Soundscapes NYC
The Seventies was a calamitous decade, a low point in the history of New York City. City Hall continually failed to balance budgets and turned to austerity, privatization, and sheer negligence when it came to running city services. Roads disintegrated, buildings and overpasses collapsed, garbage piled high, and crime ran rampant. The city literally crumbled under the weight of austerity.
At the same time, underground culture surged with energy, from subway graffiti to experimental theater and gay bars. Musical artists embedded in the urban fabric turned to their craft with gusto. They formed loose networks of like-minded artists who made and appreciated particular styles of music. Their world during this period at times reflected the disintegrating cityscape. At other times, their music celebrated the social constraints let loose in a time of crisis, when the city seemed to be falling apart.
Soundscapes is a podcast about how music created in New York has shaped the history of the city and how the city itself has been an incubator in which music has blossomed throughout its history. Soundscapes is a bi-weekly podcast series in which historian Ryan Donovan Purcell talks with artists, music industry professionals, and scholars about NYC music history.
About the host: Ryan Donovan Purcell is a professor of modern American History at Sarah Lawrence College while serving on the editorial board at the Gotham Center for New York City History at the CUNY Graduate Center. Soundscapes draws from his book Sounds of the City Collapsing, forthcoming with Columbia University Press.
IG: @soundscapesnyc
Tt: @soundsacpes.nyc
Gotham Center: https://www.gothamcenter.org/
Soundscapes NYC
5. A Queer Etymology of Punk
In the fifth episode of Soundscapes N.Y.C., host Ryan Purcell talks with British music critic Jon Savage about how LGBTQ resistance shaped American popular music from the 1950s to the 1980s. Savage discusses the curious and queer roots of the word punk stretching back to the time of Shakespeare when it was used to connote ambiguous and transgressive gender and sexuality. Those meanings carried through to the 1970s though their origins may have been obscured by popular culture.
Jon Savage is the award-winning author of England’s Dreaming: Sex Pistols and Punk Rock (1991) and Teenage: The Creation of Youth, 1875-1945 (2007) and his latest book, The Secret Public: How LGBTQ Resistance Shaped Popular Culture, 1955-1979 (2024). He is the writer of the award-winning film documentaries The Brian Epstein Story (1988) and Joy Division (2007), as well as the feature film Teenage (2013). His compilations include Meridian 1970 (Heavenly/EMI 2005) and Queer Noises: From the Closet to the Charts, 1961-1976 (Trikont 2006).
Gotham Center for NYC History - CUNY GCDisclaimer: This post contains affiliate links. If you make a purchase, I may receive a commission at no extra cost to you.