the dull ubiquity of placeless music festivals

Some questions for investigations here, presented in the form of a rant. As part of my research in musical urbanism, I consume a fair amount of music coverage in print and online. Jesus Christ, all I seem to find these days is "writing" about generic touring festivals headlined by Coldplay/Metallica/Fiona Apple/Beach House/you name it. News about new music festivals. News about cancelled music festivals. News about how the concert industry, which has put so much of its eggs in the festival basket, now outpaces the recording industry. And the evergreen question, what's the line-up for Coachella 2013? Look, I fully support the right of youth to indulge in the mass communion of bad sightlines, expensive food, sunburns and portapotty stench for the romantic pursuit of sex, drugs and [insert any pop genre here]. I've indulged in that myself.  Coachella, Glastonbury, Sasquatch, Werchter et al—by all means, let them be the gateway drug to a rich life as a music listener. But it's interesting and, frankly, discouraging that the generic, touring festival seems to be the end game for live music these days, with generally no thought being put to how live music might be presented more imaginatively and meaningfully for listeners and musicians alike. And, conversely, little attention is given to those more imaginative and meaningful festivals.   Place is an especially important concern here. While geography is what ostensibly differentiates one Live Nation mega-event from the next, inside the venues the performers, the lineups, the layout, the vendors etc. are generally undistinguishable and internchangeable across the events. They're carefully themed spaces that are paradoxically placeless, at least beyond the conceits of the event. The rise of generic touring festivals don't yet make me worry for the fate of cities, urban economies, or local music scenes. But I sometimes wonder if the dull ubiquity of big-money touring festivals makes younger audiences eager for the theming of their everday spaces: the commodification of colleges and universities, the insularity of the hipster neighborhood, and so on.

It's understandable why 'independent' music, which at one pre-ironic point in cultural history was opposed to such commodification, increasingly hitches its wagon to corporate music festivals today. Although touring the music-festival circuit can be a draining, exhausting slog, the promotional opportunity can't be beat, at least when these events are all any music publication or blog wants to write about. I suspect it also helps that "indie rock" is now mainly the purview of 20- and 30-somethings without dependents to tend to.

This is something that the EDM industry has especially figured out. The facts that this music thrives in nightclubs and other smaller venues, and that rock music has long dominated the festival circuit, make me think there's nothing intrinsically "rave" to the big-field setting for EDM festivals today. EDM has more likely thrived because the barriers to entry for performers are low. Bringing along a laptop or (for the old-school purist) a crate of records is all it takes for most DJs to hit the stage—no long load-ins or soundchecks necessary. Perhaps this infrastructural advantage is the real basis for the recurring rockist insult that "no talent is required to play electronic dance music."

At least those are my hypotheses. Here are a few more.

1. The context for this state of affairs isn't live music itself. Obviously, this is what happens after the recording industry loses its profit model. Live music is what David Harvey would call a spatial fix—a secondary circuit of accumulation that capital taps into when profits in the primary industrial circuit dry up. We're simply seeing the next iteration out from the recording industry's abandonment of artist development and its short-sighted embrace of the quick-profit singles market.

The above means let's not celebrate the initiative and entrepreneurialism of the "concert industry" just yet, since the high rate of event cancellations suggests they're still largely throwing business models against the wall to see what sticks. An important question for further investigation is, Just how distinct in name/experience/profile are the players and financial backers in the "concert industry" from the rest of the "music industry"?

2. If we might expect the bovine migration of the corporate sector to the music-festival sector, I'm more disheartened by the failure of imagination on the part of the music media to write about anything else. Their rote, uncritical coverage isn't limited to summertime, when festivals generally overshadow the release of noteworthy albums and (another dismaying phenomenon) the TV season for Idol, The Voice, etc. How many freakin' tweets have I read about Coachella: the bands, the fashions, the line-up for next year, the threat of its cancellation, yada yada yada? And South By Southwest... thank god for the SXSW tweet-blocker. I think at least three factors could be culprits:

a) the collapse of the publishing industry, which has shrunk staff, dried up money for original reporting (i.e., news that isn't "researched" via Twitter or a YouTube livestream), and made it hard for remaining music/arts & culture reporters—particularly at weekly alternative newspapers, still the source for the best local music coverage—to keep their ears to the local ground and make a living;

b) the tail-wags-dog rationale of bigger publications covering "what younger readers want." So Spin Magazine calls its July/August edition the "Outside Issue," etc. Implicitly, this further yields the album market to older/occasional listeners who (it will be assumed) want "the next Adele."

c) the convergence of culture reporting and business reporting that has been encouraged by the dominance of Richard Florida's creative-city paradigm. While the shrewd promoters will spin a line about how their event borrows from the SXSW model, city papers can now rationalize their arts coverage as a means to a more 'legitimate' end.

3. What's perhaps most surprising is the absence of traditional urban business community involvement in the music-festival sector. Why is this? The rare "post-rave growth coalition" notwithstanding, I suspect the players in most urban growth machines rarely overlap with the world of festival promoting. This may be because many of these events are held in big, exurban fields, which suggests that large-scale property owners will be the main node of connection. But so far I don't see much active participation (as opposed to passive profit-making) in festivals that happen in city environments either, short of a few notable exceptions—Austin, Berlin, etc.

Traditionally, being an urban booster on the chamber of commerce has been the antithesis of hip. Historically, this has been the basis for criticism of its philistine Babbitry. In these ironic, hipster-saturated times, it's a rare source of integrity for the urban business community. I happened upon a rare music event organized by a urban business improvement district recently: the Downtown Albany Blues Music Competition. Evidently the Chamber of Commerce even got to select the line-up of performing. How "hip" is that?

the hipsterization of global protest reporting

Maria came to the Kremlin demonstration wearing her designer eyeglasses. Does that explain why she protests?

Many commentators have pointed out how after big American news media (many of them regularly accused of liberal bias) refused to report on Occupy Wall Street for several weeks, they then often sought to explain the movement by characterizing activists as privileged, college-educated, don't-they-have-a-job-somewhere "hipsters." I see in today's New York Times that reporters are now turning to this catchphrase to sum up the face of protests in Russia.

Here is the rub for Vladimir V. Putin: The people who stood outside the Kremlin on Saturday, chanting epithets directed at him, are the ones who have prospered greatly during his 12 years in power.


They were well traveled and well mannered; they wore hipster glasses. They were wonky (some held aloft graphs showing statistical deviations that they said proved election fraud). In short, they were young urban professionals, a group that benefited handsomely from Moscow’s skyrocketing real estate market and the trickle-down effect of the nation’s oil wealth.


Maria A. Mikhaylova came to the demonstration in designer eyeglasses and with her hair tied back with a white ribbon, the symbol of the new opposition movement. Ms. Mikhaylova, 35, works in a Moscow bank, and said her goal was not to upend Mr. Putin’s government. “We don’t want any violence,” she said, but rather to compel the political system to take account of the concerns of people like her.
"Boosted by Putin, Russia’s Middle Class Turns on Him" (Andrew E. Kramer and David M. Herszenhorn, New York Times, December 12, 2011)

The NY Times world news gets syndicated across many U.S. news outlets, and this apparently isolated example of hipster reporting has already circulated widely. But of course, the NY Times isn't alone in using this particular reporting shorthand. A quick Google search on "hipster Putin protest" yielded more examples of Russian protest reporting and analysis using the term.

[Quoting a Vice.com interview] "The endless number of hysterical hipsters throughout social media kind of “legitimised” my election fraud," he said. "I was checking the TV and websites and I realised that there is total lawlessness in the whole country. I realised nothing could stop me from stealing votes."
"Russian Political Strategist Claims to Have Rigged Duma Elections in Vice Interview" (Michael Rundle, Huffinginton Post, December 12, 2011)


Is it the Slavic Spring, the Hipster Rebellion, or the Snow Revolution? Russia’s anti-Kremlin protesters may be united in their determination to press for fair elections but there is no agreement on what the movement should be called.
"A Revolution — but by What Name?" (Tony Halpin, The Times [UK], December 9, 2011)


When his eyes turned to what passed for leadership on the square in Moscow, Putin no doubt burst out laughing. There was Bozhena Rynska, the Russian Paris Hilton, front and center, emphasizing that these protests were not about substance, not about the country -- just about a cadre of communists and nationalists boosted by another group of young hipsters who'd decided that demonstrating was the new black, a funny goof to pass an idle weekend until the next red carpet.
"The Futile Demonstrations in Russia" (Kim Zigfield, December 10, 2011, American Thinker)


According to the Financial Times the swarm was cut from an eclectic swathe of Russin society, including fascist flag-bearing nationalists, communists and liberal hipsers, all united in rejecting the Kremlin's authoritarian model of "managed democracy."
"Moscow Messiah Feels Heat of Arab Winter" (Michael Hughes, Examiner.com, December 11, 2011)


         [Blogger Alexei] Navalny also strikes a chord with Anton Nikolayev, a left-wing artist and activist. He's part of the network of Twitter users who are mobilizing support for Navalny in jail.
        "Common liberal people are looking to his blog, and they believe him, and he is the only man who can take all the hipsters to go on the street, and he is a very significant figure in this street politic now," Nikolayev said.
"Kremlin Cracks Down, Arrests Prominent Critic" (NPR, December 8, 2011)


But the obvious hero of Monday's protest was Navalny. Through his hugely popular blog, he had called on many of his fans to attend, and when he took the microphone, he had a simple message for the hipster demographic. "They can laugh and call us microbloggers," he said. "They can call us the hamsters of the Internet. Fine. I am an Internet hamster ... But I know they are afraid of us."
Occupy the Kremlin: Russia's Election Lets Loose Public Rage (Simon Shuster, Time, December 5, 2011)

The point here isn't to focus on whether Russia has hipsters, or how many of these Russian hipsters have taken part in protests against Putin's election fraud, or whether there's a global wave of hipster protest in modern nations, or whether Marx and his intellectual descendants were wrong to expect revolt to come from the "truly" downtrodden.

It's simply to notice that the term "hipster"—still questionable if not derogatory among 20- and 30-somethings—has now undeniably slipped its semantic homeland in North America and the UK to become a media red herring of global proportions. As we saw in reporting on Occupy Wall Street, the reference to "hipster" sidesteps serious consideration of the underlying issues in these protests, relegating the political refusals of young people across the world to the lifestyle activity of a status group. So let's mark today as another milestone in the degeneration of media discourse into what C. Wright Mills called crackpot realism.

Importantly, I think we have some complicity in this. By "we," I mean the learned or culturally omnivorous participants and spectators in internet chatter, academic debate, and lifestyle marketing that sustains our are-we-or-aren't-we speculations on the hipster, its aesthetics, and its ranks. This discourse has become so prolific and so kneejerk that it has diminished the quality of our own considerations of real political issues. (All you folks looking for the "soundtrack to #OWS," this means you, among others.) Let's turn a page, people. Stop instinctively talking and writing about "what we know," do some research about some other part of the world—across the planet, or just across town—and start using a genuinely political voice.

living the urban crisis at the new wave rent party

I recently downloaded the reissued Human Switchboard album, Who's Landing in my Hangar? Anthology 1977-1984, which set me off again obsessing about a subgenre of new wave that I've never really seen recognized.  I don't even know how best to name this subgenre, although I'm convinced it has a musical coherence.  I'll call it new wave rent party to evoke an emblematic scene for this music: 

1979, Manhattan, a 5th-floor walk-up on 2nd Avenue between 28th and 29th. Carla, 26, and Michelle, 25, college friends from Rutgers University, moved to The City three years ago to the horror of their parents, who are waiting for the phone call from the NYPD informing them that their daughters were raped and stabbed on their way from home.  Neither of the girls can exactly allay their parents' fears, but they felt they had to leave New Jersey because New York could give them three things: 

1. real jobs that will give them a chance to use their degrees 
2. a chance to fool around with guys who don't want to stay in New Jersey, inherit their fathers' accounting firms, and expect their wives to have kids
3. bars, clubs, movies, 24-hour restaurants, theater... the NIGHTLIFE! 

The girls' roommate, a SVA student from Japan named Sukiko, moved back to Japan on last-minute notice, leaving Carla and Michelle behind in rent.  It looks like this guy Marshall, a gay friend of Carla's (can't WAIT to tell the parents about that situation), can move in next month, but their shady Greek landlord (who's NEVER around to fix the hall light or replace the moldy shower unit) is threatening to evict them unless they can come up with the $250 rent.  It's not like there aren't other places to live, but Manhattan can be really HAIRY in a lot of places, and the girls have spent too much time learning the lay of the land in this neighborhood to leave.  

So they've decided to throw a rent party to make up this month's rent.  Carla knows this other girl from the gallery she works at who's in some kind of new wave band.  It's not exactly their kind of music—they've had fun dancing at Hurrah's before, but that New Wave Vaudeville at Irving Plaza was so dull!—but this girl Nina is really cool (does Carla have a CRUSH on her?), and she promises the band will draw at least 50 of their own friends and get people dancing.

Friday night comes, and the band arrives at the girls' loft apartment at 10:30.  Nina, another girl with a really short bob, and three guys (wearing button-down shirts that already show the sweat under their arms) bring in their gear: guitars, amps, keyboards, drums, sax, microphones, and a ton of cords.  What, they need grounded plugs?  Uh oh, hope these adapters don't blow up the place.  Then the band leaves (Carla looks a little crestfallen) while guests start showing up.  

Ugh, Michelle's brother Ricky from New Jersey is here!  But he and his friends roll in a couple of kegs; they can stay just as long as they don't go making fag jokes.  Then Aaron from the law firm where Michelle paralegals is making a mess at the kitchen, whipping up margaritas: "here, Michelle, try these!"  "Ugh, needs more mix!"  And suddenly the apartment's really crowded and REALLY LOUD, and Michelle needs to use the bathroom (better just sit still for a minute before the line outside gets too long), and then they're having a BLAST, exactly the reason why they left New Jersey for The City, let's just not think about the clean-up tomorrow, and is that Nina and her band now?  It is!  They're gonna play! 

Musically, new wave rent party is the style of new wave in its early, pre-synthpop years that reveals a line from 60s garage bands to the Velvets through the Modern Lovers on to many, mostly unsung groups circa 1977-81 who played danceable garage rock.  The foundation of musical influences in this subgenre isn't all that important; what's more distinctive is how new wave rent party reflects an interesting moment of change in the practice and aesthetics of the rock ensemble.  Quintessentially, new wave rent party is a mixed gender affair.  The greater visibility in new wave of female musicians, singers and composers signaled a gain of liberation and freedom in rock music overall, but for this subgenre it's in the internal dynamics within each band that the most significant ideas, values, and pleasures of performance emerge.

To illustrate, look at the B-52s, probably the greatest of the new wave rent party bands: two girls, three guys, a then-uncommon mix of thrift-store signifiers and camp aesthetics, and a genius for danceable rock music.  More than 30 years into their career, the joy these musicians have in playing together and dancing onstage is still contagious, but it's perhaps best captured in the final half of "Rock Lobster," which to my thinking is one of the great moments of pop music.  

[A few weeks ago, I was in line at Michael's arts and crafts store in Manhattan, waiting in line with my daughter to return some cupcake decorations, when I heard a BLOOD CURDLING scream over the store speakers.  "What," I thought to myself, "did no one else hear that?!  Oh... it's just the end of 'Rock Lobster'."]

In this song chock full of fantastic moments, the call-and-response vocals particularl rips open the staid conventions of rock music, as the singers commit themselves to an new extremes of offbeat vocals.  (Fred: "There goes the norwhal! Kate: Eeee-oooo-eeee-oooh! Fred: HERE COMES A BIKINI WHALE!! Cindy: EEEEEEEEEEEEEEEKKKKK!)  In Are We Not New Wave? Modern Pop at the Turn of the 1980s (University of Michegan Press, 2011), Theo Cateforis writes:

As Rolling Stone's Anthony DeCurtis aptly described, [Fred] Schneider approached the band's lyrics quizzically, "as if he hoped that by singing them, he might be able to figure out their meaning."  DeCurtis reacts here to the doubleness in Schneider's singing; on the one hand we hear the dynamism of his surface affectations, but on the other hand it is difficult to read in his voice any direct emotional underpinning.  Like the camp of the drag queen, Schneider's singing comes across as deliberate role-playing.  But the quesiton remains, what exactly was he camping? (pg. 118)

Cateforis goes on to analyze Schneider's "camp play on male whiteness" persuasively, although by doing so he ignores the B-52s' secret weapons, vocalists Kate Pierson and Cindy Wilson.  Nevertheless, irrespective of the group's semiotics, what comes across in the best B-52s' music is their discovery of a new performative syntax.  This discovery still sounds as much of a shock to the band members as it was to listeners the first time they heard the B-52s, which is why for me their music always brings to mind the interpersonal dynamics and back-and-forth within the group. 

I'm being generous in claiming that a small handful of groups from the new wave rent party sub-genre were nearly as great or important as the B-52s.  Most of them almost certainly weren't, and listening to their music today, you can see the reasons why many of them have been forgotten.   Still, reviewing the other groups sheds light on other dimensions of this sub-genre and provide further historical context to this transitional moment.  So, in declining order of their greatness (in my humble opinion)... 

Martha & the Muffins 
Rush may be the greatest Canadian rock group, but Martha & the Muffins are definitely my favorite.  Based in Toronto, this new wave unit led by singer Martha Johnson and guitarist Mark Gane evolved over its first five or six albums in remarkable tandem with Talking Heads' aesthetic arc, but their prime years in the new wave rent party corresponds early years leading up to their first two LPs, particularly their ageless debut album Metro Music (1979).  This record features a classic new wave rent party format: two women, keyboards, guitar, saxophone, bass and drums.  Saxophone is a particularly vintage new wave instrument; after the so-called second British invasion made synthesizers the sound of new wave, the sax almost immediately became an archaic instrument linked inextricably to the "retro" 50s/60s rock and R&B styles that originally inspired new wave just a few years before.  The same holds for cheap keyboards: Farfisa, Vox or, in the case of Martha & the Muffins, the Ace Tone that dominates their biggest hit "Echo Beach."

Furthermore, at this point in rock music (and perhaps on into the present day) saxophones and cheap keyboards weren't regarded as the basis for "new sounds" and studio exploration, two hallmarks of most new wave bands whose influence survived past the early 80s.  This might be a shortcoming of early new wave, but I think it once again calls to our attention the real-time performance setting of this music: bands playing before a audience, but also members' musical interactions as captured (or asynchronously refashioned) on recording.  All of this is to say, I don't listen to new wave rent party to take a headphone-assisted flight into fantastic landscapes of my mind.  I crank it up as loud as needed to recreate the presence of a band playing live.  And while Martha & the Muffins hit their stride as a studio band with their third and fourth albums (1981's This is the Ice Age and 1983's Danceparc, both highly recommended), it's on those first two albums where you can hear the band's internal rapport.  On tracks like "Revenge (Against The World)," I imagine the original six-piece band playing to each other in a circle (not lined up facing the fourth wall, as in concert or video) as the twin vocals of Martha Johnson and Martha Ladly (two Marthas! how cool is that?) carry out a private conversation within the band.  

Martha and the Muffins' Canadian origins also highlight how new wave rent party is almost entirely a North American sub-genre.  Certainly there were contemporaneous groups in Britain, Ireland and Europe playing new wave styles and sounds not all that different from the groups reviewed here, but they did so in a different context due to the undeniable impact of punk rock.  When the Sex Pistols have reached the top of the charts in your country a year or two earlier and changed the game of pop music entirely, the choice to play a kind of music that's just fun, danceable and poppy wouldn't be as innocent as it would in North America; more likely it would represent an artistic timidity ("nothing too extreme to keep us off the charts!") or an acknowledgement of conventional popstar ambitions.  In North America, by contrast, the dominance of corporate rock by Led Zeppelin, the Eagles et al. would give music that's "fun, danceable and poppy" a more transgressive charge.  And in an era before MTV, the vast geography between still fairly distinct musical regions meant bands undertook new wave music without the media echo chamber fostered by Britain's music-weekly saturated pop culture.   

The Waitresses 

The stretch of Ohio between Cleveland and Akron was an especially fertile crescent for vintage new wave, and out of it came the Waitresses.  Under the musical directorship of guitarist Chris Butler, the group started out in Akron more as a studio project with an evident taste for Beefheart and Pere Ubu (which was even more pronounced in another band that Butler played in, Tin Huey).  Butler relocated to New York City, reformed the Waitresses with NYC musicians (such ex-Television drummer Billy Ficca), and let original singer Patty Donahue assume all the vocal duties.  And of course it's Patty's voice that has become the Waitresses' signature; singing lyrics written by Butler, she developed a talking style of vocals that managed to convey both feminine sass and urban stress.  I can't say it better than Jim Green did in The New Trouser Press Record Guide (3rd edition, 1989):

Furthermore, Donahue's persona — she doesn't sing so much as carry a simultaneous conversation and tune — has been developed into the archetypal young, white, middle-class woman trying to sort out her identity while beset with standard societal conditioning on one hand and specious, voguish "alternatives" (the Sexual Revolution, the Me Generation) on the other.  The Waitresses' combination of musical aplomb and lyrical acuity makes the first LP [Wasn't Tomorrow Wonderful?] at once funny, sad and universally true (pg. 621).

As this passage suggests, new wave rent party is a very self-consciously middle-class music.  If this seems uncool or uncomfortable for those inclined to look for rebellion or (in the language of cultural studies) "resistance" in their pop music, I think the historical context reveals its signficance.  New wave rent party is the sound of young, college educated women and men moving to the city at a time when the urban crisis was raging with no apparent end in sight.  Maybe some of these kids moved "downtown," i.e., to the emblematic zones of punk rock (and, in New York City's case, no wave).  However, the statistics suggest many others settled into less destabilized urban neighborhoods where, frankly, you could still get mugged or worse if you were careless or unlucky.  Perhaps these kids hedged their bets geographically and musically, although if they really wanted to play it safe, it would be easier to stay, like most of their contemporaries did, in the suburbs where their parents (quite likely themselves of the generation born and raised in cities) lived.  

Thinking About Sex Again

For young women at this time, the urban context was perhaps most alarmingly represented in the 1977 film Looking for Mr. Goodbar.  To acknowledge the pleasure in "thinking about sex again" (to cite another title from the Waitresses' first album) might be a privilege of the "archetypal young, white, middle-class woman," but it was also an achievement with its own risks. 

Romeo Void 
Hence the gender revolt signified by Romeo Void, one of San Francisco's most successful new wave groups.  In the early 1980s, generations of virginal teenagers had their libidos tantalized on the dancefloor as they heard singer Debora Iyall's croon the chorus of "Never Say Never": I might like you better if we slept together.  Those who saw the band on MTV would likely have had their minds blown to boot, as they watched a charismatic, overweight woman of Native American descent command the stage like Pat Benatar never could.

Musically, Romeo Void were a mixed bag.  On the one hand, their taut rhythms, jagged guitar (for me, "Never Say Never" was a musical gateway drug to Gang of Four), and muscular saxophone were appealing enough.  On the other, the songs weren't really there as a rule, and the band's cheesy gestures of "rocking" and mugging for the camera were probably as hard to stomach then as they are thirty years later.

Romeo Void exemplifies how across the generic border of new wave rent party lies the traditional rock stardom that most musicians in this sub-genre uncritically aspired to. "Do it yourself" prodded Romeo Void and others of their ilk to get up on stage, no matter how unlikely a rockstar they might seem, but in general these groups didn't have the independent ethos that might commit them or their audiences to sustaining the urban nightclubs and regional independent labels from which these groups typically launched.  Of course, almost no one had this ethos in these days; their inconsistency was true for new wave in general, as well as much of early punk in New York City and Britain.  Maybe what new wave rent party added was a visibly gendered component, as illustrated by Romeo Void, in which a subversive female performance shared the stage with the macho posturing of "real" (i.e., male) rock musicians. 

Pylon 

Across the other generic border lies post-punk, which brings its own set of contradictions that new wave rent party negotiates.  While it takes obvious inspiration from postpunk's "rip it up and start again" aesthetic (to cite Simon Reynolds' canonical book on the subject, which in turn invokes the Orange Juice lyric), it stops short of the radical modernism that motivated Wire, PiL, the Raincoats, and other postpunk groups to create new musical forms.  On the whole, new wave rent party is formally conservative, operating out of fairly established generic traditions (i.e., that line from 60s garage bands to the Velvets through the Modern Lovers); its aesthetic innovations appear primarily in the domain of performance.

For this reason, the Athens GA group Pylon squeaks through into the subgenre.  Formally, they fall squarely within the postpunk genre, but it's Vanessa Briscoe's musical and performative reinvention of the "girl singer" for which they're probably most remembered, and which qualifies them for new wave rent party.  One might even go so far as to say Vanessa upholds an emerging Southern tradition of iconoclastic female frontwomen that Kate and Cindy of the B-52s established, and which Hope Nicholls of mid-80s college-radio band Fetchin Bones (from North Carolina) next embodied.  In any case, I do think it's significant that Pylon weren't from New York or Los Angeles.  The absence of major punk scenes in their environs seems to have inspired the group to forge an idiosyncratic performative grammar, something characteristic of new wave rent party's most important contributions to pop culture. 

The Bush Tetras 

For similar reasons, I think New York City's Bush Tetras also squeak into new wave rent party.  The group had an impeccable no wave pedigree, particularly via the Contortions.  So why doesn't new wave rent party overlap with no wave, considering how the latter yielded so many iconic mixed-gender groups?  For one reason, you generally couldn't dance to no wave; artists like James Chance might have toyed with (or, to be more accurate, took delight in torturing) dance music, but others like Lydia Lunch would just as likely want to eradicate dance music altogether.  Furthermore, no wave's continuity with New York's confrontational high art traditions made playing music too much of a serious undertaking.  In obvious yet significant ways, new wave rent party isn't all that serious; it's less about art and more about fun and pleasure.  Listening now 30 years after the fact, these distinctions might not be all that evident.  I suspect they would be much starker on the ground, since historically the two genres drew support from different neighborhoods, different nightclubs, different drugs, and different lifestyles.

The Bush Tetras, by contrast, were a dance band in the percussive, hypnotic postpunk styles of Gang of Four and Talking Heads.  Which in turn raises another question: why haven't I mentioned pioneering new wave groups like Talking Heads, Blondie, and the Patti Smith Group?  The reason is historical; new wave rent party represents the next generation of bands, the ones who took their cue from these CBGBs icons.  With the exception of the B-52s, none of them attained the commercial success of their NYC role models.  That's largely why this subgenre was soon eclipsed by synthpop and the second British invasion, but for a few years this commercial obscurity gave these groups a relatively autonomous space (not that many of them wanted it!) to do their own thing and explore the dynamics of the mixed-gender rock ensemble away from the media spotlight. 

The Fibonaccis 

A Los Angeles band who recorded between 1981-87, the Fibonaccis outlived the heyday of new wave rent party, evidently with diminishing returns until they broke up in obscurity.  By that time, Los Angeles seemed to have moved light years past the creative peak of vintage new wave, which unfortunately would almost always be associated in L.A. with the Knack.  Hardcore, roots rock, the paisley underground, death rock, and hair metal would have come and most likely gone by 1987, and the metal-funk hybrids of Janes Addiction, the Red Hot Chili Peppers, Fishbone and Thelonious Monster would be in ascent.  Just as importantly, the promotional music video would have become an inescapable fact of the music industry by this time, a format that too many new wave rent party groups found themselves unprepared or unsuited for.  Artistically the Fibonaccis did okay on that front, making a great, crazy video in 1984 for their great, crazy cover of "Purple Haze," but one look at the results should make clear why MTV wouldn't want to touch it.

The Fibonacci's connection to new wave rent party comes from their obvious "artiness" as well as the influence they took from sources left in the alternative-music wilderness: Captain Beefheart, Frank Zappa, the chamber-music textures of Henry Cow.  There used to be a place in some cities where these traditions found a home: the new wave vaudeville, new wave cabaret, new wave theater, etc found in willing nightclubs and on late-night public access TV.  Klaus Nomi and Anne Magnuson got their start at the New Wave Vaudeville in Manhattan's Irving Plaza.  This video captures the Fibonacci's big moment on L.A.'s New Wave Theater. 

As I've argued before, higher education remains a key social element to the independent or underground rock music scenes thriving in many cities today.  Arguably, new wave rent party represents a beginning of that tradition, as college kids, art students, and autodidactic oddballs appropriated new wave music for their own ends.  It's a fascinating question how the value and uses of their education have changed over 30 years of musical development. Certainly, it's rare to find today such an overt display of art and culture learning of the kind found in the new wave theaters/vaudevilles/cabarets, which from the likes of these video documents look like they were excuses for drunken parties by art history grad students.

So whatever happened to this generation of new wave rent party musicians, once the bands eventually broke up?  Some became art professors.  One or two may have even become big-time record executives.  Today reunion concerts and album reissues have rekindled many of their careers; some of them may have kept musically active in the three decade interim.  And no doubt some went on to obscure lives of substance abuse and ignoble ends of the kinds that we might expect for rock musicians, but I suspect that's not the norm. 

New wave rent party represents the first cohort of the young urban professional, a.k.a. the yuppie, as that term first appeared in the early 1980s.  However, with few exceptions these girls and guys weren't the monied Wall Street or successful professionals originally designated by that term.  I suspect that currently many of them, maybe most, enjoy the familial and career situations that they find themselves in.  They're middle class, after all, and they're armed with a backstory and a cultural capital that would be the envy of many a 20-something today.  But the path to where they find themselves today hasn't been clear because, with few exceptions, they failed at their first significant vocation. 

To the extent that they still live in the city, we can recognize them as the so-called urban pioneers of urban gentrification.  It's easy to cluck about that in hindsight, but at least we shouldn't forget the uncertainty and risk of their urban existences back in the late 70s and early 80s.  This was hardly an era in which people moved to cities because homeownership was a safe bet; they were drawn by other opportunities for lifestyle, self-expression, and self-actualization.  To the extent that cities today have become safe playgrounds for hipsters, we could look further at the new wave rent party to how that unanticipated development came to be.

[For more on new wave rent party, see my next post.]

Pitchfork urbanism

The award for Fun Read of the Week goes to "On Pitchfork," Richard Beck's smart, caustic review of indie rock's überblog Pitchfork.  You can't find this lengthy essay anywhere but the latest issue of n+1, an NYC-based journal of politics, literature and culture, and yeah it's worth the $10 PDF download.  (The issue also features a very moving essay by Lawrence Jackson about a funeral in Baltimore as well as... sigh... another "serious" piece on the Juggalo subculture.)  

[1/23/12 update: Richard Beck's essay is now online at http://nplusonemag.com/54.] 

Beck effectively and righteously criticizes Pitchfork for turning music criticism into taste aggregation, with its hyperprecise rating scale of 10.0-0.0 and its facile attention to musicians' "influences" (read: CD collections).  For Beck, Pitchfork is inseparable from indie rock, particularly the present decade in which 20-something musicians and listeners have evacuated post-punk music (broadly speaking) of any independent ethos or anti-commercial principle.  Now the big game in indie rock is status competition: who's listening to the newest music, living in the coolest neighborhoods, rocking the tightest threads... and what do they think about how I'm living?  In this context, the reason for Pitchfork's continual growth and influence is it's become the hipster's premiere users guide to successful musical taste acquisition and display. 

(In the obscure, academic world of hipster studies, this cultural capital explanation for hipsters is maybe better associated with MarkGreif, an English professor at the New School, co-editor of the recent volume What Was the Hipster? A Sociological Investigation and, it should very much be noted here, a founding editor of n+1.) 

You can poke around the internet for the greatest hits of Beck's criticisms of Pitchfork and indie rock; here's a good place tostart.  Clearly he's touched a nerve with readers, giving voice to their dismay at Pitchfork's unchallenged ability to make or break worthy groups with its famously verbose, erudite yet aesthetically arbitrary music reviews.  (In a quintessential hipster riposte, one reader commented, "welcome to the party about 5 years late n+1"!) 

In this post, I want to respond to an apparently casual attempt at urban theory that Beck makes toward the end of the essay:

In 2007, [Pitchfork founder] Ryan Schreiber moved to Brooklyn, which had become one of indie music’s vital hubs.  Just as the internet had weakened the major labels and the music magazines that Pitchfork would eventually see as its competition, so did it decimate the weekly newspapers that had supported indie rock throughout the 1990s.  As the alt-weeklies went into decline, regional music scenes began to weaken, and indie bands began gravitating toward New York, the city with the greatest hype-generating media apparatus in the world.  Priced out of lower Manhattan by the ’90s real estate boom, these bands lived in the Brooklyn neighborhoods of Williamsburg and Greenpoint, where promoters like Todd Patrick—better known as Todd P—had begun to organize DIY concerts in 2001 for acts like Yeasayer, the Dirty Projectors, and Dan Deacon.  Although the main body of Pitchfork’s editorial operations stayed behind in Chicago, Schreiber almost immediately became a fixture at concerts.  In that same year, the site also finally managed to buy its rightful URL from the livestock company.  Pitchfork has made a home at www.pitchfork.com ever since (pp. 188-9).

On an empirical basis, I think the least credible statement here is, "As the alt-weeklies went into decline, regional music scenes began to weaken, and indie bands began gravitating toward New York..."  There are two quasi-causal claims here: (1) the decline of alt-weeklies is associated with the weakening of regional music scenes, and (2) New York, specifically Brooklyn, has drawn indie bands away from regional music scenes.  How do these hold up to scrutiny?

(1) It seems improbable that the decline of alt-weeklies has caused the weakening of regional music scenes.  The causal arrow, if there is one, more likely points the other way, but certainly there are more fundamental reasons, starting with craigslist and the internet's erosion of alt-weeklies' advertising/classified ad markets.  (Remember when you could find "musicians wanted to form a band" ads in these publications?)  The internet giveth and it takes away; it seems hard to believe that other online forums couldn't fill any regional void left by the decline of alt-weeklies. 

It's an interesting theoretical claim to designate alt-weeklies as the crucial glue to a regional music scene.  Journalism, reviews, concert listings and other forms of music writing/media serve an important function in music scenes by gathering and filtering information to participants and audiences.  Not to dismiss the media urbanism thesis out of hand, but did alt-weeklies ever provide this service exclusively, or even primarily?  Now that traditional print-based media for music information across the board are in decline (as is of course the proverbial independent record store staffed by music snobs, another such forum), it remains an empirical question what if anything fills that void.  Presumably urban public space and "third places" also sustain their own public sphere.  Yes, these might be most vibrant in the biggest cities (a supposition by which all roads again lead to Brooklyn), but that remains to be seen.

(2) No doubt Brooklyn's indie bands include a large number of musicians and groups who originally came from someplace else.  And no doubt Brooklyn's scene is big, as is Brooklyn's share of NYC's 20-something population on the whole.  But has the indie rock pie, so to speak, remained the same size or even shrunk, such that Brooklyn's gain in the last decade has necessarily been other regional music scenes' loss?  Is anyone going to speak up for Austin or L.A. (or London, Berlin, etc.)?  I suspect we might not find definitive evidence to prove or disprove this, in part because indie-rock musicians are hard to find in occupational and population data (some researchers have better luck identifying them indirectly via their service-sector day jobs). 

But more importantly, Brooklyn's ascendancy as an indie-rock scene isn't a purely demographic phenomenon.  Let me put it this way: precisely because the invidious distinctions that hipsters make aim at moving targets, Brooklyn's indie-rock hegemony is by no means assured.  Will it surprise anyone when the day comes that Brooklyn is "no longer cool"?  One indicator here is that, just as Brooklyn draws indie-rock musicians from elsewhere, so too do these other regional music scenes elsewhere draw them from Brooklyn.  (This is anecdotal, but I met a few of them in Baltimore this summer.)

In sum, cultural capital better explains Pitchfork's current hegemony in indie-rock circles than it does Brooklyn's critical mass.  It's not really helpful to think about a city's cultural "market share" the same way we might a blog's.  Cultural capital may very well motivate hipster pursuits—are they really the only musical constituency with this characteristic?—but Brooklyn hardly monopolizes the location for these pursuits.  Other cities will always play a role because in more general (and, these days, increasingly banal) ways, the urban is itself a medium for symbolizing cultural forms and practices—musical trends and genres of course, but also lingo, amusements, fashion, and the mundane elements of everyday life (day jobs, food shopping, slipping into RiteAid for a quart of milk, etc.)—and signifying them to status-obsessed constituencies both near and far.  Those instructive moments of silent observation on the bus or subway, listening to an iPod's worth of Pitchfork's "best new music" while commuting to work, are also important opportunities for articulating and acquiring taste. 

Perhaps it's a significant difference that in these latter cases, the accumulation of cultural capital occurs in socially heterogeneous settings, in contrast to the insiders-only milieu of a Pitchfork album review or a Brooklyn Vegan-sponsored gig.  But until the importance of these differences are better explained, we have no reason to confuse the supremacy of Pitchfork and Brooklyn as hipster status symbols (to grant Richard Beck his argument) with the centralization of status display, distinctions and anxiety under one media geography.

under the shadow of Woodstock: listening to the Hudson Valley

Another problem with the "Brooklynization of Hudson River Valley" thesis that I discussed in my last post is that the music in these parts isn't very hip.  That's not a judgment, just a statement of fact if by "hip" we mean the product or embrace of 20-something hipsters who disproportionately reside in Brooklyn. 

However, the Hudson Valley does have a musical soundtrack, if you will—a distinct set of styles, artists, and local events that are used to musically represent the region to the world at large.  Separately, there's some noteworthy musical creativity going on in the region.  That these two scales of activity don't coincide in the same way that we think of, say, Brooklyn indie rock or New Orleans jazz tells you something about how music contributes the cultural geography of the Hudson Valley.

Maybe I've overgeneralize in this post too much.  I'd be eager to hear others provide counterevidence to this thesis.  But first, let's look at the music and musical lifestyles currently found in the Hudson River Valley.

MUSICAL CREATIVITY

To begin, let me acknowledge that despite the fact I've lived in this area for 12 years and have always been curious about the music created here, I'm still no expert.  In part that's because this is a big, six-county region, and a comprehensive, balanced view of its musical geography isn't easy to access.  But also, my investigations in local music are significantly directed by my tastes, which tend toward new and exciting stuff out of the rock tradition broadly speaking, e.g., indie, electronic, dance, punk, metal, and so on.  If I'm a modernist in expecting music to innovate and move forward, I can also be historical and sentimental in my musical tastes—one reason I have oldies and classic rock on the radio a lot.  In truth, I'll go see almost any live performance if it fits my working dad hours (which tends to keep me from seeing 75% of the decent concerts around here) and is reasonably close to where I live (which takes out another 22%).

Indie rock

Since I've been talking about the Brooklynization of the Hudson Valley, I'll begin here by noting that indie rock, the sound of Brooklyn today, is conspicuously underrepresented in this region.  None of the big nightclubs, theaters, or commercial performance venues specializes in it; no "alternative" or independent commercial radio stations play it.  Occasionally one of the bigger acts of this genre come to one of the area's bigger concert venues, usually only if they have some sort of crossover appeal with an older demographic who can pay higher prices for tickets.  For instance, Bright Eyes and Dr. Dog are coming to Poughkeepsie's Mid-Hudson Civic Center, a 3000-seated venue, in September; tickets are well into the $40 range once service charges are added, and unless the area's college kids find about it (few live here when school is out), I suspect the show will be undersold.  The draw would probably be larger if the show were in the southern part of the Hudson Valley, like Peekskill in Putnam County, but then a lot of touring bands are prevented from playing here by the 100-mile radius restriction in their concert contracts with NYC venues.

The oases in the indie-rock desert around here are the area's colleges.  I know the three four-year liberal arts colleges in Dutchess County best: Vassar, Bard, and Marist.  The first two are (to put it crudely) notorious hipster colleges, and not surprisingly they've graduated a number of indie-rock musicians.  In the past decade, bands like Beach House, Throw Me The Statue, and the Bravery came from Vassar.  Bard College has gone so far as to officially inventory all the bands that ever formed at Vassar, the most famous being Steely Dan (who recall the college in Annandale-on-Hudson scathingly in "My Old School"). 

The other big college in the area—the biggest, in fact, with about 8,000 students—is SUNY New Paltz in Ulster County.  The town of New Paltz itself is probably the only real college town of note in the Hudson Valley.  Located next to the Shawangunk Ridge, a Northeastern destination for serious rock climbers, the town draws an outdoorsy constituency across age brackets, and I've always thought of SUNY New Paltz as having an appropriate musical aesthetic: jam bands, roots reggae, and folksingers.  However, a Vassar student described it to me as also "something of a folk-punk mecca" that draws touring DIY performers like Paul Baribeau, so I stand corrected.

Significantly, few bands of any note actually formed while college students in the Hudson Valley.  From Vassar, I know so far of three exceptions: Alan Licht's early 90s post-punk group Love Child, their lo-fi contemporaries the Sweet Things, and mid-'00s post-metal iconoclasts Genghis Tron.  Otherwise, the general pattern is for musicians to move away after graduation and form bands elsewhere, usually in the big cities; they may continue to collaborate with fellow alumni (again, see Steely Dan), but more often they'll find musicians along lines other college alma mater.  Here as in other regards (recall my last post), this is a region that characteristically exports people once they hit the post-college age bracket.

Hip hop

The Hudson Valley is comprised of swelling suburbs (particularly in its southern half along the main parkways and thruways), historic towns and villages, quite rural hamlets, and a handful of cities.  Of its six counties, only half of them have municipalities registered officially as "cities", and of these there are only seven: Middletown, Newburgh and Port Jervis (of Orange County), Beacon and Poughkeepsie (of Dutchess County), Kingston (of Ulster County), and Hudson (of Columbia County).  Generally, these cities reveal the history of rustbelt industrialization, as river, canal and railroad made them well-placed locations between NYC and its hinterlands to the north, east and (via the canals) midwest.  Demographically, the cities were built upon the waves of ethnic immigrations associated with NYC, including substantial numbers of Irish, German, Italian, and African-American groups through the WWII era, and continuing in recent decades with West Indian, South Asian, and Latino residents.  And as is the norm for ethnic hierarchies in the Northeast, white ethnics largely moved on to the Hudson Valley's towns and villages while blacks and Latinos remain disproportionately concentrated in cities still struggling to emerge from the post-WWII urban crisis.

This, as you might expect, is a fertile geography for hip hop to bloom in, and it's probably not a stretch to say that hip hop is the go-to music among the cities' African American and Puerto Rican youth, maybe West Indian youth as well (particularly in its dancehall hybrids).  Of course, hip hop is the favorite music for many white kids in the suburbs and colleges as well, but I'm not sure how many venture into the cities' clubs where hip hop plays on the speakers.  While hip hop performers will play to fanatical student audiences in the colleges, theirs is a different environment for hip hop than the inner cities that many youth of color would recognize in Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Hudson and Kingston.  Ghetto realism and hedonistic materialism are the themes of the clubs, while high school students might find older rappers teaching consciousness in hiphop-oriented school programs and community organizations.

So who are the Hudson Valley rappers?  I'm out of my area of expertise here, but I imagine an enterprising visitor to the area's hip hop clubs could walk away with dozens of mixtapes and CD-Rs.  (Whether they're good enough to interest non-locals, I couldn't say.)  Yet it seems very few MCs or DJs of wide regard have come from the region.  My Vassar colleague Hua Hsu thinks the most important one is probably J Rock from Newburgh, whose 1991 album Streetwise is a minor classic of ghetto reportage.  In the early 90s, a 20-year-old redhead MC going by the name of Sarai dropped a major-label debut album and gathered a lot of hype as a "female Eminem."  (Am I correct in recalling she made the cover of Hudson Valley Magazine as well?)  Now she goes by the name Miss Eighty 6 and works the TV/film soundtrack angle.

It may be that the Hudson Valley's hip hop scene is overshadowed geographically and musically by New York City to the south.  Cities like Newburgh and Poughkeepsie often appear in NYC hip hop narratives as satellites of "the City" and its urban hustle.  With its entrenched gang violence, Newburgh is sometimes called the "sixth borough" of NYC, while Poughkeepsie (at the end of the commuter rail) is commemorated in "'98 Thug Paradise" by Tragedy, Capone and Infinity as a place for NYC's drug dealers go to cool out:

Capone bag the keys

Let's move like a gypsy

It's hot out here

Relocate to Poughkeepsie

 

Reggae and Latin music

There are two very different genres, but their similarity appears in the regional context.  Namely, the Hudson Valley's West Indian and Latino populations have expanded sufficiently to support concerts featuring acts from the West Indies and Latin America.  These events are rarely announced in the cultural calendars and concert listings that most white residents peruse.  But go to the ethnic stores, and you'll find the slickly printed color flyers announcing the latest dates.

Contemporary Jamaican acts with dancehall riddims and lyrical slackness play the Hudson Valley's urban nightclubs around (I'm estimating) 5-10 times a year.  Vintage roots reggae performers like the Mighty Diamonds, Burning Spear, and Culture might also play these venues, although they also have a significant constituency in the bucolic hippie/jam-band stronghold of Woodstock—hence the Woodstock Reggae Festival.  I couldn't tell you how much audience crossover there is along lines of race and age across reggae's "murrrdah!"/"one love divide," but it's an interesting question to investigate.

The Hudson Valley's immigrant Latino population has boomed in just the last 10 years, another small milestone in the new immigration outside the U.S. Southwest.  In cities like Poughkeepsie, the new Latino presence has significantly revitalized a downtown once known for its vacant storefronts.  Mexican tiendas and restaurants play corridas on the jukeboxes and cable TV; now, performers from that genre are touring the area.  (There's a smaller but growing Central American population in the Hudson Valley, but so far I haven't detected a corresponding musical presence.) 

For reggae and Latin music, I don't see local performers performing these styles at a significant scale (i.e., beyond the sound systems and DJs for hire).  Maybe that's the point: these are non-U.S. acts performing for an immigrant audience.  As West Indian and Latino families put their kids in local schools, another interesting question is whether they'll give up the taste for reggae and corrida for "native" music like hip hop and rock, much like they do the traditional foods their parents want them to send them to school with.  Alternately, maybe they'll be drawn to the urban genres that fuse the old and new worlds: reggaeton, merengue, and other sounds easily heard on the streets of NYC.

Rock and heavy metal

One of my favorite deep cuts from Blue Öyster Cult is "Dominance and Submission" from the 1981 album Extraterrestrial Live.  This particular track was recorded live in Poughkeepsie, and about 2:30 minutes in, the band vamps as Eric Bloom addresses the crowd:

"Here we are in Poughkeepsie, New York!"  [audience cheers] " Yeah, I see we are sold out to the maximum!" [audience cheers louder]  "You know, we like coming up here once or twice a year because—we like coming up here from New York City because we know Poughkeepsie is SERIOUS about rock and roll!!"  [audience goes nuts]

And so it goes.  With its white blue-collar base, the Hudson Valley (like all of upstate New York) is a natural stronghold for rock.  Classic and alternative rock abounds on the radio and in the bars.  The biggest annual fair around these parts (in Dutchess County) draws graying stadium rockers like Foreigner and REO Speedwagon.  And the concert venues draws B-list and C-list reunions and classic-rock bills that can't quite sell out NYC venues.  (Boston Legends All Star Concert, anyone?)  Age and/or upscale the act a little more, maybe broaden the parameters of "rock" to include blues, vintage new wave and R&B, and you get a sense of the acts that play nice theaters like Poughkeepsie's Bardavon or Kingston's UPAC: Ray Davies, the Temptations, David Byrne, Pat Benatar, Los Lobos, Patti Smith, et al.  Demographically, it's not a mystery what's going on here.  With its aging population, there's a sizable market in the region for rock and pop of the baby boom and its Gen X successors. 

But what about the kids who just wanna rock?  Young bands playing metal, emo, metalcore, and guitar-heavy "alternative" can be found at busy venues like the Poughkeepsie Chance Theater or (just north of the Hudson Valley, past Albany) the Northern Lights venue.  This is a real meat-and-potatoes rock circuit, and, importantly, here you find a lot of local bands.  Replace the flyers with myspace pages, and it feels like a smaller version of the hair-metal scene found in most major American cities in the late 80s.  So far as I can tell, no bands of this ilk have "made it"  in a big way.  Maybe that's because none is any good, or because this scene seems rather tied to the conventional record-and-tour model of a rock music industry that's increasingly difficult to bust out of.

Some of you may recall that I have a special place in my heart for crazy black and death metal.  It's not for everyone, but its intrinsically esoteric, extreme nature offers a useful perspective to evaluate the metal scene in the Hudson Valley.  Occasionally I find myself browsing the local concert calendars looking for bands of this nature, and generally I find nothing.  A couple of years back I did go see Skeletonwitch, Toxic Holocaust and Trap Them at the Chance Theater.  It was a great show, and the first two bands in particular excelled in the unexpected retro-thrash sub-genre that brings 80s hold-outs like myself together with younger metal fans.  But that's just it: the bill satisfied both connoisseuring sensibilities and rather mainstream contemporary tastes in metal, but it was probably the latter that brought most of the kids out, and it's the latter that the local bands traffic in.  Until I find the real crazy stuff that tries to push the metal envelope forward in a serious way, that's my hypothesis about the Hudson Valley metal scene.

One final note: around 2006, when Genghis Tron were still Vassar College students, I recall that a Time Out New York listing for one of their NYC shows indicated they were "from Poughkeepsie."  This is a very rare regional identification for a Vassar College, but it makes sense in a metal context.  For one thing, most metal bands don't go around announcing they're kids; given the genre's proletarian aesthetics, that's quite likely a kiss of death.  (Google "hipster metal" for similarly scathing backlash.)  But also Poughkeepsie's hard-on-its-luck reputation provides a special aesthetic grain for post-metal groups trying to urbanize a genre typically associated with oppressive suburbs and Scandinavian forests.

Folk, blues and jazz

Here's another disparate set of genres united by local context. Go to any open-mic night at one of the Hudson Valley's many coffeeshops, and you won't have to wait very long before you hear folk music played, particularly in the Dylan/Laurel Canyon singer/songwriter traditions.  Turn on "Poughkeepsie Live!," the public access TV show featuring regional musicians, and it's a good bet you'll catch a guitarist wailing on the blues.  Go to a nice restaurant on a late weekend evening, and if there's live music, it's most likely going to be jazz.  Folk, blues and jazz are the default soundtrack for the amenity settings and quality-of-life districts of the Hudson Valley.  And, as I argued in my last post, these destinations characteristically serve an older, 45-and-up clientele; even if the musicians themselves don't come from that bracket, that's the audience their music reaches.  In short, it's lifestyle background music, by no means unique to the Hudson Valley, but certainly redolent of the rural getaways and intimate "third places" with which this region attracts baby boomers and well-to-do urban migrants.

Of course, the Hudson Valley is home to some serious practioners of these genres.  Folk legend Pete Seeger has lived in Beacon since 1941.  Jazz saxophonists Sonny Rollins and Joe Lovano live in Dutchess and Putnam Counties, respectively.  It's a separate question whether artists such as these can be considered local musicians—not simply local residents, but contributors to a local music scene.  A strong case could be made for Pete Seeger, whose presence in the region's various post-WWII left-wing camps and chataquas and whose activism on behalf of the Hudson River's health have created lasting local legacies.  This could be parsing an unhelpful distinction, but perhaps Seeger's local contribution as a folksinger has been political more than musical—at least, that's a hypothesis.

By contrast, the case is more straightforward for Sonny Rollins and Joe Lovano.  Nominally associated with the NYC jazz scene, these are clearly artists of an international caliber for whom the Hudson Valley is essentially just a home base.  Their careers are so developed, they don't need NYC's jazz scene to get gigs and make a living.   Whether they desire the collaborations made possible by living and working among other jazz musicians is another question altogether, but I suspect there's a lot of musicians who would drop whatever they're doing for an invitation to jam at the Hudson Valley home of Sonny Rollins or Joe Lovano.

MUSICAL REPRESENTATIONS

Now we get to the more famous musical associations, histories, and symbolic geographies of the Hudson River Valley.  In contrast to the hard work and promotional hustle that characterizes most of the artists I've talked about so far, at this level the musical "economy" is far more developed and successful.  A key reason is because the underlying demand for the musical representations of the Hudson Valley is national and even international in scope.  But let's be clear here: the demand isn't for musical recordings and performances, but for regional aesthetics and lifestyles made meaningful in some part by their association with music.

Second homes and the quality-of-life district

Pete Seeger, Sonny Rollins and Joe Lovano are hardly the only musicians living in the Hudson Valley.  A load of popular musicians have homes in the area: off the top of my head, I can think of Natalie Merchant, David Bowie, Chris Stein of Blondie, Levon Helms of the Band, and Graham Parker.  Aside from these famous names, there's probably as many successful session musicians, technicians, promoters, agents and music industry executives. 

What characterizes these musicians' relationship to the Hudson Valley is choice made possible by their success.  Many of them are in states of semi-retirement; some pursue their non-musical passions for writing, painting, entrepreneurialism (the B-52s' Kate Pierson runs a rather curious B&B in the old Catskill resort area), and other elective avocations, just like many non-musician Hudson Valley migrants of their career success do.  Although they may live rather private lives in rustic idylls—you don't really see David Bowie and Imani picking up vegan burritos in Woodstock, do you?—their proximity to the entertainment industry center of NYC is a key asset.  Through industry contacts, fellow musicians, and major airports in the city, they can shift their activity into higher gear for a recording session, long tour or even just a rare concert guest appearance.  It's in this sense that their Hudson Valley location isn't really local.  Whether their residence here is actually a second (or third, fourth, etc.) home or not, this region serves as an exurban residential enclave for artists with significant autonomy over the substance, schedule and location of their work. 

In this way, these musicians are perhaps no different than your garden variety doctor or publishing executive who's bought a home in the Hudson Valley: all move here to consume the region's scenic amenities, residential/outdoor opportunities, and local quality of life as a private experience.  Or so it might seem.  In fact, the major difference between musicians and other quality-of-life migrants is that we don't hear about the famous medical history or publishing history of the Hudson Valley.  Yet we hear about the musical history of the region—specifically, of one place, Woodstock—all the time, and that cultural discourse precedes and heavily informs these musicians' relationship to this area.  Indeed, in some way it informs every Hudson Valley resident's relationship to the area.

Woodstock

I can't believe that as I write, today is the 42nd anniversary of the Woodstock Festival.  There's so much to be said about Woodstock, and I can hardly do it justice here.  I would contend that like Hollywood, Woodstock can be understood as a place, an industry, and a sensibility; and only in a very narrow slice of a Venn diagram do these three definitions overlap. 

• The place is the town in Ulster County.  It wasn't the site of the 1969 festival (that was Bethel, in neighboring Sullivan County), but that hasn't deterred a continual stream of visitors to Woodstock the town.  (Bob Dylan did have his motorcycle accident here, however.) 


• The industry is the industry of history, memorabilia, and nostalgia associated with the famous music festival and its cultural import.  The Museum at Bethel Woods is an official gatekeeper of this memory ("The Story of the Sixties and Woodstock", its main exhibit promises), but a hundred books, a hundred documentaries, and a thousand and one bootleg t-shirts (preferably tie-dyed) also keep the flame alight.


• The sensibility is... well, do I have to spell it out?  A reverence and optimism for the dream of 1960s peace, love and freedom embodied by the festival, perhaps, and an aptitude for tuning in and turning on this dream, through drugs or other forms of consciousness heightening. 

Woodstock is a place-based musical sensibility if there ever was one.  It can be discerned in the jam-band festival and the "one love" roots reggae ethos, but it skews heavily toward the 1960s and 70s rock baby boom demographic enamoured of classic rock and related 60s genres (particularly folk and blues).  Every summer weekend, people come to Woodstock the place by the hundreds and patronize Woodstock the industry in order to partake of this Woodstock sensibility.  It seems alive in the town's mountains, streams, and architectural landmarks; it feels sustained within the bookstores, record stores, health food restaurants, galleries, art-house cinema, flea markets, benches, and patches of grass of the town. 

I don't want to suggest this is merely the simplistic, commodified Woodstock sensibility that you can buy on a PBS pledge drive.  If David Bowie, hardly the pop-culture symbol of natural living and spiritual authenticity, can find himself drawn to the symbolic geography and lifestyle zone of Woodstock, then it's clear we're talking about a complex, multivalent discourse that can withstand diverse interpretations and critical artistic/intellectual gestures.  Even cynical indie-rockers are negotiating their peace with Woodstock's symbolic geography, as illustrated in the recent indie-rock music festivals, All Tomorrow's Parties and the Truck Festival US, that were scheduled (and in the latter case cancelled) nearby.  Understanding what Woodstock means and how it sustains a creative life isn't a simple, commodifiable experience.  It can be a worthwhile, long-term project, and it's one that has drawn many people, musicians and others.

If it's not clear by now, there's really no current music scene in Woodstock to speak of.  The town has some great performance venues, and musicians still record in various studios in and around the area.  Occasionally a "Woodstock native" will play locally, the most famous being Levon Helms' monthly Midnight Ramble.   Usually, just the local knowledge that famous musicians have long lived, and still do live, here or nearby is enough to sustain the enchantment of the region's musical geography, even if it's not something you can hear on a recording or take home with you.

Probably Woodstock's most important musical export nowadays is the independently-owned radio station, WDST.  With a playlist combining the contemporary and vintage sounds of jam bands, alternative, blues, singer-songwriters rock, and reggae, it's become a model of "adult alternative" radio that's rarely heard outside of subscription-based satellite radio.  Locally, WDST fills the airwaves with what must feel like the living sound of Woodstock and the Hudson Valley more broadly to anyone who travels to the area.  The region's other radio stations with bigger market shares provide functionalless, place accompaniments to everyday life.  By contrast, WDST enables consumption of a distinct sense of place.  No doubt its random discovery of the car radio dial has tipped the scales toward moving to the Hudson Valley for more than one migrant.

If Woodstock is the chief metonym for the musical representations of the Hudson Valley, its global recognition underscores how almost no Hudson Valley musician or genre today can carve out a successful, global profile under its shadow.  Woodstock continually evokes the past, thereby eclipsing most anything musically exciting in the present.  It's the sound of baby boom dreams that lull residents and newcomers into privatized, domestic lives in quaint villages and rural idylls—and compels everyone else in the Hudson Valley to live with the burden of that market demand.  No, the Hudson Valley is not becoming the next Brooklyn.  Rather, Woodstock is absorbing aging Brooklynites, wherever it is that they actually come from.