NY Sounds

1 day ago 2

There are roughly three New Yorks. There is, first, the New York of the man or woman who was born here, who takes the city for granted and accepts its size and turbulence as natural and inevitable. Second, there is the New York of the commuter — the city that is devoured by locusts each day and spat out each night. Third, there is the New York of the person who was born somewhere else and came to New York in quest of something.

Of these three trembling cities the greatest is the last — the city of final destination, the city that is a goal. It is this third city that accounts for New York’s high-strung disposition, its poetical deportment, its dedication to the arts, and its incomparable achievements. Commuters give the city its tidal restlessness; natives give it solidity and continuity; but the settlers give it passion. And whether it is a farmer arriving from Italy to set up a small grocery store in a slum, or a young girl arriving from a small town in Mississippi to escape the indignity of being observed by her neighbors, or a boy arriving from the Corn Belt with a manuscript in his suitcase and a pain in his heart, it makes no difference: each embraces New York with the intense excitement of first love, each absorbs New York with the fresh eyes of an adventurer, each generates heat and light to dwarf the Consolidated Edison Company.

— EB White

I want to capture the best music in the world. (This will include little “world music”.) But I hit a snag - New York. It is just too huge to capture. (Here’s what I have so far.)

Why? What would a complete New York playlist have to cover? If you limited yourself just to totally new genres:

Pop as we knew it (Tin Pan Alley)
Big band and swing. Duke, Calloway
The Musical. Berlin, Gershwin, Rodgers and Hammerstein and Hart, Bernstein, Kern, Wodehouse(!)
Bebop, hard bop, cubop
“Latin” jazz (Afro-Cuban, Puente, Barretto, Palmieri…)
Pop as we know it (Brill machine music and thus ultimately K-pop) (Leiber-Stoller et al)
- Globalised samba and calypso (1930 - 1956).
Folk revival
Avant-Garde (1960s-1980s): Varèse, New York School, Loft jazz, Fluxus, No wave, Minimalism, Avant Rock, Fluxus again, Free Jazz
Disco (Studio 54)
- Globalised dub (Gibbons among the first Americans to incorporate techniques from dub production into dance music)
Punk
Hip-hop
US garage house
Garage rock revival
Blog House and dancepunk

Tech

You’d also want a separate playlist for Technical New York: the engineering breakthroughs. Spotify isn’t up to this though.

first electromechanical musical instrument
Stereophonic recording
theory of amplification
electrical recording
first commercial synths, first keyboard synth
electret condenser microphone - what 90% of all current mics are.
algorithmic music
first fully electronic film score
first widely-used computer music program (MUSIC-N)
sliding faders
Spector wasn’t the first to use the studio as an instrument but he cemented it
breakbeat and scratching
the extended remix and 12” single
the breakdown

Current

Scenius seemed to stop happening at some point early in this century. What was the last musical movement to be distinctively associated with a city in Britain? Trip-hop, from Bristol? Grime, from East London? Once you get beyond 2010 it’s hard to think of any. In the US, New York is a more liveable city than it was for much of the twentieth century, and a less creative one. Portland and Austin are not quite what they were. San Francisco and Silicon Valley are perhaps the last examples of scenius, but those scenes are driven by money, not art.

- Ian Leslie

And now? It’s still a great city, so what new sounds is it cooking?

Brooklyn drill. A minor variation on UK drill. A$AP Mob a minor variation on Southern rap.
Outsider house
New opera (Mazzoli, Lang, Wolfe, Du Yun, Muhly)
Post-minimalism and free jazz (Mary Halvorson, Matana Roberts, Oneohtrix Point Never).
Brooklyn noise. No wave plus

Solid, but not the same. Something ran out. Guesses:

loss of cheap rents and squats. Relatedly: loss of discomfort and chaos.
loss of the wizards. Maybe deindustrialisation means that the engineers aren’t colocated with the artistes, so New Yorkers don’t get the stream of pre-market prototypes they had for 80 years. No Bell Labs and maybe not many Bebes and Louises.
loss of some of the wealth gradient? 70s New York had both extreme poverty (and so cheap spaces) and extreme wealth (and so patronage, whether from slumming trust-fund kids or moneyed venue donors)
loss of (colocated) gatekeepers you could party with and extract attention rents from
loss of industrial zoning allowing big noises. loss of lax enforcement
Institutionalisation of weird music. (All of the above new genres were either deeply commercial or deeply street and subcultural.) Now:
- academic capture of alternative music? Careerification, taming, sexlessness?
- philanthropic capture of alternative music? Grant applications and awards legibilise.
But probably the strongest factors are the universal ones:
- ideas getting harder to find?
- loss of modernist aggro?
- retromania, catalog dominance
- the general dematerialisation of social energy Leslie alludes to. The extraction and dissipation of cultural meaning through homogenous phones located in any mere geography. The loss of friction and the loss of mystery and the loss of random physical collision.