Street ballets in magic cities
cultural imaginings of the modern American metropolis
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i2.111Keywords:
Blaxploitation, image-ability, inner city, New Urbanism, soundtracks, Urban StudiesAbstract
Written from the perspective of an urban specialist rather than a musicologist, this paper is a series of three inter-linked reflections on attempts in popular and ‘semi-popular’ music to represent the modern, later twentieth-century, American metropolis. Using a number of urban soundtracks as case studies, culminating in the soundtrack to Shaft, an early 1970s Blaxploitation movie, the suggestion is made that musics purporting to represent urbanism are better understood as constructions of virtual, parallel, urbanisms, reflecting the cultural imaginations of their creators and responding to the cultural needs of their audiences. It is suggested that the value of music research in Urban Studies derives not from the potential of music to capture the nature of urban life but from its potential to illuminate subtle, but sometimes politically potent, cultural conceptualizations of the city as a concept of place.
References
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–2002. The Unknown City: Contesting Architecture and Social Space. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Christgau, R. 1981. Rock Albums of the 1970s: A Critical Guide. New York: Ticknor & Fields.
Clarke, D. B. 1997. The Cinematic City. London: Routledge.
Crist, E. B. 2005. Music for the Common Man: Aaron Copland during the Depression and War. Oxford: Oxford Univerity Press.
Fogelson, R. M. 1967. The Fragmented Metropolis: Los Angeles, 1850–1930. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press.
Gillett, C. 1970. The Sound of the City: The Rise of Rock and Roll. New York: Dell.
Gottdiener, M., and J. R. Feagin. 1988. ‘The Paradigm Shift in Urban Sociology’. Urban Affairs Review 24, no. 2: 163–87. doi:10.1177/004208168802400201
Jacobs, J. 1961. The Death and Life of Great American Cities. New York: Random House.
Jameson, F. 1991. Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. London: Verso.
Kraszewski, J. 2002. ‘Reconceptualising the Historical Reception of Blaxploitation: Articulations of Class, Black Nationalism, and Anxiety in the Genre’s Advertisements’. The Velvet Light Trap 50: 48–61.
Lachenmann, H. 1995. ‘On Structuralism’. Contemporary Music Review 12, no. 1: 93–102. doi:10.1080/07494469500640081
Lewis, G. E. 2008. A Power Stronger than Itself: The AACM and American Experimental Music. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Lynch, K. 1960. The Image of the City. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Marcus, G. 2000. Mystery Train: Images of America in Rock ’n’ Roll. 5th rev. edn. London: Faber and Faber [1975].
Mazullo, M. 1997. ‘Fans and Critics: Greil Marcus’s Mystery Train as Rock ’n’ Roll History’. The Musical Quarterly 81, no. 2: 145–69. doi:10.1093/mq/81.2.145
McAdam, D. 1982. Political Process and the Development of Black Insurgency 1930–1970. Chicago, IL: Chicago University Press.
Miller, D. L. 1989. Lewis Mumford: A Life. New York: Weidenfeld & Nicolson.
Miller, Zane. 1981. ‘The Role and Concept of Neighborhood in American Cities’. In Community Organization for Urban Social Change: A Historical Perspective, ed. Robert Fisher and Peter Romanofsky, 3–31. Westport, CN: Greenwood Press.
Monahan, T. 2002. ‘Los Angeles Studies: The Emergence of a Specialty Field’. City & Society 14, no. 2: 155–84. doi:10.1525/city.2002.14.2.155
Mumford, L. 1961. The City in History: Its Origins, its Transformations, and its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace and World.
Neal, M. A. 1998. What the Music Said: Black Popular Music and Black Public Culture. London: Routledge.
Pareles, J. 1990. ‘There are 8 Million Stories in John Zorn’s Naked City’. New York Times, April 8, Section 2, 29.
Park, R., E. W. Burgess and R. D. McKenzie. 1925. The City. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Savall, N., and J. Shell. 2003. ‘Editorial’. RHAPSODY: A Journal of Urban Affairs at Columbia University 1: 3.
Soja, E. 1996. Thirdspace: Journeys to Los Angeles and Other Real-and-Imagined Places. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Szwed, J. F. 1997. Space is the Place: The Life and Times of Sun Ra. New York: Pantheon.
Wilson, E. 1995. ‘The Rhetoric of Urban Space’. New Left Review 209: 146–60.
Zukin, S. 1995. The Cultures of Cities. Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell.
Published
2010-11-16
Issue
Section
Articles
How to Cite
O'Keeffe, T. (2010). Street ballets in magic cities: cultural imaginings of the modern American metropolis. Popular Music History, 4(2), 111-125. https://doi.org/10.1558/pomh.v4i2.111
