listening to home, encountering the other: book review of "Migrating Music" (Jayson Toynbee and Byron Dueck, eds.)

The settlement of foreign-born ethnic migrants has to be the oldest source of urban vitality. It's also a wellspring of musical innovation. Might the latter connection offer insights into the modern city? That's always my hope when I read books like Migrating Music (Routledge, 2012). Edited by Jayson Toynbee and Byron Dueck, this volume addresses the cultural dynamics and social consequences of music that travels across borders. The most common scenario described within the volume is the diasporic one in which ethnic groups move to new countries and bring or rediscover their 'homeland' music. In other chapters, music migrates independently of a 'native' constituency. Hip hop takes hold of youth in countries with no basis in the African diaspora, this volume documents, while jazz performers and Brazilian genres might migrate at the behest of music industries and institutions.

I've written recently about the prohibitive costs associated with recent edited volumes of musical scholarship. Although this was an issue when Routledge originally published Migrating Music in 2011, the book has now been released at a (comparatively) more affordable paperback price. The writings here grew out of a 2009 conference sponsored by the University of London's School of Oriental and African Studies, and its contributors are predominantly based in European institutions. Accordingly, with a few exceptions the research gathered here was conducted in European settings, although the diasporic circuits that this volume charts extend into Africa, Asia and the Middle East. The omission of research on diasporic music in the Americas might irk readers looking for the latest thinking on banda or reggaeton, yet as Toynbee and Dueck point out, "more than one-third of migration in recent years has been to Europe, making it the most important region of destination for migrants around the world" (pg. 13).

The book is organized into four sections. "Migrants" and "Translations" give respective emphasis to the listeners and forms/transformations of migrating music, while "Media" and "Cities" suggest the importance of material contexts for, respectively, disseminating and producing migrating music. As these edited volumes often go, Migrating Music is a bit of a mixed bag across the chapters. This is true perhaps more so in terms of its sections, which are otherwise well served by the various introductions prepared by the editors. While conceptually the importance of media and cities to the question of migrating music is inarguable, and (separately) the chapters within each section are generally quite interesting, these concepts' development in the context of the volume's organization isn't as consistently up to snuff as the first two sections on "Migrants" and "Translations."

Despite the title's promise of entering new terrains, Migrating Music pays almost no attention to the digitally-circulated, club-focused fusions that sometimes get called World Music 2.0. (If this phenomenon doesn't ring a bell, listen to music made by MIA, Diplo and Moombahton, or check out the writings of Wayne Marshall and Larissa Mann.) So, Pitchfork readers may find very little here to make their hearts skip a beat. A possible exception is Helen Kim's chapter, "'Keepin' It Real': Bombay Bronx, cultural producers and the Asian scene," which examines the London Asian urban music scene in which a "post bhangra" sound incorporates fusions with hip hop, dancehall and R&B. However, her concerns in this chapter aren't musicological but instead more reflective of a cultural studies agenda, e.g., how generic distinctions (here vis-à-vis the tasteful, drum-n-bass-flavored "Asian Underground" associated with Talvin Singh and Nitin Sawhney) reflect contested ideas about British Asian youth identity.

The opinion that the Asian Underground was not for Asians is a loud declaration that not all Asians are alike. It furthermore reclaims 'Asian' for a decidedly less highbrow audience, construing the Asian Underground not only as 'middle-class', but additionally as inauthentic insofar as it colludes with white middle-class tastes. By defining themselves in opposition to the Asian Underground, cultural producers [at London's Bombay Bronx] assert that they are countering white, middle-class, hegemonic space (pg. 22).

This example highlights two defining features of Migrating Music. First, the intellectual undertaking here is typically rooted in the anthropology and cultural studies traditions. I confess a little disappointment that there's almost no musicological analysis (much less music criticism) in Migrating Music, if only because as a sociologist I'm most familiar with the social scientific approaches. Who knows, maybe the musicologists and critics will find these approaches a valuable corrective to the scholarship they're used to. But as cultural studies is especially prone to do, these approaches support a narrative that eventually abstracts out of the particularities of their subject matter—the historic/geographic contexts, collective dynamics, and cultural artifacts including the music itself—to arrive at a recurring set of social functions: the collective negotiation of identity, the restoration of community, national/ethnic reaction to change from without, etc.

Social science writing shouldn't have to be a poetry contest, of course. At one level, the predictability of these scholarly 'punchlines' reminds us of the stability and durability in the organization of the social world, without which the social sciences would be lost. But it would be nice to hear these general facts of the social world within the music, wouldn't it? In this regard, the most notable chapter is "Un Voyage via Barquinho: Global Circulation, Musical Hybridization, and Adult Modernity, 1961-9" by Keir Keightley. Reviewing the 'migration' (really, the diffusion by key composers, filmmakers, and media gatekeepers) of the Brazilian bossa nova via the Roberto Menescal/Rondaldo Bôscoli composition "O Barquinho," Keightley describes the emergence of a very particular, indeed now quite retro, structure of musical feeling: that sense of pre-rock "adult modernity" associated with early-1960s signifiers of James Bond-cool and the jet-setting journey into the "now." (Later groups like Stereolab, Portishead, and Broadcast mined this specific musical vein quite well.) Keightley's critical analysis of a key track (from Francis Lai's soundtrack to the the 1967 film "Live for Life") makes the reader want to listen closely:

Consuming the adult good life, whether via jet or wine, appears as the imperative of a new sensibility; why else would the injunction "live for life" be necessary? The chord progression's half-step drop occur and reoccur, creating an effect suggestive of lingering in one place and thn moving onto another. Presenting a montage of moments at both the lyrical and musical levels, the song's harmonic instability and pleasurable pausing remind us of the restless mobility that characterizes the global consumption at issue (pg. 119).

In a second defining feature, Migrating Music isn't especially preoccupied with the 'newest and most exciting' musical forms if the latter are understood to be whatever excites young people in diasporic communities (or popular music scholarship). To its credit, the volume is even-handed in covering music that resonates across the generations. It's enlightening to learn of what older Afghanis who have fled their wartorn country are tuning into—the subject of "Music, Migration and War: the BBC's Interactive Music Broadcasting to Afghanistan and the Afghan Diaspora," a fascinating chapter by John Baily. It's important to examine the circumstances by which young migrants find new relevance in 'old-fashioned' music from their homeland (as Carolyn Landau recounts for one Moroccan Londoner in "'My Own Little Morocco at Home': A Biographical Account of Migration, Mediation and Music Consumption"). An ethnographically rich chapter by Laura Steils, "'Realness': Authenticity, Innovation and Prestige among Young Danseurs Afros in Paris," documents the unexpected appropriation of 'old world' Congolese/Ivoirian styles of music, dance, fashion, speech and display by French-African youth caught up in the musique afro movement of the last decade.

This attention to the 'old-fashioned' extends to the "Media" section. While elsewhere the book establishes the importance of the Internet and social media to disseminating music across borders, all four chapters in this section primarily address radio. Even more curiously, half of these chapters pertain specifically to British broadcasters. In "Migrating Music and Good-Enough Cosmoplitanism," Kevin Roberts interviews Robin Denselow and Charlie Gillett, the latter a storied music writer whose work as a radio DJ exposed untold numbers of British music fans to "world music" (a generic designation that has been partly attributed to Gillett). In "Ports of Call: An Ethnographic Analysis of Music Programmes about the Migration of People, Musicians, Genres and Instruments, BBC World Service, 1994-5," Jan Fairley recalls her programming work on the titular show, which was recorded in English for global broadcast. (I'll not count Baily's chapter in this category, as the two Afghani radio programs for the BBC World Service he describes were broadcast in the Pashto language.)

If the rationale (never made explicit) behind operationally defining 'media' as radio include the fact that the latter remains the chief medium of musical distribution around the world, for native-born residents and transnational migrants alike, then the point is well taken. So too is the editors' reminder that radio is indeed interactive (increasingly via real-time telephone calls and e-mails with listeners) and can now be heard on a variety of Internet-ready devices. Still, the Roberts and Fairley chapters address quite Anglo-centric topics, and in a breezy, analytically undeveloped manner no less, which gives off an unfortunate whiff of academic laziness. In principle their British views into "world music" is interesting, insofar as they hail from a classic setting of the colonial gaze that these authors wrestle with —well, at least Robins does—from a contemporary context. But I also noted that the contributors to the "Media" section were among the most senior and august scholars in this volume (e.g., Fairley is a past International Chairperson of the IASPM). Did these selections originate as informal "conversations" in the 2009 conference? Do they merit inclusion in Migrating Music alongside the empirical research of the other chapters?

To return to a familiar point of reference for most readers, let me address the issue of youth-based pop culture once again. Were the assembled authors given a vote, I think it's likely they would nominate hip hop as the most widely practiced lingua franca among youth cultures around the world. In all its artistic (and contested) diversity, hip hop is central to Laudan Nooshin's chapter on "Hip-Hop Tehran: Migrating Styles, Musical Meanings, Marginalized Voices") and Antti-Ville Kärjä's chapter, "Ridiculing Rap, Funlandizing Finns? Humour and Parody as Strategies of Securing the Ethnic Other in Popular Music." Elsewhere, hip hop gets alchemized along R&B and dancehall in Helen Kim's chapter on London's "Bombay Bronx" club, while the danseurs afros in Laura Steils' chapter reject hip hop's earlier grip on Afro-French youth to embrace Congolese and Ivoirian flavors.

This spectrum of local responses to the global spread of hip hop highlights Toynbee and Dueck's chief theoretical contribution to the scholarship on migrating music, which elaborates anthropologist Michael Taussig's ideas of mimesis and alterity (also the title of his 1993 book). Taussig's concepts offer a different, more relativistic framework for understanding the encounter with a dominant culture's influences than simplistic ideas of "Westernization" or "cultural homogenization." Mimesis (or imitation, what the assimilation of outside influences evidently results in) can occur when two cultures encounter each other, as a way of containing their misunderstood or threatening cultural differences (or alterity). Taussig asserts that this process is rarely unidirectional, as both cultures are transformed in some significant way when appropriating the other's elements; in this way, homogenization isn't a foregone conclusion of mimesis. But the editors point out that Taussig's framework still supposes the binary of the colonial encounter, whereas migrating music can reveal responses to more local, less hierarchicalized orders.

None of the assembled authors in Migrating Music takes up Taussig's framework or the editors' elaboration explicitly, but the eclipse of hip-hop by musique afro among the Afro-French youth Steils studies offers a good illustration of what Toynbee and Dueck are getting at. Whereas hip hop was assimilated as a means of addressing the racism of French whites, it became less relevant once assimilation of Congolese/Ivoirian influences gave Afro-French youth a way to renegotiate more subcultural (e.g., banlieue-specific) meanings of "realness." This is a potentially productive framework, I think, for understanding the often complex semiotic innovations of diasporic cultural production. Certainly it's an alternative to "glocalization," an unlovely piece of academic jargon that the all the authors thankfully neglect. More to the point, mimesis and alterity highlight the signifying politics at work in diasporic cultural production, far more than the broad, ambiguous notion of glocalization does. However, the latter evokes a spatial framework that is intuitively salient to urbanists. The absence of such a spatial framework in this book underscores the limits of Migrating Music's contributions to cultural urban studies, as well as the insights that a more active urbanist reading of this volume can yield.

Throughout the book, "cities" are on the whole conceptualized narrowly as material sites for cultural production. In Kristin McGee's chapter "'New York Comes to Grongingen': Jazz Star Circuits in the Netherlands," Grongingen is the location for a musical academy whose jazz program derives international repute from its connections to NYC. In Helen Kim's chapter on Bombay Bronx, London is the site of a particularly influential weekly nightclub. In Sara Cohen's chapter, "Cavern Journeys: Music, Migration and Urban Space," Liverpool is the site of the Cavern Club, a performance venue that sustains musical communities as well as (in the neoliberal era, with tragic historical oversights) supports urban brands. This focus on cultural production means the city qua community—of ethnic/migrant groups, neighborhoods, music fans or otherwise—is largely undeveloped in Migrating Music.

However, elsewhere the volume highlights diasporic 'publics' that are constituted by migrating music. As various chapters show, these publics may have urban foundations, although the analysis typically emphasizes publics' manifest content—e.g., the imagining of cross-border diasporic nations and ethnicities—over their geographic milieu. (As a reader from urban sociology, I was puzzled how frequently some authors downplayed the physical location of their human subjects, at least in comparison to the imaginary locations evoked by the music.) The volume's relative neglect of urban milieux for diasporic publics, and of the prospect that settlement in concrete places can in fact transform and differentiate the scattered members of diasporic publics, puts it at odds with the thrust of much scholarship in urban studies. Then again, the latter might benefit from this volume's insights into the signifying work that goes into imagining publics, a work that involves considerable agency on the parts of audiences and contingency in the materials available to construct publics. Just think of how the concept of publics might retorque the critical scholarship on urban branding and hipster enclaves, to name two recent topics in urban studies.

The migration of music and people also supports another feature of cities: cosmopolitanism. Indeed, Byron Dueck questions the conventional association of cosmopolitanism with cities: "Unacknowledged comopolitanisms are hidden everywhere, all the more easily ignored when they seem to be manifestations of the traditional, the rural or the sacred" (pg. 199). This is a valid way to understand what's at stake when (as John Baily's chapter describes) women from Afghanistan call into the BBC World Service program Zamzama and share their zamzama—Pashto for everyday humming and singing:

AMINA: Salaam. Where are you speaking from, Farahnaz Jan?
FARAHNAZ: I'm from—in the north...
AMINA: And are you married?
FARAHNAZ: Yes, I'm married.
AMINA: Farahnaz Jan, do you listen to music?
FARAHNAZ: Yes, I listen to music, especially to the BBC. When I go to the kitchen I take my radio [mobile telephone] with me and listen every minute I'm in there. This is the song I want to sing.
[Farahnaz sings]
AMINA: Farahnaz Jan, thank you very much. I thought I could hear someone in the background while you were singing. Is there anyone else with you who would like to sing?
FARAHNAZ: No, there's no one around because my husband's very strict. That's why I came to the kitchen as soon as my phone rang.
AMINA: I hope your husband is not too strict.
FARAHNAZ: Because of the situation in this country and because we're in a village, people feel they have to be strict, they're so nervous about upsetting someone.
AMINA: Your husband won't be upset if he hears you singing on the BBC?
FARAHNAZ: He doesn't know my [singing] voice that well!
AMINA: Thank you very much (pp. 189-90).

Ultimately, I think it goes too far to suggest that such mass-mediated musical exchanges occur outside the auspices of urbanism (as social condition). My view on this isssue may be more philosophical than empirical, but it seems that what Georg Simmel and Max Weber would recognize as the techno-rational media for modernity—in this case its structured encounter with the 'other,' the abstract reflection such encounters facilitate, and (ideally) the civilizing effect that results—emerged in fundamental respects out of the historic cauldron of city life. To acknowledge that modernity has since escaped its original setting hardly means that indicated urbanism has lost its significance. On the contrary, giving a nod to Louis Wirth, urbanism is now a portable way of life. In this way, perhaps new encounters with urbanism are among the best of what migrating music offers its listeners.

the five-year plan: a review of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire by Will Hermes

 

New York music doesn't lack for good books. Nor does the history of 1970s New York. The intersection of these two subjects has been so worked over in the past ten years, it would seem any worthwhile new title would have to move on to fresher fields. So it's utterly remarkable how Will Hermes' book Love Goes to Buildings on Fire: Five Years in New York That Changed Music Forever (Faber & Faber, 2011) has made NYC music circa 1973-77 seem quite fresh again. In so doing, the book joins the ranks of beloved titles on New York music like Please Kill Me, Can't Stop Won't Stop and Love Saves the Day.

Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is such an enjoyable and engaging read in large part because of the particular methods used by Hermes, a long-time music journalist and Queens native:

First, Hermes pulls back from the usual focus on punk, hip hop, and disco for a wider angle on New York music of the era, giving equal attention to the city's loft jazz, salsa, and avant-garde composers. Hermes also covers some unexpected musical figures, most notably Bruce Springsteen; Hermes' account of how Springsteen's E Street Band line-up and breakthrough albums came together in NYC puts a new twist on the Boss's traditional association with New Jersey .

Second, Hermes sequences the many threads on various scenes and musicians are with a straightforward chronological sequence. Literally, Chapter 1 begins on January 1, 1973 (a New York Doll's concert at the Mercer Arts Center), and Chapter 5 ends on December 31, 1977 (a gig by saxophonist David Murray at the Lower Manhattan Ocean Club). Pre-1973 back stories are kept to a minimum, and then largely to motivate the NYC moment in question, not to illuminate particular biographies.

Third, he puncutates the five-year narrative with additional NYC events and backdrops. The reader will anticipate many of these; the NY Post's "Ford to City: Drop Dead" headline, the serial murders of Son of Sam, and the 1977 blackout are all here. However, Hermes has a native's intuition for including lesser-known events that conveys an authentic slice of life:

        At the Emotional Outlet, a clothing store on Sixteenth Street off Seventh Avenue, a customer inexplicably punched a salesgirl in the face. And in October [1975], in a bizarre case of live imitating art imitating life, a burnout named Ray "Cat" Olsen held up the Bankers Trust on Sixth Avenue with a rilfe, taking hostages à la Al Pacino in the current hit film Dog Day AFternoon (itself based on a crazy New York City bank robberty from the summer of '72). Declaring himself a member of the Symbionese Liberation Army, Olsend demanded the release of Patty Hearst, who'd just been arrested in San Francisco. 

       "On any night, the Grateful Dead are the best fuckin' rock 'n' roll band in the world," Olsen told a live radio audience via phone over his favorite radio station, WNEW-FM, which fed his voice of the airwaves while his gun was trained on ten hostages. "I want to thank Jerry Garcia. I want to thank Phil Lesh . . . They have made me high over the years. I'm psychedelic." He spoke with Scott Muni, who played Dylan's "Stuck Inside of Mibole" for him and then went down to the bank to try to talk him down. The gunman was finally arrested after trading two hostages for a six-pack, and then passing out (pg. 148).

        New York was especially high-strung that spring and summer [of 1976]. This was partly due to the Great Dope Famine—or, as it was known in our neighborhood, simply the Drought. There was no weed to be had anywhere. It's hard to remember, in these days of cell-phone-delivery-service characters who come to your apartment 24/7 with suitcases full of jewel-boxed hydroponic buds grown domestically, that in the '70s quality marijuana had to be imported. 

       The Soho News ran a cover story about the weed famine in its Fourth of July Issue. "Stockbrokers ahve lost their radar," Frank Lauria wrote. "Creative Directors can't find the hook. Disc Jockeys are at a loss for words, and Television Executives can no longer sense the pulse of the public. Manhattan's artistic turbine is sputtering lamely on stems and seeds . . . There is simply no grass to be had in fun city" (pg. 186).

Fourth, Hermes liberally adds his own story to the narrative. A middle-class white kid in Queens socially predisposed toward Led Zeppelin and the Grateful Dead, his life is changed by a 1976 Springsteen concert. Otherwise, "What was happening in Manhattan, I had no idea" (pg. 41). As suggested by the book's title, Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is Hermes' opportunity to rectify the opportunities he missed to witness these musical flourishings at firsthand. Nonetheless, he effectively exploits his Queens positionality to illuminate the diffusion of multicultural fusions, subcultural styles, urban unrest, and generational change emanating out of the numbered-streets grid in Manhattan and the South Bronx:

At Goose Pond Park next to Jamaica High School in Queens, as the winter [of 1976-77] thawed, the white kids would sit on one side of the pond smoking cigarettes and joines while, across the way, the black kids with their boom boxes did the same. They'd blast WBLS, or cassette tapes of funk, disco, and fusion jams. Across the divide, all heads nodded to the beats (pg. 258).

Fifth, Hermes avoids letting these concurrent narratives merely accumulate by looking for the mutual influences and back-stage connections across the many scenes and musicians divided by idiom, milieu, and even language. Thus, we learn how David Byrne was at the 1976 Metropolitan Opera premiere of Philip Glass and Robert Wilson's Einstein at the Beach, and how minimalist Rhys Chatham found his musical voice while attending a Ramones gig at CBGBs with his former roommate Arthur Russell.

These five formal methods yield a lot of material that Hermes skillfully develops into an exciting narrative that works best at the level of historical description. Not that the reader has to wade through dry, "objective" account—the following passage illustrate how Hermes' personal voice drives the detailed and occasionally quantitative enumeration of facts:

And then there were the subways. Height similarities notwithstanding, [mayor Abraham] Beame was no Mussolini, and the trains did not run on time. Wild delays were the norm, and rarely announced. Trains were often shortened, meaning you might sprint down the stairs to find the train doors closing on the end car halfway down the platform. There were 2,971 purses snatched in the subways in '76, 5 rapes, 5 homicides, 145 felonious assaults. Operating hours for booths were shortened, and lines long, so you had to stock up on tokens, fifty cents each. Stations stank of garbage. People smoked freely and flicked their butts onto the tracks; tunnel fires were common. The trains were old, maintenance was sketchy. At its best, graffiti actually helped more than hurt (pg. 228).

In recent interviews promoting the book, Hermes has been asked the predictable questions of why this musical explosion happened in New York City at this time, and he's given some predictable answers: "cheap rent," for instance. No doubt that's a factor. Probably so, too, are the "melting pot culture" (pg. 24) and self-conscious "historical perspective" (pg. 140) that characterized NYC's music scenes. But the analytical strength of Love Goes to Buildings on Fire is precisely how it devotes little space for the author's speculations. For one reason, Hermes adheres to the writer's rule of "show don't tell"; better to recount, for example, how Rashied Ali paid $200/month rent in 1973 to open his two-story jazz venue Ali's Alley ("at 77 Greene Street, just off Spring") than to pontificate about the generalized importance of cheap rent for music scenes.

But if I correctly detect from Love Goes to Buildings on Fire that Hermes is hedging his bets—that he betrays a self-doubt that he's not well suited to enter into academic and planning debates about what's more important, cheap rent or multiculturalism (or some other factor—I think cultural scholars can learn a lot from Hermes' fidelity to more or less thick description. As ethnographer Howard Becker argues in Tricks of the Trade (University of Chicago Press, 1998): 

Social scientists... ordinarily expect to be given such interpretations in what they read and to rely on them in what they write. They think of the details fo their work as the basis for generalizations, as samples whose interest lies in their generalizability, in the interpretations that explain what those details stand for. But perhaps these interpretations aren't as necessary as we think. We can get a lot from simpler, less analyzed observations. The appropriate ratio of description to interpretation is a real problem every describer of the social world has to solve or come to terms with (pg. 79).

Look to Hermes' inevitable citations in hundreds of future scholarly publications on this era in New York City (musical and otherwise) for proof of this book's archival and methodological value. In the meantime, set aside a weekend or extended plane/train ride to acquaint yourself with its more immediate pleasures.

what's local? a review of "The Dears: Lost in the Plot" by Lorraine Carpenter

Does it diminish a musician's accomplishments to view them through his or her place of origin?  Does the prism of the "hometown" assign the stigma of parochialism or, worse, artistic failure, implying that the musician never got out of the minor leagues, or never wanted to?

Consider how we don't find it fundamentally necessary to know where the "truly great" artists come from.  We don't understand, say, David Bowie or Keith Richards primarily their local origins.  Yes, they were children of the suburbs and provinces, perhaps, but these places' identities (Bromley, Dartford) and qualities are fairly incidental and transcended by the non-local inspirations and global impacts of the music they made at their prime.  If we're interested in the geography of their work, it's usually to mark the place of inspiration in a peripatetic career: Bowie's Berlin albums, the Stones' recordings in Richards' tax exile home on the coast of France. 

Beyond a historian's documentary interest, what's there to be learned from contextualizing a band within the place where it formed and rose to prominence?   This is the question begged and not adequately answered by Lorraine Carpenter's The Dears: Lost in the Plot (Invisible, 2011).  91 pages in length, the book is basically an extended feature article on the Dears, the vastly underrated and unfairly overlooked legends of Montreal indie-rock.  Through interviews with members past and present, Carpenter provides a convincing narrative about the band's musical triumphs and career frustrations.  But she further proposes that the Dears' story is also a story about musical Montreal:

The Dears are as good a band as any Canadian act of the aughts.  But why didn't they get the glory?  Being "ahead of the curve," as Lightburn said, or simply victims of bad timing.  The hype behind the band, particularly in North American, peaked just prior to the rise of social media and blogs, before online trumpeting could propel a band as far as it can today.  Perhaps that why, when the Montreal scene was being feted in a succession of major publications, their name was usually absent—the only organization to shine the spotlight on The Dears in a Montreal-scene piece was CBC's The National, Canada's nightly news show (pg. 8).

So the stakes have been raised: how can the Dears—their biographies, aspirations, and music—be understood in the context of Montreal?  Unfortunately, The Dears: Lost in the Plot doesn't really develop many insights about the group's relationship to their city of origin.  However, it does offers some provocative material for such a project —or, rather, it sketches out what this material might look like—almost despite Carpenter's best intentions.

By highlighting such shortcomings, let me make clear at the onset that I'm not here to fault Lorraine Carpenter for failing to write a different book.  That's a cheap form of criticism, and it dismisses what the author brings to the table (and what Invisible Publishing is trying to do with the slim volumes it releases).  Furtheremore, I'll happily gobble up any lengthy treatise on the Dears, and Lost in the Plot works well as a documentation of the group's career and a critical review of their work.  A Montreal journalist, Carpenter has known the band personally for a long time, she's very familiar with their recordings (including the very early ones that are maybe best overlooked), and she's not afraid to call it like she sees it in their typically brilliant yet inconsistent body of recordings.  (I for one appreciate her advice to skip the first four tracks on Gang of Losers; a false start, these songs betray the Dears' Britpop influences a little too earnestly in their anthemic, swing-for-the-bleachers stylings, postponing the band's more interesting aesthetic development until track #5.) 

More to the point, the Dears needn't be listened to or understood as a "Montreal group" first and foremost.  Really, in my book they're not even a "Canadian group," just a great band.  But by pushing at the urban/local angle that Carpenter uses to document the Dears, I want to use this review to think about some questions of inquiry and methods for analyzing musical urbanism.

An appreciation

To begin, hands up for folks who've given the Dears a few listens...  Not that many?  Okay, that's simply unacceptable. 

The Dears' sound—dramatic, tuneful, majestic, witty, able to shoulder the burden of the listener's own heartbreak and anguish—is probably best conveyed by the title of their 2001 EP, Orchestral Pop Noir Romantique.  Unlike some other '00s groups around whom that category could loosely fit (Stereolab, Air), the Dears continued to evolve in musical scope and theme.  Perhaps that evolution hasn't been quite as flashy as Pitchfork (whose coolness toward the Dears is notorious) and other music bloggers might like, but it has been uncontrived and hard earned.  In over fifteen years of operation, the Dears have produced five albums, two EPs and other recorded odds and ends characterized by remarkable musical and emotional substance. I find myself returning to these records again and again; each album is rewarding on its own and further comprises an fascinating career arc comparable to their influences—the Smiths/Morrissey, Suede, Pulp, and (I never see anyone mention this) Roxy Music/Bryan Ferry.  After today's trends have faded into obsolescence five, fifteen, fifty years from now, I suspect the Dears' music will still sound great.

The Dears probably garnered the most attention between 2003 and 2006, a period bookended by their astonishing breakthrough No Cities Left (one of the great albums of the last decade) and the Polaris Music Prize-nominated Gang of Losers.  Then, for a variety of personal and business reasons that this book chars, the band imploded down to the kernel of singer Murray Lightburn and keyboardist Natalia Yanchak, just as the media spotlight on Montreal shifted to Arcade Fire (Yanchak half-seriously calls AF frontman Win Butler an early Dears "cyberstalker").  And, for many, that seems to close the book on the group, despite the fact that they put out two more really good albums.  Today, when they get any attention, the Dears are generaly summarized by one of three points:

1. the singer sounds like a black Morrissey


2. they're that torchy, miserablist group fronted by a husband-and-wife duo


3. they're the Montreal band who never quite made it

The last point, undoubtedly the least trivializing of the three, in turn calls attention to the broader musical scene in Montreal.

So what's so Montreal about the Dears?

If rock music is a genre that doesn't particularly charge its performers to report on or identify with specific places, the ways that hip hop or maybe folk music might, then perhaps it's perhaps a natural instinct to think about the "urban" aspects of a rock group by looking to the scene of local bands, musicians, venues, media and institutions that it comes from.  (Certainly, that's the ready-made angle, by now a little tired, that the media has used to understand musicians coming from Montreal and Canada's other major music cities).  Canada is a huge territory with almost one-third of its population concentrated in its three largest cities' metropolitan area.  In that setting, the locations of musicians and other creatives won't generally be accidental; patterns of migration, intermingling, and sharing of resources will fundamentally shape the creative milieu.  In Montreal, this dynamism extends back much further than the city's current prosperity in the creative economy:

Of course Montreal is unique.  It's the urban centre of a French province on an English and Spanish continent, with all the quirks, wonders and troubles that such a politically tense and culturally fruitful juxtaposition brings.  But in many ways, Montreal is also a typical North American city: a piece of land (an island) that was founded, settled and developed by conquerors and immigrants, one that's famous for cultural touchstones that have flourished here, but originated in our old countries, sometimes by way of the superpower to the south.

In the late '70s, the rise of nationalist fervour inspired a slow exodus of English-speaking (anglo) Montrealers that would last for two decades.  But once the threat of a separation from Canada subsided, taking the recession down with it, not only did native anglos stay put, but a segment of the steady influx of students from other provinces and countries began to plant roots.  Some of them formed bands, founded festivals or otherwise created and hustled to enrich the local art scene.

English musicians from these parts used to take their quest for a career to Toronto, the national hub of the music industry.  Now, it's not uncommon to hear about bands relocating from their city to Montreal, to tap into the storied recording studios, live venues, hipster hangouts and cheap rents that fed the successes of the mid-aughts.

That scene remains small, and with 68 percent of the city being francophone, Québécois culture looms large.  But despite this, the past decade has given us a pack of anglo bands and a scene to be proud of, to the particular delight of pop music connoisseurs and indie-label patrons (pp. 5-6).

This promising overture notwithstanding, The Dears: Lost in the Plot is not the definitive book on the Montreal anglo indie-rock scene.  It's not even close, really.  Montreal bands that Carpenter mentions are the most usual of suspects (Arcade Fire, Wolf Parade, the Godspeed You! Black Emperor collective) and then only in the briefest of passing.  When Murray Lightburn is reported to have enticed guitarist Patrick Krief back into the Dears in 2009 by praising the latter's band—"When I heard the Black Diamond Bay record, I wish I had been a part of it"—and the reader has by this point no idea who Black Diamond Bay is (they even included another ex-Dears member, drummer George Donoso), you realize an opportunity has been lost to dive further into the constellation of Montreal bands and say a little more about their modes of/occasions for recombination. 

Furthermore, Carpenter gives local francophone bands like Les Georges Leningrad, Pas Chic Chic and Les Breastfeeders only a tantalizing footnote.  In this case, Carpenter is up-front about her focus on Montreal's anglo indie-rock scene.  But while that focus gives The Dears: Lost in the Plot a coherence of narrative, I can't help but wonder why she had to strive for coherence at all.  Why not instead foreground the contradictory perspectives and ambitions of a scene's participants, cliques, and neighborhoods?  The excellent oral history of the Germs illustrates how even the focus on a single band can entertain a multiplicity of local viewpoints and opinions. 

A different urban angle might be to situate the Dears within an indigenous tradition of place-based culture and history.  In the case of Montreal, presumably such an argument could be drawn from the city's famed cultural heterogeneity.  Wisely, Carpenter backs off from assessments of Montreal's musical terroir, which are vulnerable to highly romanticized, overly simplicistic claims about a place.

Interestingly, she reports that Lightburn employs such a Montreal rhetoric from time to time, usually to deflect  the charge that "he's a black guy in a 'white' musical realm":

Lightburn took pride in the band's mixed heritage: "George moved here from chile when he was nine, Martin is as Quebec as it gets, au boutte, Natalia is a Pollack/Ukranian from a Pollack area of Toronto, Valérie is half American, Benvie is a straight-up Canadian white guy and I'm the son of immigrants from Central America," he said.  (For the record, Krief is a Jew with roots in Morocco.) (pg. 61)

If, as this example suggests, urban(e) rhetorics are used to engage what are essentially non-urban issues (in this case, the unspoken racialization of indie rock), then does anything of sui generis relevance remain to the urban story of the Dears?  Is there anything gained by further barking up this tree? 

The Dears and everyday life

In fact, The Dears: Lost in the Plot hints at another way of thinking about the urban context surrounding the Dears.  It comes at the very beginning of the book, in a preface entitled "Full Disclosure":

I was 16 when I moved into the master bedroom in my parents' apartment, a room previously inhabited by my older brother, and my older sister before him.  I vividly remember watching the video for "How Soon Is Now" by The Smiths the night my family moved into the top floor of that triplex in 1985.  But not much Smiths was played on the turntable there; my musical education was dominated by my siblings' records, mostly David Bowie, The Beatles, Roxy Music and The Velvet Underground, along with a range of questionable '80s bands.

It was only in the '90s, when I was a Suede fanatic, that I truly became enamoured with The Smiths.  And in that bedroom (in a beautiful old building, incidentally) I heard The Smiths not only on my stereo, but through the wall.

It was shocking to me then that someone else, someone right next door, was listening to this vaguely gay, English '80s band in the era of Pearl Jam.  I know now that I was hardly alone, as young Britpop fans everywhere had found The Smiths the way I had, just as teenagers in the aughts took the cue from emo idols like My Chemical Romance or Fallout Boy (I've seen the homemade Smiths t-shirts to prove it).  Even on that one block in Montreal, there was a kindred spirit.  Years later, I found out that person was Murray Lighburn (pp. 1-2).

Here is a glimpse onto a real, tangible place, one that articulates both non-local contexts (adolescence, maybe a particular Canadian slant on Anglophilia) and local contexts (a racial-ethnic composition that made Lightburn "the one black guy at all the Britpop concerts" in Montreal) into a concrete spatial formation for the conduct of everyday life.  The scenario Carpenter describes could be played out in a number of places, yet the reader intuits it's genuinely Montreal.  On the surface it's a silly episode related from a 16-year-old's vantage point, but were it developed into a coherent biographical arc that encompasses the Dears in their messy adult lives, it could form the basis for a very serious documentation and analysis of Montreal urbanism.

It's disappointing but maybe not surprising that Carpenter backs away early on from this view into the Dears' mundane relationship to Montreal.  To make their voice credible, journalists are supposed to stick to objective facts and not make themselves the subjects of their story, which are just what this episode appears to threaten; hence she invokes the journalistic duty of "full disclosure", thereby dismissing this provocative nugget of data from serious analytical consideration.  (Subjectivity is legitimate, of course, when Carpenter shifts into the role as musical critic, a transition that her writing carries out rather seamlessly.)  Perhaps the lived experience that Carpenter shares with the Dears and other participants of the Montreal music scene is too close to even notice, much less analyze adequately.  Yet beneath the book's musical history and critical review, windows onto Montreal urbanism appear everywhere, even in a passing reference to the difficulties of maintaining distance from her subjects:

Anglo Montreal is such a small town that no editor has ever accused me of being biased.  It's as normal for local writers to know their subject personally or professionally, or at least be separated by very few degrees, as it is for my conversations with Murray to shift in and out of interview mode, on and off the record.  That's how our friendship began (pg. 3).

Again, I don't want to criticize Carpenter for not being a proper ethnographer, which would be just as unfair as slamming her for not writing a different book than the one she did.  But her subjective relationship is the most promising lead that Carpenter has into a greater understanding of the Dears' Montreal urbanism, whatever that might be.  Given the proper analytical treatment, subjectivity transcends gossip or personal opinion (if we want to give the authors' nemeses those names) to become the window onto everyday life, musical or otherwise.

the end of the line in Sheffield: Sex City? a review of Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp by Owen Hatherley

With the horribly regressive debt-ceiling legislation passed by the U.S. Congress today, the West took yet another step toward making the neoliberal dream — gutting social programs, enshrining the market as the means and end of social well-being, idealizing upward mobility and the consumer good life, and leaving the lower classes to their own fate — the only game in town.  Do we even count these steps anymore?  Is there any point?  There is no alternative, Margaret Thatcher said of the amoral economic world she helped set in motion, and the liberal opposition seems only too eager to believe it.

It seems now might be an appropriate time to revisit the remarkable music of Pulp. 

 

Luckily, we have an excellent gazetteer on this journey: Owen Hatherley's slim little book, Uncommon: An Essay on Pulp (Zero Books, 2011).  An erudite and excitable writer, Hatherley has two useful qualifications for this task.  First, he was born in 1981, around the same time Pulp began recording.  This means that at the band's artistic zenith up to and through the heyday of Britpop, he was at that impressionable age when a young personopens up emotionally and socially to the promise of music, discovering the performers they'll likely deem their all-time favorites through much of their later lives and gearing up for fuller participation in pop culture in their coming years of autonomy.  The appearance of this book indicates Pulp was the group for Hatherley, notwithstanding that by the first time he saw them in concert, they "were as distant as any stadium rock act, a speck far, far away in the stratosphere; yet at the same time they were constantly in your living room" (pg. 88).  Evidently he's spent the second half of life obsessing over Pulp, and his distance from the whole span of their career along with his general acuity as a cultural critic lend him a useful perspective which to assess the highs and lows, the singular achievements and unexpected failures, across Pulp's 30 years as a pop group.

Second and perhaps uniquely, Hatherley is a prolific and insightful architectural critic.  He's thus especially qualified to illuminate the physical landscapes and everyday objects that singer Jarvis Cocker recites and mythologizes in his sometimes hilarious, sometimes savage lyrics.  He specializes in the study of architectural modernism, especially the post-WWII Brutalist variation that Pulp's hometown Sheffield is famously built in.  The urban environment provides the crucial supplemental text with which to interpreting the places, material goods, fashions, leisure activities and ways of killing time associated with Britain's working classes that inhabit Cocker's lyrics and even inform the musicians' choices of instrumentation and genre (e.g., their 1991-94 run as a "rickety glam-disco band").  The music of Pulp, Hatherley demonstrates, constitutes a historically concrete and aesthetically charged urbanism, the explication of which is Uncommon's distinctive contribution.

It is no coincidence whatsoever that Pulp were from Sheffield, the provincial city that, perhaps more than any other in the UK, attempted to create a viable modernist landscape between the 1950s and 1970s, before the money ran out when the steel industry restructured itself and sacked most of its workforce, and a council attempting ‘Socialism in One City’ were squeezed of any funds. Its wildly overambitious Brutalist buildings, left in ruins or demolished altogether in the 1990s, provided — still provide — a landscape where there’s space to dream of what could have been, and to move from there to thinking of what could still be. From their earliest records in the early '80s to the early 2000s, there’s a persistent, direct and occasionally too-close-to-the-bone attention to male-female relations in Pulp’s work, but it’s when they leave this town at the end of the decade – and return there, to write about it, suddenly seeing it anew – that their work transforms, that they become a band worth writing tortuous monographs about. From Separations (recorded mostly in 1989) to 2001’s ‘Wickerman’, Pulp excelled at the evocation of a devastated but still very much alive post-industrial city, and the lives, loves and explorations that go on inside it. It’s arguable that their determined urbanism — as opposed to Britpop’s suburbanism — was informed by having been told, throughout their 1970s childhoods, that their city would be the site of the future, something that is far harder to believe if you grew up in the 1980s or 1990s. Alongside that is the collectivity of the city itself; as often as the protagonist of a Pulp song is a voyeur, he or she is also entirely of the crowd (pp. 12-3).

In fact, it seems Hatherley's very career as architectural historian and cultural critic owes a significant debt to Pulp, as strange as that might seem.  One of the book's best passages recalls his trip north to Sheffield, home of famous modernist edifices like the Park Hill council housing estate, to take in the setting for Pulp's notorious 1992 b-side, "Sheffield: Sex City".  I quote this section at length because it conveys the texture of Hatherly's criticism and because, well, this is what blogs are good for, right?

When I was 16, I and my girlfriend were completely obsessed with this song, and we walked around willing ourselves to see the teeming, simmering, carnal city described, peering up into the L-shaped windows of the tower blocks, past the twitching curtains of the semis, imagining the couplings and perversions inside. It also soundtracked something fairly momentous between us. It is, more than anything else, the reason why this book was written.

Jarvis intones a series of Sheffield place names, with luridly sensual relish - from ‘Intake’ onwards, each one of them emphasised for any possible double-meanings. Frechville, Hackenthorpe, Shalesmoor, Wombwell. The next voice you hear is Candida Doyle, deadpan and Yorkshire, reading — of all things — from one of the sexual fantasies in a Nancy Friday book. Here, as in ‘My Legendary Girlfriend’ (to which it is, according to the sleevenotes, ‘the morning after’) the city itself is the focus for all libidinal energies. ‘We were living in a big block of flats...within  minutes the whole building was fucking. I mean, have you ever heard other people fucking, and really enjoying it? Not like in the movies, but when it’s real...’. Then, the ‘sun rose from behind the gasometers at 6.30am’, and we’re on a tour of the carnal possibilities in a post-industrial city.

Park Hill, Sheffield

The most important sounds in it (aside from Jarvis’ own increasingly astonishing groans, howls, gasps and ecstatic squeals) are hers, too — the banks of synths, taken from the same jumble sale ransacked at the same time by Stereolab, interspersed with some more recent artificial instruments. It’s these smears of indistinct, tinny keyboard atmospheres, the arpeggiated stutters, the repetitious house vamps and Russell Senior’s queasily treated violin, which simulate the vertiginous feeling of nervousness, anticipation and mania which underpin the ridiculous, magnificent lyric, an obsessive, clammily sexual ambience. Underneath, a metronomic kick drum pounds, and deep, relentless low-end throbs, which the group got Warp’s in-house engineer to lower to sub-bass levels. As it pulses, the whole city is ‘getting stiff in the building heat’, and Jarvis walks through its entire extent trying to find his lover. So overwhelmed is he by the sheer sexuality of Sheffield that he finds himself ‘rubbing up against lamp-posts, trying to get rid of it’. The places made sexual are exemplars of non-utopian everyday life, as we traverse the semis, the gardens, and hear ‘groans from a T-reg Chevette — you bet...you bet...’, and in a particularly memorable moment stop to penetrate ‘a crack in the pavement’. This transfigured space is cut with moments of frustrating mundanity; ‘crumbling concrete bus shelters‘, and tedious nights indoors watching television. The pursuit is interrupted, because ‘the fares went up at seven’, our protagonist loses his lover while ‘sentenced to three years in the housing benefit waiting room’. The frustration and fascination builds and builds and builds to the point of explosion, leaving the city’s topographical extremes as location for the final consummation, with the city abstracted below them. ‘We finally made it, on a hilltop at 4am. A million twinkling yellow street lights. The whole city is your jewellery box. Reach out, and take what you want...’ The city has not survived its orgy, and our lovers survey the wreckage left over. ‘Everyone on Park Hill came in unison at 4.13AM, and the whole block fell down. A tobacconist caught fire, and everyone in the street died of lung cancer.’

 Park Hill

This tumultuous collapse was our favourite moment in the song, and we always imagined it taking place in the vast slab block which loomed over this particular courtship (did they have similar fantasies, looking down on us?). It was a bit of a revelation a few years later when, developing what was then a part-time interest in architecture, I found out just how famous and important Park Hill was, and saw photographs of this enormous, snaking collective housing estate, with its wide streets in the sky, its interconnecting decks thrusting out of each block, its form rising to different storeys depending on its place on the hill; the longest walkway has for the last few years had the graffito ‘I LOVE YOU, MARRY ME’, as if in tribute to ‘Sheffield: Sex City’ itself. It was absolutely perfect, a visual emblem of the familiar 1960s-built city turned into a utopian, libidinal megastructure (pp. 43-5).

Park Hill

Is it far-fetched to imagine that the program for Hatherley's two prior books, his 2009 architectural treatise Militant Modernism (which the Guardian praised as "an intelligent and passionately argued attempt to 'excavate utopia' from the ruins of modernism" and an "exhilarating manifesto for a reborn socialist modernism") and his 2010 Guide to the New Ruins of Great Britain, was born in some part from this romp through "Sheffield: Sex City"?  

Of course, the backdrop for Pulp's potent mix of lust, ennui, perversity, solidarity, and bitterness wrapped up in a retro-70s aesthetic is hardly confined to Sheffield landscapes or even the cities of Northern England.  Hatherley recognized the same urbanism in his Southern coastal hometown of Southampton, where the juxtaposition of building scales and architectural eras meant different classes lived next to each other, charging daily interactions with class consciousness and status competitions.  More to the point, Pulp's subject matter was never exclusively urban in a topical sense, and Hatherley is a fine interpreter of their domestic vignettes (where the suburban protagonists are often from higher if still anxious strata) and ambivalent generational anthems (a genre the group especially took up during the Britpop era, e.g., 1995's double A-side single "Mis-Shapes"/"Sorted for E's and Wizz").  Still, Hatherley deftly and consistently ties together their lyrical references, musical strategies/accidents, thematic developments and (less so here — this isn't a typical band bio) career arc into a concrete, coherent worldview that the reader can discern and appreciate as urbanism.  Even if the reader won't recognize the specific cultural references and social codes as well as a British native (or well-versed Anglophile — I'm neither), Uncommon is an inspired, often exemplary work of documenting and criticizing a musical urbanism. 

Beyond this architectural/urban analysis, Uncommon seeks to articulate the utopian project that Pulp both aestheticized and embodied.  For anyone with a modest familiarity with the group's biggest hits like "Common People" (much less song titles that give it away, like "Cocaine Socialism"), Pulp's politics — an old-school socialism of universal entitlements and public education; a defense of the arty, the intellectual, and other embattled outsiders in British society; their disdain for the sheepish masses and uncritical solidarities celebrated by Britpop and New Labour — aren't exactly a mystery.  Yet Hatherley is too smart a critic to dwell at the surface levels of Cocker's lyrics, and he insightfully engages the peculiarly British retro aesthetics that the group exhibited in their music, self-display, video and performance.  Pulp's project was never the nostalgia of Britpop, a self-conscious resurrection of the country's 1960s Swinging London-era hegemony in pop culture that by the 90s stood in for older imperialist, "Britain for the British" impulses.  Instead, the group's aesthetic focused on the 1970s, in all its qualities good, bad and ugly.  Its tawdry materialism, artificial fabrics, and discotheque hangovers didn't age well, of course; here the 70s offers veins of desperation and disdain mined by some of Cocker's more loathsome protagonists.  But the 1970s, coming as they did before Thatcherism's neoliberal project, also provided the group a vision of things that that could have been.

For Pulp, the imaginary 1970s were a portal, a transforming force, not a real remembered thing. Pulp were the first major carriers in Pop of what has since been called Nostalgia for the Future, a Futurism that is dated to the 1970s as the last time that viable political, urban and stylistic alternatives really existed; and which has since been codified as ‘Hauntology’, via a landscape of BBC Radiophonic Workshop, Pelican Books, public information films and Municipal Modernism bent awry through the gaps and aporias of memory, with half-remembered horror films shaking the stiltedness of BBC English into uncanny incantations. Almost all of the above were present and correct in Pulp’s work, but the persistent sexual and personal urgency of their music – not to mention the lack of ‘ghostly’ signifiers – sets them apart from its snugly contemplative warmth. If much hauntological music can sound like a means of filling the time while we wait for the future to start up again, then Pulp’s persistent desperation, their sense of time running out, demands that the future-past resume itself immediately (pg. 11).

Needless to say, this future never came to pass — at least it hasn't yet, a fact provides the animus that fuels Pulp's class-based criticism (see "Common People," "Wickerman") and vengeful scenarios ("I Spy," "This is Hardcore").

Another early 1990s NME interview makes it especially clear just how much of an effect this construction and destruction had on the future members of Pulp: ‘’Sheffield’s full of half-arsed visions of cities of the future that turn into a pile of rubbish,’ Russell Senior reflects, standing on the biggest traffic roundabout in Europe. ‘We grew up reading the local paper and seeing ‘Sheffield, city of the future,’ with a map of how it’s going to be and pictures of everyone walking around in spacesuits, smiling. But we’re the only ones who took it seriously...’ ‘When I was younger I definitely thought I’d live in space,” says Jarvis Cocker ruefully. ‘But when you realise you’re not going to, it colours your life; you can’t think, ‘It’s alright if I’m signing on because I’ll be on Mars soon’, you have to try and get it down here.’ What runs through all of this is the lament of true believers in modernism, holding the present to account for its failure to create a viable future, and the pinched vision of the possible that then instils in those born after the future; as Cocker would yelp in 1998, obliquely apropos New Labour’s workfare schemes, ‘we were brought up on the space race — now they expect you to clean toilets‘ (pp. 48-9).

Perhaps the greatest tragedy is embodied in the band's very existence.  Uncommon extends an argument that Hatherley recently made in briefer form for the Guardian: After 30 years of neoliberal attacks on public education, the dole, subsidized housing and other collective entitlements, there may very well be no more British bands like Pulp.  For Hatherley, the group represents the last great art-school band, in which working and lower-middle class individuals could be trained and then, upon graduation, be economically supported and physically housed while honing their idiosyncratic craft free from the pressures of the market.  The demise of this lineage (represented by "The Kinks, David Bowie, Roxy Music, Japan, Associates, Soft Cell, Kate Bush, The Fall, Pet Shop Boys, The Smiths, amongst others") is captured by a startling statistic: "in October 2010, 60% of British artists in the UK top 10 had been to public school, compared with 1% in October 1990" (pg. 2). 

 (Readers of this blog might recall I found comparable patterns of private-school educationat the college level for NYC's indie-rock bands.  My data were much more DIY and impressionistic, and I'm envious of Hatherley's source of data, if it's as systematic as it's presented to be.)

While the well-fed and well-educated dominate the pop charts, the working-class dreams that have replaced are equally troubling insofar as they offer no room for the odd, the intellectual, and other outsiders.  Presciently, Blur foretold the world of Simon Cowell, Simon Fuller, Pop/American Idol and in the music video for their final single, "Bad Cover Version":

pop as reality TV... was one where the unexpected, fantastical, vivid and vehement things which Pulp had consistently found in the everyday were completely and conclusively sidelined. The main virtues were, first of all, a compelling ‘story’ (although with their decade and a half of failure before fame, Pulp certainly had that), and secondly, an ability to mimic the gestures and the melismatic acrobatics of more famous singers – which, taken together, created an all-pervasive culture of conformity in pop which made the likes of Oasis and Menswear look like paragons of originality by comparison. Rather than being changed or upended, the British pop charts after the 1990s had reached a pre-1960s level of conservatism which was previously inconceivable; and the ‘alternative’ world was hardly in better shape, with the album charts and the rump of the music press dominated by the grossly sentimental epic anthemic balladry of ‘landfill indie’. The ‘Bad Cover Version’ video was horribly prescient, in imagining a pop landscape made up solely of impersonators, other people’s gestures, and the death of the weirdo pop star as anything more than a heritage reminisce. That something so bitterly angry, so musically off-message as ‘Common People’ could have been an enormous hit as recently as six years ago seemed absurd. The lineage that Pulp inherited died with them (pp. 126-7).

This is a bleak thesis, but there are bleak times.  Where will the next Pulp come from?

musical urbanism: statement of a scholarly project

It's promotion review time for me, and in writing a research statement for the three anonymous sociologists evaluating my work, I've had the occasion to compile and synthesize my thinking on musical urbanism into a single essay.  Think of this post as a users manual for understanding what I've been up to academically with this blog.  Your comments are very welcome!  [And if you're my future evaluator, please skip this and read the final draft of this statement in the materials I've given you.]

My third and most recent field of research is a project in urban cultural analysis that I call musical urbanism.  Since this project is still under development, and since it involves a somewhat unconventional approach to a topic seldom addressed within urban studies, here I provide a programmatic discussion of paradigm and methods.  In this project, I examine popular music—an area that for almost 30 years I've been enthusiastically following and involved in (as bandleader, on-air disc jockey, college-radio music director, touring musician, and most recently house/techno DJ)—as a site for asking three general questions:

1. How do cities sustain creative milieus and cultural movements?

2. How are cities and the urban condition represented in art and popular culture?

3. What's local (to a city, neighborhood, group) in any given art form or cultural movement?

Alone, any one of these questions has their scholarly traditions in the social sciences.  Thus, as a contributor to the research on "creative cities," I have a repertoire of sociological responses for the first question.  Also, as a student (but never a participant before now) of cultural studies and the sociology of music, I'm familiar with the methods for answering the third question, which tend to involve ethnographic analysis of particular cultural forms, practices and audiences, concluding with a move into theoretical generalization.  I find such approaches unsatisfactory for this project, however.  For one reason, they have difficulty in accessing the exuberance, alienation and other deeply emotional responses that motivate musical producers and consumers alike.  For another, they evacuate the specific content, meanings and experience of musical creativity and consumption, as analysts too often take away a familiar set of generalized sociological findings—solidarity, social movements, globalization, etc.—from localized activities undertaken in certain historic and geographical contexts.  Coming out of the multidisciplinary field of urban studies, where I've appreciated the attention to specific, contextualized meaning paid by historians and literature/film scholars, I think a sociologist can benefit by incorporating methods from the humanities on this topic.

My point of departure is the phenomenon of urbanism, the modes of material life and consciousness found in cities.  In contemporary sociology, where urban sociology is no longer the master enterprise it was for the seminal Chicago School, urbanism is necessarily a humbler concept.  This idea no longer captures and conveys the central causal factors of modern life; indeed, as global flows of capital, people, ideas and commerce become our structural frame of reference, it's easy to dismiss the analytical relevance of the urban to music, culture and social life more generally.  However, what urbanism still highlights are the ways local and non-local contexts articulate with one another into concrete spatial formations for the conduct of everyday life—formations that we call cities or, maybe more accurately, places, a concept that doesn't presume a certain territorial scale or condition of modernization.  Significantly, as urban sociologist Michael Ian Borer emphasizes, places are the sites where people practice culture.  Accordingly, urbanism offers a lens onto concrete (if not necessarily localized) practices of musical collectivity, creativity, and representation.

AN ARGUMENT FOR MUSICAL URBANISM

My project is given greater urgency by two developments in popular music production and consumption today.  First, the spread of digital file-sharing has precipitated a "crisis" of the music industry model premised on selling physical commodities and enforcing intellectual property rights.  Although this crisis maybe overstated (it seems to have bypassed country music, jazz, and other commercial music genres not weighted toward a younger demographic), it echoes broader social anxieties about the "virtualization" and impoverishment of face-to-face interaction, local group/neighborhood identities, and urban relations.  Recent findings from Barry Wellman and other community sociologists give cause to suspect such zero-sum relationship between physical and virtual media of social life and cultural activity.  Nonetheless, empirical questions for research include: (a) which urban materiél, relations and identities remain relevant to cultural practice and consumption; (b) how urban life, subcultural communion and public space are mediated by digital networks and an evolving music industry; and (c) why urban identities and affiliations ("I represent my city," hip hop MCs and fans ritually proclaim) remain compelling in an Internet world.

Second, the "creative city" thesis advanced by Richard Florida and others indicates that global musical production is heavily concentrated in a select few urban centers, despite the possibilities for geographic dispersal created by technological advances in music recording, marketing, and exchange.  Yet at the same time, much of the economic activity in these great cities that once supported musical creativity, performance and production (record stores, performance venues, equipment repairs, etc.) has been transformed by corporatization, digitization and hollowing out; as the independent "brick and mortal" retailers and specialists have gone, increasingly so do the corporate entertainment super-stores and the A&R men prowling the scene for new acts to sign.  Furthermore, the cost of living in these cities eventually exceeds levels that are supportive to an artistic career and life.  This contradiction of economic agglomeration is a familiar syndrome for industrial geographers and researchers of new urban economies, who might anticipate that the investments and costs and associated with creativity and production will be externalized onto the creative milieu itself: the city and its residents, institutions and social relations. 

Recent debates about young "neo-bohemians" and "hipsters" (see the writings of Richard Lloyd and Mark Greif) suggest some urban expressions of these spatial contradictions.  Musicians and other creatives accept lower incomes and greater employment risk in exchange for recognition of their status superiority, for instance; and entrepreneurial activity extends to the cutting edges of subcultural lifestyle (fashion, food, crafts, etc.) and ethos (environmental sustainability, political advocacy, blogging).  Whether these hypotheses persuade or not, they raise broader questions that I consider in this project.  What physical and cultural dimensions of the city constitute "forces of production" in the creative economy?  How do creative labor, its places of residence and communion, other urban institutions and "support staff" accommodate the creative economy's social reproduction burdens, as manifested through personal lifestyle and life-stage, ancillary economies, built environment, urban amenities and texture?  How do cultural forms and practices—musical works and genres of course, but also cultural trends, leisurely pastimes, entertainment activities, lexicon, humor and cultural practice—symbolize these urban forces and signify them to creative constituencies both near and far? 

AN OUTLINE OF PARADIGM AND METHODS

As this discussion suggests, the study of urban music and related urban cultures sometimes gets drawn into policy debates and other practical discussions about the wisdom of certain urban economic development strategies or the viability of the music industry.  I'm reluctant to incorporate the premises and terms of these discourses into the musical urbanism paradigm, if only because they too often seek to contain and instrumentalize cultural practices that actually encode and give expression to social conflict and alienation.   

With the musical urbanism paradigm I walk a different fine line.  On the one hand, in keeping with my research on quality of life, I inherit the mission of critical theory by questioning the dominant terms with which music is generally presented: the solipsistic romance of disaffected youth, for instance, or the consultants' advocacy of economic value for corporations and urban branders.  On the other hand, I find it helpful (and frankly more pleasurable!) to adopt the perspective of the music fan.  By embracing the aesthetic pleasures of music and celebrity myths, and by diving into the sometimes raucous debates over the significance of this or that album, group, or event, cultural analysts can acknowledge and even begin to incorporate the collective affect and emotional "surplus" (to cite literary theorist Rey Chow) that is music's special feature. 

Pop music is a global phenomenon, and as my research develops I'm eager to investigate non-Western cases.  Paradigmatically, I'm inclined not to adopt the ethnomusicologist's cultural relativism, however, because the modernist in me sees pop music as something of a singular historical achievement.  Sociologist Chris Rojek reminds us that pop music (as opposed to folk/"popular" musics) is essentially a modern development, reflecting an "urban-industrial backbeat" comprised of technologies of musical amplification, economies of mass production, and broadcast media that constituted mass audiences in the 19th and 20th centuries.  In the new millenium's global-network society, it's important not to lose sight of the ubiquity of urban-industrial social relations and—this is especially crucial—the centrality of global capitalism, including its global music industry, that lie behind pop music and the urban today, even as we readily concede that global capitalism is always contested and can never fully homogenize musical form, never completely dictate cultural reception.

Methodologically, musical urbanism combines the structural analysis from political economy with a historical-comparative approach informed by the humanities and the hermeneutic fields of sociology.  At the initial stages of this project, I've used existing scholarship to access popular music history, the biographies of particular groups or events, and the history/analysis of music industry and technology; for the recent developments, a critical reading of industry trade media has proven effective.  I've also gotten my feet wet into ethnographic fieldwork conducted in musical events, although not yet as part of a longer-term, systematic project.  Soon I hope to conduct interviews with relevant musicians, industry representatives, journalists, cultural historians, and other well-placed observers. 

Cultural products are also obvious sources of data in this project.  This includes the music itself, although I heed the caution that music's meaning is never quite as immediate as it might seem; its exposition and analysis requires intertextual engagement with history, music criticism, and audience response.  Regarding the last, fan sensibilities and discourses constitute their own cultural entity, ubiquitous and uncontainable within global pop culture, that can be observed in the media about music.  Such media include music journalism, fan blogs, popular nonfiction books, documentary films, and even entertainment/celebrity-gossip TV programming.

SELECTED WRITINGS

My musical urbanism project is in its very earliest stages of research.  I've taught an undergraduate seminar under the same name at Vassar College's Urban Studies Program three times since 2007, having the very good fortune of co-teaching with two remarkably astute literature professors, Heesok Chang and Hua Hsu.  However, only since the beginning of 2011 has my research and writing in this field begun in earnest.

Through a blog Musical Urbanism, I've begun analyzing case studies, proposing additional research topics, reflecting on methodology, and reviewing scholarly and popular books about music and cities.  The blog format works well at this early stages, I think.  The small to medium-size essays I post allow me to write quickly in order to establish this project's breadth of topics and approaches, and to reach different kinds of readers (academics, urbanists, music fans) whose responses help me clarify and revise my thinking on this project.  The various writings featured on the blog may or may not be incorporated into a future academic book on musical urbanism, which will be written and organized more systematically to elaborate the project's paradigm and methodology, examine several case studies in greater depth, and engage the scholarly literature more extensively than the blog does. 

The reviewers are welcome to browse the Musical Urbanism blog, but I'm officially submitting for review the following ten essays.  Again, these are early statements that shouldn't be mistaken for paper-length scholarly works, but I think they usefully illustrate the analytic scope of my project.

Dancing in Uptown Kingston

Totally PV, "Totally Go-Go's": The Ambitions of Los Angeles New Wave

The Urban Ethos on a Saturday Night

These essays illustrate how I view the connections between urban geography and subcultural expression, creative ethos, and industry machinations.  My scholarly debt to Adam Krims' Music and Urban Geography is made clear in the third essay, which demonstrates how closely the urban analyst might analyze a single song.

Please Skill Me: The Growing Credentialism of NYC's Rock Underground

Out of the Valley of the Dolls

Like most of today's great cultural cities, New York has long been a geographical center for cultural production, attracting artists and would-be artists in artforms including but not limited to underground rock music.  Yet between the 1970s heyday of punk rock and indie-rock in the present, the underground's musical class has changed significantly in terms of cultural capital and class reproduction.  This pair of essays attempts to understand these changes, with the first essay demonstrating the kinds of original data I would gather for this project.

Adventures in Art-Based Urban Revitalization: The RoboCop Statue in Detroit

Just Stay Put: An Alternative Vision for Arts-Based Urban Revitalization

Probably the most influential idea in arts-based urban revitalization today emphasizes attracting the geographically mobile, amenity-sensitive "creative class" to cities.  The first essay here addresses how the creative class views cities through a distinctly non-local gaze, in this case involving popular culture.  The second essay, which I presented at a "Media and the Community" event in Poughkeepsie this spring, critiques the "creative class" strategy via a contrarian manifesto for arts-based urban revitalization.

My Guest Blog on Social Shutter re: Maryland Deathfest

Maryland Deathfest: My Photos and a First Take

This summer, Deirdre Oakley's urban sociology blog Social Shutter featured my visual ethnography, reprinted in the first essay, of a heavy metal music festival in downtown Baltimore.  In the second essay, I encourage the reviewer to click through to the slideshow of my original photostream and to read the captions, which impressionistically address objects and practices of everyday life that I observed at this admittedly extraordinary event.

How Joy Division Came to Sound like Manchester

Many listeners' appreciation of the abstract musical textures in post-punk, electronic, and other self-consciously modernist forms of pop music draws on the aesthetic sensibility that "hears" the urban-industrial landscape within the music.  This essay examines that aesthetic sensibility as it's been associated with a seminal post-punk group, analyzing it as the historic achievement of particular actors operating within specific social and geographic contexts.