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,...
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...
[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...
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...
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...
I call this list my favorite music of the year, not the best of, because I haven’t heard more than a third of all the music that people have been talking up in their end-of-year lists. Who am I to say what’s best? (Kendrick Lamar’s good kid, m.A.A.d. city is probably the best, but I’m...
Through really no effort on my own part, some of my Musical Urbanism writings have appeared in Spanish lately. An essay I posted here back in June, “The Dull Ubiquity of Placeless Music Festivals,” has been translated for publication in Bifurcaciones, an online journal of urban cultural studies published out of Chile. Thanks to...
In some regards, the development of heavy metal over the last 40 years can be understood to chart key phases in pop-music consumption under late capitalism: from mass culture to subculture to individualized culture. This arc can be seen, first and most obviously, from the vantage point of heavy metal fandom. As Will Straw has...
Please join me this Sunday, 8:30 am, at the annual American Sociological Association meetings in Denver, where I’ll be the discussant on a section that should excite anyone interested in urban cultural analysis. Co-organized by Amin Ghaziani and myself, the session is entitled “Lifestyle,” Community and Place. The scare quotes around “lifestyle” are a little pretentious,...
