{"id":263,"date":"2011-08-15T20:33:18","date_gmt":"2011-08-16T00:33:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicurbanism\/?p=263"},"modified":"2014-06-18T09:07:15","modified_gmt":"2014-06-18T13:07:15","slug":"under-the-shadow-of-woodstock-listening-to-the-hudson-valley","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2011\/08\/15\/under-the-shadow-of-woodstock-listening-to-the-hudson-valley\/","title":{"rendered":"under the shadow of Woodstock: listening to the Hudson Valley"},"content":{"rendered":"

Another problem with the “Brooklynization of Hudson River Valley” thesis that I discussed in\u00a0my last post<\/a>\u00a0is that the music in these parts isn’t very hip.\u00a0 That’s not a judgment, just a statement of fact if by “hip” we mean the product or embrace of 20-something hipsters who disproportionately reside in Brooklyn.<\/p>\n

However, the Hudson Valley does have a musical soundtrack, if you will\u2014a distinct set of styles, artists, and local events that are used to musically represent the region to the world at large.\u00a0\u00a0Separately<\/em>, there’s some noteworthy musical creativity going on in the region.\u00a0 That these two scales of activity don’t coincide in the same way that we think of, say, Brooklyn indie rock or New Orleans jazz tells you something about how music contributes the cultural geography of the Hudson Valley.<\/p>\n

Maybe I’ve overgeneralize in this post too much.\u00a0 I’d be eager to hear others provide counterevidence to this thesis. \u00a0But first, let’s look at the music and musical lifestyles currently found in the Hudson River Valley.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

MUSICAL CREATIVITY<\/strong><\/p>\n

To begin, let me acknowledge that despite the fact I’ve lived in this area for 12 years and have always been curious about the music created here, I’m still no expert.\u00a0 In part that’s because this is a big, six-county region, and a comprehensive, balanced view of its musical geography isn’t easy to access.\u00a0 But also, my investigations in local music are significantly directed by my tastes, which tend toward new and exciting stuff out of the rock tradition broadly speaking, e.g., indie, electronic, dance, punk, metal, and so on.\u00a0 If I’m a modernist in expecting music to innovate and move forward, I can also be historical and sentimental in my musical tastes\u2014one reason I have oldies and classic rock on the radio a lot.\u00a0 In truth, I’ll go see almost any live performance if it fits my working dad hours (which tends to keep me from seeing 75% of the decent concerts around here) and is reasonably close to where I live (which takes out another 22%).<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Indie rock<\/em>
\nSince I’ve been talking about the Brooklynization of the Hudson Valley, I’ll begin here by noting that indie rock, the sound of Brooklyn today, is conspicuously underrepresented in this region.\u00a0 None of the big nightclubs, theaters, or commercial performance venues specializes in it; no “alternative” or independent commercial radio stations play it.\u00a0 Occasionally one of the bigger acts of this genre come to one of the area’s bigger concert venues, usually only if they have some sort of crossover appeal with an older demographic who can pay higher prices for tickets.\u00a0 For instance, Bright Eyes and Dr. Dog are coming to Poughkeepsie’s Mid-Hudson Civic Center, a 3000-seated venue, in September; tickets are well into the $40 range once service charges are added, and unless the area’s college kids find about it (few live here when school is out), I suspect the show will be undersold.\u00a0 The draw would probably be larger if the show were in the southern part of the Hudson Valley, like Peekskill in Putnam County, but then a lot of touring bands are prevented from playing here by the 100-mile radius restriction in their concert contracts with NYC venues.<\/p>\n

The oases in the indie-rock desert around here are the area’s colleges.\u00a0 I know the three four-year liberal arts colleges in Dutchess County best: Vassar, Bard, and Marist.\u00a0 The first two are (to put it crudely) notorious hipster colleges, and not surprisingly they’ve graduated a number of indie-rock musicians.\u00a0 In the past decade, bands like Beach House, Throw Me The Statue, and the Bravery came from Vassar.\u00a0 Bard College has gone so far as to officially inventory all the bands that ever formed at Vassar, the most famous being Steely Dan (who recall the college in Annandale-on-Hudson scathingly in “My Old School”).<\/p>\n

http:\/\/www.youtube.com\/watch?v=4ZZTojpxW0k<\/a><\/p>\n

The other big college in the area\u2014the biggest, in fact, with about 8,000 students\u2014is SUNY New Paltz in Ulster County.\u00a0 The town of New Paltz itself is probably the only real college town of note in the Hudson Valley.\u00a0 Located next to the Shawangunk Ridge, a Northeastern destination for serious rock climbers, the town draws an outdoorsy constituency across age brackets, and I’ve always thought of SUNY New Paltz as having an appropriate musical aesthetic: jam bands, roots reggae, and folksingers.\u00a0 However, a Vassar student described it to me as also “something of a folk-punk mecca” that draws touring DIY performers like Paul Baribeau, so I stand corrected.<\/p>\n

Significantly, few bands of any note actually formed while college students in the Hudson Valley.\u00a0 From Vassar, I know so far of three exceptions: Alan Licht’s early 90s post-punk group Love Child, their lo-fi contemporaries the Sweet Things, and mid-’00s post-metal iconoclasts Genghis Tron.\u00a0 Otherwise, the general pattern is for musicians to move away after graduation and form bands elsewhere, usually in the big cities; they may continue to collaborate with fellow alumni (again, see Steely Dan), but more often they’ll find musicians along lines other college alma mater.\u00a0 Here as in other regards (recall my last post), this is a region that characteristically exports people once they hit the post-college age bracket.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Hip hop<\/em>
\nThe Hudson Valley is comprised of swelling suburbs (particularly in its southern half along the main parkways and thruways), historic towns and villages, quite rural hamlets, and a handful of cities.\u00a0 Of its six counties, only half of them have municipalities registered officially as “cities”, and of these there are only seven: Middletown, Newburgh and Port Jervis (of Orange County), Beacon and Poughkeepsie (of Dutchess County), Kingston (of Ulster County), and Hudson (of Columbia County).\u00a0 Generally, these cities reveal the history of rustbelt industrialization, as river, canal and railroad made them well-placed locations between NYC and its hinterlands to the north, east and (via the canals) midwest.\u00a0 Demographically, the cities were built upon the waves of ethnic immigrations associated with NYC, including substantial numbers of Irish, German, Italian, and African-American groups through the WWII era, and continuing in recent decades with West Indian, South Asian, and Latino residents.\u00a0 And as is the norm for ethnic hierarchies in the Northeast, white ethnics largely moved on to the Hudson Valley’s towns and villages while blacks and Latinos remain disproportionately concentrated in cities still struggling to emerge from the post-WWII urban crisis.<\/p>\n

This, as you might expect, is a fertile geography for hip hop to bloom in, and it’s probably not a stretch to say that hip hop is the go-to music among the cities’ African American and Puerto Rican youth, maybe West Indian youth as well (particularly in its dancehall hybrids).\u00a0 Of course, hip hop is the favorite music for many white kids in the suburbs and colleges as well, but I’m not sure how many venture into the cities’ clubs where hip hop plays on the speakers.\u00a0 While hip hop performers will play to fanatical student audiences in the colleges, theirs is a different environment for hip hop than the inner cities that many youth of color would recognize in Newburgh, Poughkeepsie, Hudson and Kingston.\u00a0 Ghetto realism and hedonistic materialism are the themes of the clubs, while high school students might find older rappers teaching consciousness in hiphop-oriented school programs and community organizations.<\/p>\n

So who are the Hudson Valley rappers?\u00a0 I’m out of my area of expertise here, but I imagine an enterprising visitor to the area’s hip hop clubs could walk away with dozens of mixtapes and CD-Rs.\u00a0 (Whether they’re good enough to interest non-locals, I couldn’t say.)\u00a0 Yet it seems very few MCs or DJs of wide regard have come from the region.\u00a0 My Vassar colleague Hua Hsu thinks the most important one is probably\u00a0J Rock from Newburgh<\/a>, whose 1991 album\u00a0Streetwise<\/em>\u00a0is a minor classic of ghetto reportage.\u00a0 In the early 90s, a 20-year-old redhead MC going by the name of Sarai dropped a major-label debut album and gathered a lot of hype as a “female Eminem.”\u00a0 (Am I correct in recalling she made the cover of Hudson Valley Magazine as well?)\u00a0 Now she goes by the name Miss Eighty 6 and works the TV\/film soundtrack angle.<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>

J Rock with a Porsche in Poughkeepsie (1991)<\/p><\/div>\n

It may be that the Hudson Valley’s hip hop scene is overshadowed geographically and musically by New York City to the south.\u00a0 Cities like Newburgh and Poughkeepsie often appear in NYC hip hop narratives as satellites of “the City” and its urban hustle.\u00a0 With its entrenched gang violence, Newburgh is sometimes called the “sixth borough” of NYC, while Poughkeepsie (at the end of the commuter rail) is commemorated in “’98 Thug Paradise” by Tragedy, Capone and Infinity as a place for NYC’s drug dealers go to cool out:<\/p>\n

Capone bag the keys
\nLet’s move like a gypsy
\nIt’s hot out here
\nRelocate to Poughkeepsie<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

 <\/p>\n

Reggae and Latin music<\/em>
\nThere are two very different genres, but their similarity appears in the regional context.\u00a0 Namely, the Hudson Valley’s West Indian and Latino populations have expanded sufficiently to support concerts featuring acts from the West Indies and Latin America.\u00a0 These events are rarely announced in the cultural calendars and concert listings that most white residents peruse.\u00a0 But go to the ethnic stores, and you’ll find the slickly printed color flyers announcing the latest dates.
\nContemporary Jamaican acts with dancehall riddims and lyrical slackness play the Hudson Valley’s urban nightclubs around (I’m estimating) 5-10 times a year.\u00a0 Vintage roots reggae performers like the Mighty Diamonds, Burning Spear, and Culture might also play these venues, although they also have a significant constituency in the bucolic hippie\/jam-band stronghold of Woodstock\u2014hence the Woodstock Reggae Festival.\u00a0 I couldn’t tell you how much audience crossover there is along lines of race and age across reggae’s “murrrdah!”\/”one love divide,” but it’s an interesting question to investigate.<\/p>\n

The Hudson Valley’s immigrant Latino population has boomed in just the last 10 years, another small milestone in the new immigration outside the U.S. Southwest.\u00a0 In cities like Poughkeepsie, the new Latino presence has significantly revitalized a downtown once known for its vacant storefronts.\u00a0 Mexican tiendas and restaurants play corridas on the jukeboxes and cable TV; now, performers from that genre are touring the area.\u00a0 (There’s a smaller but growing Central American population in the Hudson Valley, but so far I haven’t detected a corresponding musical presence.)<\/p>\n

For reggae and Latin music, I don’t see local performers performing these styles at a significant scale (i.e., beyond the sound systems and DJs for hire).\u00a0 Maybe that’s the point: these are non-U.S. acts performing for an immigrant audience.\u00a0 As West Indian and Latino families put their kids in local schools, another interesting question is whether they’ll give up the taste for reggae and corrida for “native” music like hip hop and rock, much like they do the traditional foods their parents want them to send them to school with.\u00a0 Alternately, maybe they’ll be drawn to the urban genres that fuse the old and new worlds: reggaeton, merengue, and other sounds easily heard on the streets of NYC.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

Rock and heavy metal<\/em>
\nOne of my favorite deep cuts from Blue \u00d6yster Cult is “Dominance and Submission” from the 1981 album\u00a0Extraterrestrial Live<\/em>.\u00a0 This particular track was recorded live in Poughkeepsie, and about 2:30 minutes in, the band vamps as Eric Bloom addresses the crowd:<\/p>\n

“Here we are in Poughkeepsie, New York!”\u00a0 [audience cheers] ” Yeah, I see we are sold out to the maximum!” [audience cheers louder]\u00a0 “You know, we like coming up here once or twice a year because\u2014we like coming up here from New York City because we know Poughkeepsie is SERIOUS about rock and roll!!”\u00a0 [audience goes nuts]<\/p><\/blockquote>\n