Music and Urban Geography

Adam Krims

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781135879006
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Medios de comunicación y artes escénicas
• Subtopic: Música

Music and Urban Geography is the first book to theorize musical aspects of the tremendous changes that have overtaken major cities in the developed world over the past few decades. Drawing on musicology, music theory, urban geography, and historical materialism, Krims maps changes not only in how music represents cities, but also in how music sounds and is deployed socially in new urban contexts. Taking on venerable musicological debates from entirely new perspectives, Krims argues that the cultural-studies approach now predominant in cultural musicology fails to address contemporary realities of production and consumption; instead, the social effects of space and new patterns of urban production play a shaping role, in which music takes on new forms and functions, with representation playing a significant but not always decisive role. While music scholars increasingly concern themselves with place, Krims theorizes it together with the shaping role of space.

Pushing urban geography into new cultural contexts Music and Urban Geography will offer those concerned with the social effects of space newtheoretical models. Ranging from Anonymous 4 to Alanis Morissette, from Curacao to Seattle, this text presents a truly wide-ranging, interdisciplinary, and theoretically ambitious view of both musical and urban change.

1

DEFINING THE URBAN ETHOS

This book’s first approach to music and urban geography will concern representation, not because the study will end there, but precisely because of the need, at some point, to transcend the limits of representation as a problematic and see it, instead, as part of a totality enveloping other aspects of social life. The urban change outlined in the Introduction will turn out not just to frame the aspects of representation described as the “urban ethos,” but also to form a necessary continuity with them. Some selected slices of musical history will help to elucidate just how the changing face of popular music may prove a powerful symptom of basic social conditions.

Petula Clark’s hit “Downtown” was released in 1964.¹ Clark had been well known in her native England literally since childhood and had already been a star in France, though her career in the UK by then was on the wane. The song initially was released in Europe in four different languages late in the year, and it scored immediate success in several countries. When an executive of Warner Brothers heard the song on a visit to Clark’s record company in France, he acquired the rights to distribute the song in the United States. Subsequently, the song reached number one status in January 1965, ultimately selling more than three million copies there alone and winning a Grammy award. “Downtown” thus became, perhaps unintentionally, Petula Clark’s vehicle of entry to the lucrative US market. So, while the song enjoyed European origins, its ultimate life breathed freely on both sides of the Atlantic, and, in fact, it had contact with an important American city before it even existed: the composer and arranger, Tony Hatch, had been inspired to write the song by a trip to New York City and initially intended to write it for the Drifters. It can be signaled right now, in fact, that many of the artists discussed in this chapter are non-US artists breaking into the American market and thus “American” not so much in national origin as in national destination and representation. The song’s successful crossing into the US market, in fact, speaks significantly, because it indicates that this song projects a representation of cities that was at least recognizable to American consumers at that time, on a large scale.

In the lyrics, taken for the moment in isolation from their musical settings, the downtown district is cathected as a locus of excitement, adventure, and even cheerful escape. Not only do all the lyrical descriptions offer the unnamed city as a solution to all personal problems, but Tony Hatch’s musical arrangements, harmonies, and production also underline the point. The approach to the refrain (starting with “The lights are much brighter there”) happens chromatically through B-flat and then B-natural to a bass C that supports a dominant 6/4 chord, which in turn sets most of the refrain; the string parts crescendo in great climactic upwards scales over that tense 6/4 chord; the thickening of the orchestration there increases the textural energy as the resolution is delayed, and then the final line of each refrain arrives as a glorious conclusion, with the force of a slogan: “Everything’s waiting for you,” or “You’re gonna be allright now.” The musical strategies—chromatic bass approach to a climactic dominant chord, thickening of texture to emphasize an emotional climax, sustaining of an unstable chord to build suspense and underline the following musical event—are all, of course, standard with quite a bit of popular music compositions from that era, and they would have been most accessible to audiences. Such structural ploys open up a musical space of ecstatic pleasure that not even the gushing lyrics manage to convey. By the time that the listener has passed through the gentle, supportive encounters with strangers (!) in the fragmentary third verse, the music and lyrics in tandem have projected the city as a destination of diversion, fun, and humane encounters. The joyous urban image closes with a pseudo-jazz-style muted trumpet solo, reiterating a well-known musical semiosis of exciting city nightlife, adventure, and sophistication. It would be difficult to imagine an image of urban life more brimming with optimism, enthusiasm, and energetic embrace.

Representations of the city in popular music during this period, however, did not always match the sheer ebullience of “Downtown.” Just two years later, in fact, Petula Clark herself enjoyed another US hit with “Who Am I?”, which projects the city as a locus of alienation and anxiety.² One could find, in fact, a range of constructions of “the urban” in the American popular music charts of 1965, correlated at least loosely to music genre, public identities of performers, and other aspects of the industry. From the unifying celebrations of Martha and the Vandellas’s “Dancing in the Streets” to the ominous silliness of Jan and Dean’s “Dead Man’s Curve,”³ music audiences in the United States embraced a large range of representations of urban life in a great number of different contexts. “Downtown” represented just one extreme, and, as will be seen, a telling one.

But there were limits to the range of city representations at that time, too, and the most effective way to feel out those limits is to look at another point in music history and find an image of the city that would have been inconceivable at the time of greatest popularity for “Downtown.” For contrast, and also because it falls within the period that constitutes the principal focus of this book, one can look at a song from the first decade of the twenty-first century, 50 Cent’s “In My Hood” from his (officially) second album The Massacre (2005).⁴ Aside from the question of his real talents, 50 Cent may legitimately claim to have resonated, for whatever reason, with mass audiences: his first album, Get Rich or Die Tryin’,⁵ had become the highest-selling debut album in history, selling more than 870,000 copies in its first week and shooting to the head spot on the album charts. It then went on to sell more than 7,000,000 copies in 2003 alone. This second album, as of the time of this writing, seems to have followed up with comparable sales, already having gone quadruple platinum. “In My Hood” serves as the lead song of the album (after the near-ubiquitous spoken introduction). It also addresses unusually explicitly the urban surroundings by the standards of 50 Cent, who more normally focuses (in nonsexual contexts) on alternating bragging and threatening, with only passing references to the city surroundings. Not surprisingly, both the musical beats and 50 Cent’s flow seem to accentuate the rather old-fashioned (by rap music standards) focus on the “’hood.” 50 Cent’s flow comes far closer here to what in my rap book I described as a “speech effusive” flow, whereas Dr. Dre’s beat veers away from his usual consonant and highly accessible g-funk style to produce something much closer to (if not fully) what I, in the same book, define as the “hip-hop sublime”: the layers are detuned, the alternation of the C-minor and E-flat-minor chords (the latter appearing near the end of verses and refrains) produces a jarring close-relation, and Dr. Dre also mixes in the vinyl-style “surface noise” that formerly (especially in the early to mid-1990s) lent a “hard” edge to hip-hop soundscapes.⁶ The semantic aspects of the lyrics present unusually (for him) detailed and focused representations of his origins: “I’m from Southside / Motherfucker, where them gats explode, If you feel like / You’re on fire, boy, drop and roll, Niggaz’ll / Eat yo’ ass up, ’cause they heart turned cold, Now you can / Be a victim or you can lock and load.”⁷ As the song (like so many of 50 Cent’s) begins with some singing, the above lines constitute the first lyrics actually rapped; immediately, 50 Cent establishes the speech-effusive (again, by his standards) style with his delivery, as the first four words arrive in spoken style before he gradually settles more into something between his usual simple sing-song style and speecheffusive MCing. All these features combine to mark “In My Hood” as something of a “retro” song, perhaps more at home stylistically some ten years before its release. At the same time, such a “ghettocentric” urban landscape lies, of course, behind the construction of 50 Cent’s authenticity, every bit as much as his fabled near-fatal shooting, his history as a crack dealer, or the menacing glare that he seems to manage for every album cover.

And more important for the present content, such a relentlessly bleak and nightmarish conjuring of city life would simply be unimaginable to contemporary audiences of Petula Clark’s “Downtown.” Of course, illicit drugs existed in 1964–1965, as did gun violence and urban underclasses. What was lacking, however, was a widespread, shared sense, on the part of Anglophone Western popular music audiences, that such things somehow constituted a fundamental and essential aspect of urban existence. And, likewise, to the analogous audiences at the turn of the twenty-first century, something like the vision of a worry-free, hospitable city life had disappeared (Downtown”)—or, at the very least, had to be framed and modified.

To see that necessary framing, one might look at a recent attempt to project just such a carefree urban existence, like that of Elvis Costello and Burt Bacharach in their famous 1998 collaboration Painted from Memory.⁸ The song “Such Unlikely Lovers” from that recording stages its urban setting as a backdrop for the drama of an interpersonal encounter, a chance meeting between strangers who end up, as the song title implies, lovers: “On a hot city day when your white shirt turns to grey / That’s when she’ll arrive / When you look how you feel, someone steps upon your heel / That’s when she will come.” The city’s dangers here are projected as trivial—some dirt and perspiration on the clothing, a trampled shoe. Juxtaposed with such a trifle, the appearance of the future paramour stands out as the incident in question; the city, in other words, stands as a (relatively) harmless stage for interpersonal encounters. The resemblance to the final verse of “Downtown” (“And you may find somebody kind to help and understand you / Someone who is just like you and needs a gentle hand to / Guide them along”) implies a common theme of the urban locus as background for romance. Indeed, in “Such Unlikely Lovers” the city seems to function as the occasion for serendipity: “Listen now, I’m not saying that there will be violins / But don’t be surprised if they appear—playing in some doorway.” The accidents of urban environments, then, can provide an unexpected romance. Nor does the anonymity of urban crowds prove an obstacle to human intimacy: “Though no one seems to notice as they hurry by.” The inconveniences of the environment—blaring heat and a foot-treading accident— are dispensed with at the very beginning of the song, immediately becoming a foil to the central focus, which is the personal situation. The city here structures the encounter through its exciting potential for accident, while its pitfalls adopt the status of charming nuisance. And the musico-poetic climaxes project the same emphases within the specifically urban imagery. The strings wind into their dynamic climax and bring the harmony back to the tonic for the rhythmically staggered line “playing in some doorway”; sweeping conjunct melodic lines of increasing intensity set the rest of the urban imagery after the opening line, climaxing with the second iteration of “Though no one seems to notice as they hurry by.” So although in an obvious semantic sense the city provides only the setting for the encounter, in another sense it is projected musically as the true locus of ecstasy—or at least it fully absorbs the emotional investment. Here the urban setting is not only livable but also a place through which one lives, and in which one invests, with a certain romantic intensity. The city becomes both urban and urbane, all the more elegant for its accidental magic.

But the musical poetics of the song also provide another crucial clue about how “Such Unlikely Lovers” projects urban experience, features that differentiate the song from “Downtown” and announce its origin in a different historical moment. The genre of the music and identity of the performers (especially, of course, Burt Bacharach) indicate how such a view of city life comes to be possible in 1998; the album, after all, presents a collection of retro-styled songs. The pop jazz harmonies, orchestration, and Costello’s crooning all contribute to form the stylistic context of the urban jazz lounge. Indeed, not just the music but also the portrait of the city carries the frame of historical relic; the song presents a vision of urban life every bit as “retro” as Bacharach’s pianistic style. The example of a song like “Such Unlikely Lovers” suggests that the portrait of the city as a locus for romantic adventure and charming serendipity may still have been possible for Anglophone Western popular music audiences in 1998—but it required a certain framing, as an outdated vision, rather than the wholesale, bubbling enthusiasm of 1964’s “Downtown.”

The three songs examined so far here, and the differences among them (both contemporaneously and across time), already can go some way toward suggesting some contours of musical representations of urban environments, and the historical mutations of those representations. Something that quickly becomes apparent is that there seems to be, at any given time, both positive and negative cathexes of the urban environment in Western Anglophone popular music. That, in itself, should not be surprising, given the broad range, at any moment, of experiences and ideologies of American cities by varying classes, ethnicities, genders, and so forth; a given person’s or group’s response could not simply be determined or read off the changing urban environment.⁹ Thus, if one views songs such as those discussed here as responses to an urban environment (or better, a range of urban environments), it becomes clear that the responses may highlight different aspects and thus embrace or critique the city in different ways. A second implication, however, is that the character of both affirmative and critical representations of American cities seems to change drastically over time. Much more specifically than that, some kinds of urban representation seem not to appear at all at certain times, such as that projected by the 50 Cent song (absent in 1965) and, conversely, to appear uniquely at other times, such as that of “Downtown” (appearing only within a “retro” frame in 1998). Other kinds of expressive responses to urban life, such as “Such Unlikely Lovers,” may appear at a certain time but with a necessary framing that modifies its force—whereas at some earlier time, a similar representation (like “Downtown”) may have been able to appear without such careful qualification. One could also at least speculate on the likelihood that some kinds of city images predominate in some periods, yet occupy a marginal status in others—as that of “Such Unlikely Lovers” would seem marginal, compared with that of “In My Hood,” around the turn of the twenty-first century.

All these observations seem to indicate that at any given time, there is a range of possible, and more or less likely, representations of the city in the corpus of American commercial popular music, and that certain representations call for framing at certain times. That range of possibility may often be distributed among certain genres (as rap seems to host the majority of the most nightmarish visions, at least since “The Message”), certain artists, and even particular songs.¹⁰ It also would always have its limits. In the mid-1960s, there were certainly songs that addressed urban alienation and danger (like “Who Am I?”), but there were no visions as explicit and nightmarish as that of “In My Hood.”

It is the scope of that range of urban representations and their possible modalities, in any given time span, that I call the urban ethos. 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 certain particular cities, especially New York City and Los Angeles (just as “Downtown” paints a presumably anonymous place, inspired by Manhattan). Views of “cities” generally in Anglo-American media culture tend to be weighted disproportionately to American cities as well, as it is to a great extent the urban life of the United States against which much “international” popular music is imagined, even in the case of music produced outside the United States. (Of course, the exceptions are important, though they hardly outweigh the normal centrality of American examples.) The urban ethos certainly may shape the representations of certain particular cities, but it does so only as a background structure of feeling, usually unnamed; for example, the short-lived American popular infatuation for Seattle in the early 1990s seemed to measure out a exasperation with the decaying and increasingly dangerous metropolis of the East Coast and the drastic horrors of Los Angeles crack culture. The exasperation was not so much named as invested in an otherwise inexplicably vehement fascination with Seattle itself.

Now that the urban ethos has acquired at least a preliminary definition and a range of illustrations, it should be stipulated that it is not an autonomous characteristic of popular music; instead, it is a multimedia phenomenon developed among music, music video, films, television, newspapers and magazines, novels, theatre, and recently the Internet. Thus, for example, the Tom Wolfe’s 1987 novel Bonfire of the Vanities participated in the same urban ethos as Madonna’s “Open Your Heart,” whereas the 1967 film Barefoot in the Park shared an urban ethos with The Association’s “Windy.”¹¹ In point of fact, it may be the case that much of the representational force of music in this context is built as much through television “star-texts,” film soundtrack use, and media coverage as it is through the sonic properties of music and the semantic level of the texts that comprise my music-theoretical disciplinary focus.¹² But nevertheless, musical features then imbed aspects of the urban ethos that may function with at least temporary autonomy, much as images imbued with a semiotic value may then function as second-order signs.¹³ In fact, precisely that process was audible at the end of “Downtown,” in which the brief jazz-style muted-trumpet soloing signaled images of urban sophistication that would be familiar to 1965 listeners from exposure to film and television. In truth, this regime of representation always seems to ricochet back and forth among parameters of cultural production, in ways that are sometimes unpredictable but that as an aggregate can form some interesting and revealing patterns.

Historical Shifts (Diachronic)

Although it is a regime of representation, the urban ethos nevertheless interacts significantly with the structures of real cities, especially American ones. Not surprisingly, given the discussion in the Introduction, our present urban ethos seems to figure expressively those ways in which American cities, over the past twenty to thirty years, have had to change in order to host new strategies of capital accumulation. Such dramatic changes naturally have affected who lives in cities, who moves through them and in what ways...