favorite music of 2013
Julia Holter, Loud City Song Holter’s 3rd record has to be the Musical Urbanism album of the year — the title is almost an alternate title for this blog, right? In the four months since it came out, I’ve been puzzled and intrigued by how an album this composed, in both senses of the word,...
Restless Records, 1989: from an independent label intern’s view
The inspiration for my latest post: a request. How cool to find out @enigmarecords, where I did my first internship, is on @twitter. Tweet more, Enigma! What are the Effigies up to? — Mara Schwartz (@mara_schwartz) December 8, 2013 @MusicalUrbanism @EnigmaRecords I would like to read this. — Mara Schwartz (@mara_schwartz) December 9, 2013 In...
now I have a Lou Reed story
Driving my 7-year-old daughter home from her gymnastics class tonight, we’re listening to the radio. Bruno Mars’ “Gorilla” comes on, and I use the confused irritation she expressed the last time we heard this ode to intoxicated sex (“Why is he singing about gorillas?!”) as excuse to turn the station. I’ve discovered recently that I’m...
how the sound of New York came from four Brooklyn high schools
One of the great eras in New York City music comes not from a ‘scene’ of musicians and audiences as we normally think of this term, but from the very mercenary activities associated with the songwriters, publishers, and promoters associated with the city’s Tin Pan Alley. In Always Magic in the Air: The Bomp and...
a history of rave: from the UK to Ultra Miami
Almost six months since the Ultra Music Festival held its ninth annual event in Miami, an official “aftermovie” was just released two days ago. It’s so bonkers and over the top in how it depicts the state of the art in rave culture, it calls for a juxtaposition with an earlier moment in rave culture,...
sound in 70 cities: the European urbanism of Simple Minds
Dream, dream, dream It’s the eighties’ youthful theme Loving the city A theme for great cities And loved ones And love – “Wonderful In Young Life” (1981) Americans know them mostly as “that Breakfast Club band” from the 80s, but Scotland’s Simple Minds have carried on in one form or another long enough to...
the view from suburbia: Dead Kennedys, Washington DC, 6-5-83
It’s been said 14 is the influential age in the development of our musical tastes. That was the case for me: I find I regularly return to the music that I explored and embraced as my own back around 1983. It wasn’t just what I heard that has shaped my ideas about ‘good’ music, though,...
recent publications
Some writings that first appeared on this blog have been published recently. First, the latest print issue of Burning Ambulance comes out today with my essay on Tito Larriva (from the Plugz, Cruzados, Tito & Tarantula, and Robert Rodriguez’s Mexican exploitation films) in it. Burning Ambulance specializes in extended pieces covering musical artists “who deserve...
what could be cooler than Brooklyn? latest findings from Census data
[Update 12 hours after originally publishing this essay: Well, this is interesting… and a little bit embarrassing: I seem to have misread the Census Flows Mapper data entirely incorrectly. So much for the “test drive”; it’s like I pulled out of the car lot and onto the highway with the emergency brake on the whole...
cherchez la femme: Tommy Mottola and Dr. Buzzard’s Original Savannah Band
I’m fairly immune to the musical charms of the many recording artists whose careers were launched into stratosphere by Tommy Mottola, “one of the most powerful, visionary, and successful executives in the history of the music industry.” Mariah Carey, Daryl Hall & John Oates, Celine Dion, Gloria Estefan, New Kids on the Block, Shakira, Jennifer...
lecture at Queens College
I haven’t posted anything on the blog in awhile because I’m in the middle of a number of non-music projects. One of these is a talk I’ll be giving at Queens College, which anyone is welcome to attend: Pursuing Quality of Life: Happiness, Creativity and Place in These (Still) Neoliberal Times a lecture at...
musical suburbanism, pt. 1: Kidz Bop and the commodification of kids’ listening
Last summer I took a family roadtrip and was driven slightly insane by the heavy rotation of Kidz Bop CDs on the car stereo. In a rare moment of solitude carved out of a frenzied week, I sent out these missives via Twitter: 1. if one promise of musical urbanism is Simmel’s vision of...