In urbanists’ excitement over music scenes and the desirability of “social and interactive street-level culture” (to invoke Richard Florida), it’s easy to lose sight of whether there’s any value to all of this besides promoting careers and urban economies. Does “enriching creative communities” actually involve extending the practice of creativity into people’s everyday lives? Or...
For a future post, I’m crowdsourcing a topic: performers, bands, or other musical units whose work received a significant artistic or commercial boost by reinventing themselves. What examples come to mind for you? Sure, lots of musicians adopt new approaches with virtually each album. Others have pursued new styles or found greater success through a...
In the Fall of 2010 I began serving as primary co-investigator on a community food assessment (CFA) in the city of Poughkeepsie, New York. A remarkable coalition of local groups came together under the title Poughkeepsie Plenty, including the Poughkeepsie Farm Project, Dutchess Outreach, the Dutchess County Dept. of Health, and Cornell Cooperative Extension Dutchess...
Continuing with my last post on the decline of urban music retail, here’s a truly extinct medium: the album radio spot. These advertisements flourished in an era when record companies pursued mass markets of radio listeners who bought their music in record stores. How many of those conditions exist anymore, at least in this combination?...
I had a brief but interesting Twitter conversation yesterday triggered by Maura Johnston’s link to a New York Times article about how J&R Music World, a venerable downtown NYC retailer of music, hardware and technology, is abandoning its CD sales. already happened to fans of all music across US… MT @nytimes NY classical fans running...
I set up a personal Twitter account, @LeonardNevarez, to accompany my original @MusicalUrbanism account. In explaining why, this is a good moment to review the evolution of my Musical Urbanism project. In the fall of 2007, I introduced a new co-taught course, Musical Urbanism, as a senior seminar at Vassar College’s Urban Studies Program. The...
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,...
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...
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...
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...
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,...
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,...
