Blogging at the intersection of urban studies and popular music

the Paisley Underground: the mythic scene and Los Angeles legacy of the neo-psychedelic 80s

the Paisley Underground: the mythic scene and Los Angeles legacy of the neo-psychedelic 80s

The Los Angeles legacy of the Paisley Underground can be understood through three “L.A. stories”: how it was a scene that was never actually a scene, how its urban representations included the manifest absence of Los Angeles, and how its aesthetic sensibility presaged a future Los Angeles.
Latest entries
making the scene in the creative city

making the scene in the creative city

In exploring how cities sustain musical creativity, you eventually get around to the creative city thesis. This is most commonly associated with Richard Florida, the regional planning professor and urban consultant who contends in books like The Rise of the Creative Class that the most prosperous cities and regions are the ones with the highest density of...
the urban ethos on a Saturday night

the urban ethos on a Saturday night

My considerations of musical urbanism owe a good deal to the work of Adam Krims, particularly his book Music and Urban Geography. Like much scholarly work on popular music, at times it’s a little weird to read his highly academic language (I had to look up one of his favorite terms, “cathexis”) applied to the Wu-Tang...
dancing in uptown Kingston

dancing in uptown Kingston

Ran across “This is Ska!,” a light but fun promotional film from 1964, on Dangerous Minds (one of my go-to culture aggregators). Some thoughts: 1.Wow, that place is jumping. It must have been amazing to be young at that moment in post-independence Kingston. 2: [Around 3:45] Really? That’s how you “dance the ska”: plant your feet, wave...
great moments in selling out: the Paisley Underground

great moments in selling out: the Paisley Underground

I first heard about the so-called Paisley Underground in 1985. Sitting in the office of a drivers ed classroom, I flipped through a copy of People magazine, where I read a feature about the Los Angeles scene of 60s garage, country-rock and pop revivalists, and gawked at photos of groovy kids in paisley shirts and...
haunting the urban: dubstep

haunting the urban: dubstep

First post draws on Bassweight, a new documentary about the dubstep scene coming out of South London. The film begins with a DJ leading the camera on a daytime tour of Croydon’s sidewalks, pointing out a nightclub here or there atop anonymous commercial buildings before ending up at (what else?) a record store. At some point...

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