whey we don’t hear the city in Siouxsie and the Banshees
Currently I’m revising and expanding an essay I posted here a year ago, about how Joy Division came to sound like Manchester, to present at the 2012 EMP Pop Conference next month. The artistic connection between Joy Division and their city of origin is clear and powerful for many listeners, but my argument is that the connection isn’t...
remembering the serious triviality of pop music
Something left unelaborated in my review of Echotone (from the last two posts: here and here) is a larger uneasiness with the instrumentalization of independent or underground music — the reduction of pop music culture from an end in itself to a means for other ends. Although this isn’t a new critique of post-punk music (i.e., music groups inspired...
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...