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 hosts: 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.
Kristie Soares is an Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Author of Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media (2023), Soares is currently conducting an oral history project that explores the role of Latinx disc jockeys in the development of dance music in 1970s New York. This is part of a larger book project entitled Macho Man: Performances of Latinidad in the Disco Era.
IG: @soundscapesnyc
Tt: @soundsacpes.nyc
Gotham Center: https://www.gothamcenter.org/
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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 hosts: 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.
Kristie Soares is an Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Author of Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media (2023), Soares is currently conducting an oral history project that explores the role of Latinx disc jockeys in the development of dance music in 1970s New York. This is part of a larger book project entitled Macho Man: Performances of Latinidad in the Disco Era.
IG: @soundscapesnyc
Tt: @soundsacpes.nyc
Gotham Center: https://www.gothamcenter.org/
In the penultimate episode of season 2 of Soundscapes NYC, hosts Ryan Purcell and Kristie Soares sit down with acclaimed historian Alice Echols, author of Hot Stuff: Disco and the Remaking of American Culture. Echols—who holds the Barbra Streisand Chair of Contemporary Gender Studies at the University of Southern California—unpacks how disco not only mirrored but actively shaped the social, racial, and sexual revolutions of 1970s New York City. Echols is the author of several books that have framed the way we understand the history of the 1960s and 1970s, and particularly the way music has shaped society at the intersection of gender, sexuality, and race.
The conversation begins with Echols’ newest research, drawn from her forthcoming book Black Power, White Heat: From Solidarity Politics to Radical Chic, which reexamines interracial activism and allyship during the Black Freedom Movement. From the Angela Davis trial to the alliances formed within SNCC and the Black Panther Party, Echols traces how solidarity both flourished and fractured across the era.
Turning to disco, she considers disco’s uneasy place in Black and queer cultural history. She notes how disco was created by and for Black audiences, while also being rejected by many in the Black music industry, like James Brown, for being “politically empty.” Through figures like Nile Rodgers, Grace Jones, and Sylvester, Echols argues that disco’s lush orchestration and sensual performances reflected radical redefinitions of gender, sexuality, and Black masculinity.
With musical excerpts woven throughout, Purcell and Soares guide listeners through the sonic textures of disco—its roots in funk and soul, its resistance to genre boundaries, and its capacity to move bodies and politics alike.
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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 hosts: 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.
Kristie Soares is an Associate Professor of Women & Gender Studies and Co-Director of LGBTQ Studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Author of Playful Protest: The Political Work of Joy in Latinx Media (2023), Soares is currently conducting an oral history project that explores the role of Latinx disc jockeys in the development of dance music in 1970s New York. This is part of a larger book project entitled Macho Man: Performances of Latinidad in the Disco Era.
IG: @soundscapesnyc
Tt: @soundsacpes.nyc
Gotham Center: https://www.gothamcenter.org/
