s a little weird to read his highly academic language (I had to look up one of his favorite terms, “cathexis”) applied to the Wu-Tang Clan, to name just one example. But Krims’ knowledge and love of music are clear, and his ideas are often quite helpful for thinking about the relationship of music to the urban. Case in point: the “urban ethos,” his framework for understanding how cities are represented, fictionally or otherwise, in a context of real history and social structure:

[T]here is a range of possible, and more or less likely, representations of the city in the corpus of… commercial popular music, and… certain representations call for framing at certain times… It is the scope of that range of urban representations and their possible modalities, in any given time span, that I call the urban ethos. The urban ethos is thus not a particular representation but rather a distribution of possibilities, always having discernable limits as well as common practices. It is not a picture of how life is in any particular city. Instead, it distills publicly disseminated notions of how cities are generally, even though it may be disproportionately shaped by the fate of particular cities… (pg. 7).

I’ve been trying on this concept of the urban ethos recently while listening to Suede, the 90s British group. In their heyday I didn’t pay too much attention to Suede; some of their songs were undeniably catchy, but at the time I was generally more focused on American indie-rock. However, the intervening years recast the mix of influences at the heart of Suede in a more favorable light. Jeff Buckley especially rehabilitated the genius of the Smiths for anyone who didn’t identify as an introspective, sexually confused kid (or a member of a chicano subculture, apparently); a string of exciting British 70s glam-rock compilations led me into a serious reappraisal of Mick Ronson-era David Bowie; and I discovered the early Scott Walker albums. Finally, last year’s excellent retrospective The Best of Suede made a persuasive case for the band’s role as the first band to spearhead the Britpop revolution. Add in Suede’s excellent songwriting and “muso” sensibility in recycling retro elements of musical styles and visual signifiers, and you’ve got a formula for repeated listenings.

Many Suede songs evoke a concrete urban location, but an urban ethos is particularly evident on their excellent 1997 single “Saturday Night.” At first glance, the song suggests a variant on the “we’re gonna have a good time/we’re gonna rock tonight” genre of lyrics: the “we’re going out into the city tonight” theme. For other examples, think Petula Clark’s “Downtown” (which Krims discusses in some length in Music and Urban Geography), or Foghat’s “Fool For The City.” The video for “Saturday Night” suggests only a general, contemporarenous relevance for that theme; its signifiers of 90s youth fashion and London’s underground Tube could be meaningfully placed into any number of British pop music videos of that era.

The outlines of a historically specific urban ethos begin to appear, however, when we get to the lyrics of the bridge: “We'll go to peepshows and freak shows/We'll go to discos, casinos/We'll go where people go and let go.”  Just where does one find peepshows and freak shows in the city? Maybe these refer to destinations in the 'immoral' city’s notorious zone of vice and deviance, but then why would the narrator want to take a female companion there? And why to the tune of a sad but ultimately hopeful ballad?

I think these lyrics suggest an older, historic orientation to the city: the attraction exerted by urban arcades, boardwalks, and other zones of proletarian mass leisure in the modern city. Mass leisure because escape into the crowd and its anonymity is the draw; proletarian because these zones draw the disapproval but evade the regulation of bourgeois morality’s guardians. Please, anyone with greater authority on British cities should correct me, but “peepshows and freakshows” to me evoke a Victorian era of mass leisure. Admittedly, casinos and discos bring us closer to the corporate amusements found in the present day, but their inclusion simply extends the resonance of these urban emblems to contemporary listeners. The unbridled enthusiasm for the city depicted by the lyrics suggests a much older view of the city, one that (at least for Americans) is interrupted by the middle-class fears evoked by the post-WWII urban crisis.

Two further aspects of “Saturday Night” clarify this urban ethos. First, the lyrics carefully skirt any mention of romance between the narrator and the female “she” that he describes. Considering Suede’s penchant for androgyny and sexual ambiguity, I like to believe the relationship evoked by the song is a platonic one between a gay or sexually confused male and his female friend—the proverbial “girls who like boys who like boys” scenario. The high-register la-la-la-la-la-laaaa’s of the coda, so evocative of a Morrissey vocal (“The Boy With The Thorn In His Side,” for instance), further suggests this interpretation. Hesitating to identify the narrator’s sexuality might be the songwriter’s technique to broaden the song’s appeal (it could be about two best girlfriends), but the heteronormative machismo that working-class culture famously enforces makes it likely a male narrator wouldn’t be able to announce his homosexuality, even to himself.

Second, there’s the music. I plead guilt in my analysis of the urban ethos here to overemphasizing lyrics over musical content, which is a shame when we’re talking about melody, arrangement, and performance this beautiful. The descending chords of the verse (Bowie’s “Life On Mars,” anyone?”) juxtapose with the elevation of the chorus, in its vocal register and ethereal keyboards, to convey a musical sense of escape not usually associated with the “we’re going out into the city tonight” theme. Think about how “Downtown” or “Fool For The City” are pointedly upbeat; they convey an excitement and enthusiasm for the city that never calls into question the mundane rounds of private life, only normalize the city as an acceptable site for temporarily having some fun before returning to home and work. But in “Saturday Night,” the melancholy chord structure of the verse emphasizes the sadness, even alienation, of daily life, while the uplift of the chorus emphasize the solace and refuge offered by the city. However briefly, it’s only in the anonymities and carnival of city life that we can begin to find ourselves.

dancing in uptown Kingston

 

Ran across "This is Ska!," a light but fun promotional film from 1964, on Dangerous Minds (one of my go-to culture aggregators). Some thoughts: 

1.Wow, that place is jumping. It must have been amazing to be young at that moment in post-independence Kingston.

2: [Around 3:45] Really? That’s how you "dance the ska": plant your feet, wave your arms? Kinda surprised this hasn't made it into a low-impact aerobics class yet.

3. The handful of ska legends shown here—Jimmy Cliff, the Maytals, Prince Buster—leads me to think this line-up was more or less the same one that represented Jamaica in the famous ska showcase at the 1964 World Fair in New York. The top billing of Byron Lee & the Dragonaires (shown here playing the first song, their post-independence "Jamaica Ska") was a controversial one, as Kevin O’Brien Chang and Wayne Chen write in Reggae Routes: The Story of Jamaican Music:  

            There are conflicting stories about the circumstances surrounding the tour, particularly the decision to choose Byron Lee as the backing band. According to [Clement] Coxsone: 'Seaga just board the bandwagon. They send people to represent the ska business who don’t even know anything about it.' Garth White makes this judgment: 'They left out The Skatalites and Bop and Persian in what seemed to be class bias. There was absolutely no way you could compare Byron Lee as representative of ska with The Skatalites, which was the top and most authentic band of the time.' Jackie Mittoo was more matter of fact: 'They send Byron Lee because The Skatalites smoked Ganja.'

            Byron Lee himself tells this story: 'We (Byron Lee and the Dragonaires) were booked to appear at the Manhattan Centre. The government was planning this ska tour to the World’s Fair and heard about our gig, so they asked us if we would back-up the singers since we were already going to be in New York. But we were never paid by the government. We played for free, to help promote ourselves and the music. So all this talk about getting out The Skatalites is foolishness. Furthermore, at the time we were the number one live backing band in Jamaica. The Skatalites were fantastic in the studio, but they were never a popular live band. We were the backing for almost all the live shows… It’s true ska was not a dance at first. When we went to the world’s fair there were dances all over the place. The Twist, Mashed Potato, Cha Cha Cha, plenty of them. In order to compete and sell our product, we Jamaicans had to have a dance too. That really is how the ska dance came about. In a sense it was Jamaican Twist' (pp. 36-7).

4. The story of Jamaican music’s role in the nation’s post-independence history is a well-told one. Lloyd Bradley’s This is Reggae Music [published in the UK as Bass Culture] is just one source that elaborates on the political opportunism of Edward Seaga, who was Minister of Welfare and Development at the time of the World Fair showcase (and producer of Byron Lee’s first record, according to Bradley). By the late 1970s, his conservative-leaning Jamaican Labour Party had plunged Jamaica into virtual civil war, drawing political lines between whites, black bourgeoisie and US corporate interests on the JLP’s side and working people, rastafarian “sufferahs” and left intelligentsia on the opposing side, alongside (if not completely trusting) Michael Manley’s People’s National Party. Bob Marley famously held up the political rivals’ hands on stage at 1978’s One Love Peace Concert at Kingston’s National Stadium, but the peace never lasted.  

Jamaica’s post-independence cleavage drew geographical divides as well: the north coast’s sanitized resorts (where Byron Lee earned his living and reputation) and uptown Kingston where the city’s ‘respectable’ population lived, versus the ghettoes of West Kingston. The sounds and sufferings in West Kingston’s Trenchtown are well known, thanks to global iconicity of Bob Marley and other roots reggae legends. But what were people listening to uptown?

“This is Ska!” offers one answer. It was filmed at the Sombrero Club (on 52b Molynes Road—now the site of a concrete manufacturer, if Google is correct), one of a handful of uptown clubs where the pioneers of ska and rocksteady made their name. Make no mistake: these genres were commonly thought of as “ghetto music” of the day, so to bring them inside in cavernous halls like the Sombrero Club is to pile a tinderbox of youth, sex, liquor, and a post-independence hunger for a better life than the deprivations of old. Never mind whether the band is authentic or not—that crowd is alive. Could the post-independence ideology of national unity  contain them? For how long?

Fast-forward to a different nightclub, featured in Theodoros Bafaloukos’s 1978 film Rockers.  

Is this uptown? The "class bias" revealed in the rasta takeover (“Remove ya!”) by DJ Dirty Harry and drummer extraordinaire Leroy “Horsemouth” Wallace suggests it is.  The club manager calls in the police too quickly and too comfortably for this to be Trenchtown. And what’s the crowd listening to? Disco music of the most neutered, Euro variety. In later posts I’ll wax poetic about disco, but context is important here: in uptown Kingston, 1978, disco is the soundtrack to Third World bourgeois aspirations and the neoliberal erosion of post-independence solidarity.