the curious case of Mariya Takeuchi’s Plastic Love: guest blog by Thomas Calkins
[I’ve wanted Thomas Calkins to write something for this blog since well before I served as external adviser to his University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee sociology dissertation on the life and death of urban record stores. While that project currently evolves into academic journals publications, he found the time to share some thoughts on a quite recent...
urban lift-off amid the rural amenity economy: riverfront cities and the “Brooklynization” of the Hudson Valley
A paper presented at the “Small Cities in the 21st Century” mini-conference, in the annual meeting of the Eastern Sociological Society, Baltimore, Maryland, February 23, 2018: Urban Lift-off Amid the Rural Amenity Economy: Riverfront Cities and the “Brooklynization” of the Hudson Valley by Leonard Nevarez Vassar College ABSTRACT: What futures and fortunes await...
how the Queen Street West scene began, pt. 2: OCA bands
How did a bunch of kids in suburban Thornhill ignite a Toronto music scene and bring new energy to Queen Street West, now a hip urban neighborhood? My last post introduced the key players and forgotten bands in the so-called Thornhill sound, but their network, activities, and energies would need to relocate and expand in...
how the Queen Street West scene began, pt. 1: the Thornhill sound
THE EVERGLADES are ambassadors of the Thornhill Sound, a sound long fermenting in the rec rooms and condo apartments just north of STEELES AVE. Among its proponents include: Martha and the Muffins, Johnny and the G-Rays, the B-Girls, and the now defunct Dishes, Cads, E-Static and the legendary Oh Those Pants! Even Canada’s songbird Anne...
the commodification of Appalachian music: guest blog by Julia Simcoe
[This past year, I had the delight to supervise two Vassar College senior theses that, through no effort of mine, were inspiring and insightful examples of research in musical urbanism. With these students’ permission, I’m going to share their theses on this blog. The first comes from Sociology major Julia Simcoe (‘16), whose work reflects...
new publications
I’ve had a couple of articles published in the past month. First, and most relevant to my musical urbanism project, an article about the proto-EU visions traced in the career of Simple Minds, “Sound in 70 Cities: The European Urbanism of Simple Minds,” has been published in a new edited volume: Unsichtbare Landschaften/Invisible Landscapes: Popular...
metro music: creativity, place and alienation in the career of Martha & the Muffins
[Presented at the University of Toronto Department of Sociology on May 1, 2015. Thanks to Judith Taylor and John Hannigan for this opportunity.] It’s a pleasure to speak today on a new research project I’m working on. In anticipation of this talk, I had a couple of other topics I could have lectured on with...
the greatest reinventions in pop-music careers, #50-41
Today I take up a question of pop-culture history: which performers made the most unexpected left turns with their careers? I farmed this question out awhile back to readers of this blog, and today I start filing the results based on my own subjective assessment. Debate and criticisms are welcome in the comment section (or,...
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...
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,...
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...