{"id":381,"date":"2011-01-10T21:02:15","date_gmt":"2011-01-10T21:02:15","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicurbanism\/?p=381"},"modified":"2012-11-11T05:08:16","modified_gmt":"2012-11-11T05:08:16","slug":"the-urban-ethos-on-a-saturday-night","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pages.vassar.edu\/musicalurbanism\/2011\/01\/10\/the-urban-ethos-on-a-saturday-night\/","title":{"rendered":"the urban ethos on a Saturday night"},"content":{"rendered":"

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My considerations of musical urbanism owe a good deal to the work of Adam Krims, particularly his book\u00a0Music and Urban Geography<\/em><\/a>. Like much scholarly work on popular music, at times it\u2019s a little weird to read his highly academic language (I had to look up one of his favorite terms, \u201ccathexis\u201d) applied to the Wu-Tang Clan, to name just one example. But Krims\u2019 knowledge and love of music are clear, and his ideas are often quite helpful for thinking about the relationship of music to the urban. Case in point: the \u201curban ethos,\u201d his framework for understanding how cities are represented, fictionally or otherwise, in a context of real history and social structure:<\/p>\n

[T]here is a range of possible, and more or less likely, representations of the city in the corpus of\u2026 commercial popular music, and\u2026 certain representations call for framing at certain times\u2026 It is the scope of that range of urban representations and their possible modalities, in any given time span, that I call the\u00a0urban ethos<\/em>. The urban ethos is thus not a particular representation but rather a distribution of possibilities, always having discernable limits as well as common practices. It is not a picture of how life is in any particular city. Instead, it distills publicly disseminated notions of how cities are generally, even though it may be disproportionately shaped by the fate of particular cities\u2026 (pg. 7).<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I\u2019ve been trying on this concept of the urban ethos recently while listening to Suede, the 90s British group. In their heyday I didn\u2019t pay too much attention to Suede; some of their songs were undeniably catchy, but at the time I was generally more focused on American indie-rock. However, the intervening years recast the mix of influences at the heart of Suede in a more favorable light. Jeff Buckley especially rehabilitated the genius of the Smiths for anyone who didn\u2019t identify as an introspective, sexually confused kid (or a member of a\u00a0chicano subculture<\/a>, apparently); a string of exciting British 70s glam-rock compilations led me into a serious reappraisal of Mick Ronson-era David Bowie; and I discovered the early Scott Walker albums. Finally, last year\u2019s excellent retrospective\u00a0The Best of Suede<\/em>\u00a0made a persuasive case for the band\u2019s role as the first band to spearhead the Britpop revolution. Add in Suede\u2019s excellent songwriting and \u201cmuso\u201d sensibility in recycling retro elements of musical styles and visual signifiers, and you\u2019ve got a formula for repeated listenings.<\/p>\n

Many Suede songs evoke a concrete urban location, but an urban ethos is particularly evident on their excellent 1997 single \u201cSaturday Night.\u201d At first glance, the song suggests a variant on the \u201cwe\u2019re gonna have a good time\/we\u2019re gonna rock tonight\u201d genre of lyrics: the \u201cwe\u2019re going out into the city tonight\u201d theme. For other examples, think Petula Clark\u2019s \u201cDowntown\u201d (which Krims discusses in some length in Music and Urban Geography<\/em>), or Foghat\u2019s \u201cFool For The City.\u201d The video for \u201cSaturday Night\u201d suggests only a general, contemporaneous relevance for that theme; its signifiers of 90s youth fashion and London\u2019s underground Tube could be meaningfully placed into any number of British pop music videos of that era.<\/p>\n