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ENGINE_OF_CULTURE
October 5, 2019
I've gone over this
The thesis is that New York City has been an idea several times:
"engine of culture" throughout the 20th
Century, regularly generating radically new EAST_OF_THE_EAST
phenomena that spread widely: STALLED
10s village writers (O'Neill, Millay) HIPHOP
20s/30s pulp / radio drama
40s/50s beat / avant classical / bop / comic books
60s folk / hippie / free jazz / pop art / madav ads
70s punk rock / hip-hop
80s new wave/goth club culture That's an attempt
90s downtown (Zorn et al) at being
inclusive, even
so I suspect
Then, near the close of the 20th century, there's more that
this essentially stops: can be included.
"An engine of culture has been broken." If you can think
of more things
that should be
added from before
2000, that makes
the thesis
To weaken this thesis stronger.
you need to come up with:
o major things I've missed from *after* 2000
Almost as good:
o major things from *outside* the NY area
back before 2000.
Such as:
o the modern art scene that came out
of Europe: 20s/30s
o the house/techno/rave music from Detroit
in the 90s
o Detroit car culture
o rock n' roll -- southern US
o psychedelic rock -- California Q: psychedlic drugs
themselves? Do drug
o Hollywood movies: 20s on. fads belong here?
Sexual scenes?
o the personal computer from
Silicon Valley: 70s/80s That's a pretty
strong list of
o the web/internet from the Bay Area: 90s contenders--
perhaps you can see
evidence of the
West Coast rising
I am *not* saying that nothing cool ever happens in significance as
in New York any more-- the point is that the New York began to
things that do happen aren't of major, stumble.
revolutionary significance any more.
It is also not a claim that nothing interesting never
happens elsewhere-- e.g. someone brought up the case of
Olympia Washington punk scene, but while I grant that
some really good, even great, bands came out of there,
it pales in significance compared to CBGBs.
When I just dash off a list
off significant cultural products
from New York, I sometimes make The dumbest odd lapse: sometimes I
some peculiar lapses. leave off "hip hop": it came out of
NY in the same time period as punk,
and it also had a huge degree of
An odd lapse: skipping any type influence. It's also arguably been
of jazz: I might identify as a much more musically creative than
jazz fan of a sort, but my punk, which after all was a
personal knowledge of the back-to-basics movement.
history of the various
sub-types of jazz is so weak,
off the top of my head I don't
quite know what should be On the list above I'm making
associated with where and when. an effort to include more the
more commercial cultural
phenomena; pulp, radio drama,
comics, advertisements...
I would guess there's still
more that could be added:
e.g. from the visual arts
What are the possible causes?
o gentrification: the renewed economic success (post "great inversion")
has choked off any possibility of an arts scene, which is a
hightly speculative activity which is never likely to have a
huge financial return.
o self reinforcing publicity-- once NY became
media-central, anything that broke there got Critical to the beat
publicized scene was a John Cellon
Holmes piece in the New
York Times.
o attractor of strangeness: anyone with a scheme,
or anyone who who feels out-of-place was likely Punk: Richard Hell, Tom
to gravitate to the Big City. Verlaine, Patti Smith,
David Byrne...
Beat: key figures
came to NY as
Columbia undergrads
o demographics: the NY tristate area is a big chunk
of the population: NY's influence may seem strong,
but not necessarily when considered on a per capital
basis.
o the internet: it's sometimes argued that the
rise of the internet was the death of localized
scenes-- nothing evolves out of a single
geographically-based community any more.
o time-lag illusion. Things that *seem* minor sometimes seem
huge in retrospect (a handful of proto-beats in upper
Manhattan; a handful of bands in a skid row dive bar)
Looking back on the 2010s from ten years later might not
be long enough to evaluate what was happening back then.
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